With one week left, we’re $61,331.67 from meeting our year-end goal. Please help with your gift of any size today.
For 25 years, Real Change has built caring community with those struggling to survive. We have made Seattle a kinder and more compassionate city.
Homelessness is about running out of options. It’s about feeling desperate, ignored and often despised.
Your support changes all of that and replaces paralysis and despair with hope and opportunity.
Your belief in our vendors helps them to believe in themselves. To build power over their own lives. To say, “I am somebody, and my voice matters!”
Every time you stop and buy a paper, you empower our vendors to take control of their lives.
Your gift to our Winter Fund Drive initiates the power that makes this work possible.
More than 60 percent of our annual budget comes from readers like you. As of Christmas Eve, we still have $61,331.67 to raise toward our critical $200,000 year-end fundraising goal.
Your support, with any size gift that works for you, offers opportunity to more than 600 Real Change vendors each year.
Your support helps us produce a quality newspaper each week that our vendors are proud to sell.
In 2019, your support allowed us to add a new staff position to meet vendor needs. We opened a new clothing pantry, and are bringing resources like healthcare, veterinary services, haircuts and foot care right to First and Main.
Your support makes our winning advocacy possible. This year, we took a stand for human dignity with our “Everybody Poos” campaign and added $1.3 million to the city budget to pilot staffed public toilets in Seattle.
If you were at our 25th Annual Breakfast in September, you met Shawn Wilson and heard about what Real Change means to our vendors.
“When you walk around with nothing, just nothing, each and every day,” he remembered, “you become desperate and confused. You don’t know how to ask for help. You don’t even look at yourself anymore.”
When Shawn found Real Change, he found far more than a means of earning an income. “I like people, but I didn’t like them when I was just lost.
“Real Change was healing me. I found I could get better. My customers helped me to trust. Once they start helping, you start growing. You don’t stay where you were. You begin to understand that what you’re doing is real to them.”
Now, Shawn is in housing and has reconnected with family. He looks forward to each day and is fully engaged with life. He credits much of this to the healing community he has found though Real Change.
“Crown Hill is my community now. I know their children, their pets. They celebrate their lives with me. And it’s all thanks to a lot of people who help us out, the support Real Change gets from people I haven’t even met and probably never will.”
Every year, your support helps 600 vendors like Shawn find community and success.
Through award-winning journalism that elevates the voices of our community to dedicated advocacy lead by the Vendor Organizing Committee, you can count on Real Change to uplift and empower.
When Shawn Wilson talked about becoming a Real Change vendor, he said, “The hardest thing was learning to accept people’s kindness.”
Your support provides the caring community that helps vendors like Shawn grow.
This week, we need your help to close that big $61,331.67 gap and meet our year-end goal. Each and every gift is a measure of the grassroots support that powers our work
Thank you for the last 25 years of community support. Together, we are building a better world one person and one newspaper at a time.
Tim Harris is the Founding Director Real Change and has been active as a poor people’s organizer for more than two decades. Prior to moving to Seattle in 1994, Harris founded street newspaper Spare Change in Boston while working as Executive Director of Boston Jobs with Peace. He can be reached at director (at) realchangenews (dot) org
Read the full Dec. 25 - 31 issue.
© 2019 Real Change. All rights reserved. Real Change is a non-profit organization advocating for economic, social and racial justice since 1994. Learn more about Real Change and donate now to support independent, award-winning journalism.