Real Change, at our core, is a caring community built around some of Seattle’s most vulnerable people. We are a platform for creating opportunity, building relationships and taking action.
We are vendors and readers, getting to know each other, speaking up, making a difference.
Here’s how you can make a difference today. A generous $50,000 match from Wyncote Foundation Northwest means that your GiveBIG donation will be instantly doubled through May 10.
With your help, Real Change offers hope to more than 700 newspaper vendors each year. Over the past 23 years, we have become a powerful and respected voice of the poor.
You see the difference that your gift makes in the lives of our vendors. Through your support, Real Change sellers move out of isolation and despair and into work and community.
Every week, our vendors bring you smart, quality, local reporting that informs you of the work to be done and the change to be made.
Your gift to Real Change means that poor people have a voice and the opportunity to be effective leaders for change.
These are dangerous times, and while our vendors have always struggled, their worries have multiplied.
Inequality in Seattle means that while incomes have risen faster than anywhere else in the nation, so have housing costs. This means that more and more of us face the economic vulnerability that leads to homelessness.
While our city leads the nation in spending on homelessness, new public dollars and an expanding nonprofit sector have not kept up with the growing economic misery.
Charity alone does not create justice. Justice requires that we take on the structures of inequality and racism that justify oppression.
Justice requires that we support human dignity and stand with those who need a hand up, who need a whole community to help watch their backs.
In just the past few months, our supporters have helped us rise to the challenge of our times.
● We mobilized to support mass events such as the Martin Luther King Day, the historic Women’s March and Black Lives Matter.
● We built stronger alliances with immigrant and refugee organizations and highlighted the struggles of communities of color in our reporting and advocacy.
● We organized the Urban Poverty Forum Town Hall, attended by 175 people. This year’s theme was Challenging Institutional Racism in the Criminal Justice System.
● We fought hard for reform of Seattle’s sweeps protocols and joined an ACLU lawsuit to uphold property rights and due process for unsheltered homeless people.
Last year, more than 1,800 readers made a gift to Real Change. More than 10,000 of you buy our paper each week.
More than 90 percent of our support comes from newspaper sales and the direct support of readers like you.
Your gift to Real Change builds power. It means that we all stand together for the change that we need.
Our work in the days to come lies in supporting vendor leadership, mobilizing our community, creating spaces for dialogue and bringing people together for change.
Your support through GiveBIG on May 10 will help us:
● Reach more people with our hard-hitting community journalism.
● Upgrade our reader mobilization tools to bring more people into action.
● Support vendor leaders in making their voices heard with the resources they need.
Real Change is not about charity. It’s about work, opportunity and building for justice. You make that possible through your generous support.
Please make your matched gift to Real Change between now and midnight on Wednesday, May 10. Your support of our work keeps opportunity and hope alive in the hard times to come.
Thanks for your support,
Timothy Harris, founding director
Read our full May 3 issue.