Real Change News | Director’s Corner

July 28, 2010
Vol: 17 No: 30

Director's Corner

Director’s Corner - NASNA

by: Timothy Harris , Executive Director

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This weekend, several of our staff will travel to Chicago for the North American Street Newspaper Association conference. Chicago, in 1996, is where it all started, when Chicago street paper, StreetWise, the National Coalition for the Homeless, and Real Change organized the first gathering of streetpapers on this continent. In the summer of 1997, Real Change hosted NASNA’s founding conference at the University of Washington. More than 30 streetpapers from the U.S. and Canada came here to create a mission statement, hash out articles and bylaws, and build a movement.

There was an epic floor fight over whether NASNA would operate by consensus or Robert’s Rules, in which the latter narrowly prevailed. The majority of the West Coast delegation read this as capitulation to the corporatist agenda that I, weirdly, was thought to personify. Some walked out, and would not return for years.

Apparently, my preference for efficiency and my openness to advertising as a revenue stream left me vulnerable to the charge. That a twice-monthly streetpaper with two staff, a budget of less than $200,000 and a print run of 10,000 could be regarded as “corporate” was a measure of our new movement’s extreme sensitivity to the issue. Streetpapers were something new, and cooptation was our mutual enemy, whether we all realized it or not.

This week, I’m reading Jane Jacobs’ “The Economy of Cities,” in which she argues against Adam Smith and the prevailing wisdom of 1969 that urban areas are, and always have been, the locus of innovation and the creation of new work. Her formula – Division of labor plus Added new activity equals new Division of labor (D + A = nD) – is easily applied to the streetpaper movement.

In this instance, the previously existing community newspaper model adapted to the new reality of mass homelessness to create something that, for decades, had not existed in newspaper form: a low-threshold means of employment that offers opportunity for cross-class community and innovative organizing. A few seminal papers that started circa 1990, in turn, spawned what has become a global movement.

This creative process, Jacobs argues, parallels one found in the arts. We must, she says, be “alert to messages that come from the work, and act upon them.” Businesses that are overly wedded to their own rigid divisions of labor tend to lose that adaptive edge. As Real Change prepares to begin a new round of visioning our future, this is an insight worth hanging on to.

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Comments

Dear Real Change:

I am so proud to be a vendor with this newpaper. It has allowed me to not run scared of anyone or anything anymore.

I have found my voice thru this paper as I have personally shared with Adam Hyla and Polly as they done my story, when my fiance’ Jose Marcos Lucio was killed here in Seattle.

He too, was homeless at the time, a very hard worker thru the Millionair Club daily work.

He was buried in a paupers grave in Renton, WA and as of this day his murder is unsolved.

Too share this is to tell you the day I got tired of holding that inside me as he was cremated and no one to share it with, and I begun to tell his story and put a face to the tragedy, I began to grow.

I have given speaking engagements everywhere I can and still do on homelessness and the injustice to our street brothers and sisters who are murdered, raped or just die alone, homeless, no name.

I now writing my own memoirs and am a published writer, been in several documentaries and books to fund raise any way I can for the poor, low income, homeless and injustices to anyone, regardless of race, sex, religion, or where you are from.

Once I started thru Real Change and learned I had a voice and it was okay to let go and use it, my life changed.

This Real Change Paper is commended for what it has done for the homeless and the poor. Where else, and who else cares so much about us, if not for Real Change who would really give a hoot about us?

They elected officials don’t want to listen to you as a whole, as a newspaper, so how would we ever have anyone to stand up for us.
I am shedding tears as I write this because it is so real.

I am proud to be a vendor, and I am proud of Tim Harris, and people like Adam Hyla and all the good people who make this work.

These are the ones I go way back with, and now we have such fantastic people on staff like, Tara Moss, Neal Lampi, Tek, Jenn and the upper management, where would we ever get this kind of exposure?

And lets don’t forget our beautiful volunteers like Elizabeth, whom attends every vendor meeting faithfully and prepares such a delicious lunch for us.

I say thanks from the bottom of my heart and if anyone out there, want to hear a real homeless story and give proof to you that we need Real Change, then by all means please contact me.

Mona Joyner
PO Box 21493
Seattle, WA
98111-3493
(206)441-7441
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Mona Joyner | submitted on 07/30/2010, 6:34pm

Wow Mona’s piece really struck me. I have been out to Mona’s post several times, and have listened in the office to how she has been bullied and intimidated out there where she sells. She was about to give in once, but came back the next day fiercely determined not to let the bastards grind her down. Oh wait let me clean that up for you, Illegitimi non carborundum. Hehe. Faux Latin phrases really don’t due Mona justice, but anyone who would attempt to extort money from Mona Joyner classifies as a bastard, without regard to the marital status of their parents

People like Mona and myself do not matter to the Times of this world,be they LA, New York or Seattle, nor do we matter to the Bank of the Almighty, Wells Fraud as we GO, or Chase you outta ya House. These institutions of capitalism are after all to big to fail while those of us on the lowest rungs of the socio economic ladder are too small to prosper.

I can attest to the fact that when Mona Joyner says selling Real Change ” has allowed me to not run scared of anyone or anything anymore.” she means it.

I like to tell people that selling Real Change restored my faith in humanity, an out sized claim you say; hyperbole, I beg to differ.

When I sold the paper I was living in my non-running car (It was out of gas) beneath the Hwy 99 via duct. It was the holiday season, and when someone pressed a twenty dollar bill into the palm of my hand, I nearly cried. I can still feel the crisp edges in my hand as I type now.

I was at the end of my rope, I was deeply depressed and in a severe state of despair. The money put gas in the tank, a bought me my first Cup a joe with two shots of espresso and a sak of tobacco.

Funds that had been withheld by a recent employer in New Mexico arrived and I was then able to return to operating a lift truck in a warehouse, but that $20.00 proved someone cared.

Never underestimate the power in a random act of kindness.

Neal A. Lampi
Field Organizer, Real Change News
206 441 3247 X 211
My M-F out of office number is
206 422 2992

Neal Lampi | submitted on 07/31/2010, 1:43am

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