Director’s Corner: Darrell Wrenn is an inspiring example of how our community of readers rewards individual effort

Jobs, Journalism, Justice

Founding Director

Articles by Tim Harris

Director’s Corner: Resistance to affordable housing leaves the most vulnerable behind

By Tim Harris | February 28, 2018

What Sand Point teaches us about Fort Lawton

Once, long ago, in 2005, when the numbers of unsheltered homeless people were less than half what they are now and you could still rent a two-bedroom apartment in Seattle for under $1,000, the Army closed its regional headquarters at Fort Lawton, and Seattle’s Office of Housing began the process of converting a 34-acre parcel in Discovery Park to affordable housing. ...

Director’s Corner: Suprise! Unapologetic racism is in Trump’s proposed HUD budget

By Tim Harris | February 21, 2018

I’ve largely avoided writing about the inexecrable mess that is President Donald Trump in this column. Mostly because we already know.

Why belabor the obvious? When one steps in dog shit, for example, you don’t need a whole conversation about what just happened. There is no point in describing the smell and consistency to everyone you know.

No one needs to hear that. It’s on their shoes too. Almost everyone already knows what it looks like. It’s better to talk about something else. ...

Director’s Corner: When we treat homeless people like widgets in a poverty management assembly line, we are all diminished

By Tim Harris | February 14, 2018

For a lapsed Catholic, I’ve been leaning pretty hard on Pope Francis lately. Last February. The pontiff weighed in on the border wall. Our challenge, he said, is “not to raise walls but bridges, to not respond to evil with evil, to overcome evil with good.”

One month later, in an interview with Italian street paper Scarp de’ Tenis (Tennis Shoes), he said we should give to homeless people without judgment, simply because we have the privilege to do so. ...

Director’s Corner: Celebrating International #VendorWeek

By Tim Harris | February 7, 2018

You want to know what makes people care about homelessness? It probably won’t surprise you: proximity.

People who know homeless people and have regular interactions with them are more likely to get involved and help. That’s because they see the suffering firsthand and come to care deeply about the people they meet. ...

Director’s Corner: Democracy isn’t dead yet

By Tim Harris | January 31, 2018

It’s February, and Real Change is getting down to the business of 2018. We are focused on what we do best: creating success for our vendors, bringing people into action and building the broad and caring community that leads to change.

Last year, this newspaper provided opportunity and a voice for 717 homeless and very low-income vendors. Every one of them has a story. Every one of them has found hope and power through your support.

Twenty-seventeen was, by nearly any measure, an awful year; 2018 already feels different. ...

Real Change staff, volunteers and vendors. Photo by Jon Williams

Director’s Corner: The MLK Day rally was a community rising

By Tim Harris | January 17, 2018

This year’s Martin Luther King Day march, despite the large police drone hovering high in the sky, felt like aloe for the chaffed and worn soul.

The size of the crowd in the Garfield gym alarmed the Seattle Fire Department, while speakers like NAACP president Gerald Hankerson, educator Jesse Hagopian, and former Black Panther Elmer Dixon, and yes, even Mayor Jenny Durkan, burned down the house. ...

Director’s Corner: Inclusion is the antidote

By Tim Harris | January 10, 2018

I’m hearing “houseless” a lot more lately. Usually moderated by the humanizing but awkward modifier “people.”

For at least two decades, the convention that we don’t say “the homeless” has been well established. This is to collapse a vast diversity of individuals into dehumanizing abstraction.

So we say awkward things like “people who are currently homeless or who have experienced homelessness in the past.” Or more conveniently, “homeless people.” ...

Director’s Corner: Movement building is about hope

By Tim Harris | January 3, 2018

The New Year is here, and none of us knows what 2018 shall bring. The only thing we can control is what we, ourselves acting with others, bring to this world.

Amid the ongoing attacks on women, immigrants, people of color, the environment and the poor, each of us has the power to decide whether we live in hope or fall into despair.

Our power rests on our ability to care for our own bodies and spirits, and to live with purpose and integrity in a broken world.

Movement building is about hope. It is about the evidence of things unseen. ...

If You Give a Moose a Muffin...And other stories we’d all be better off without

By Tim Harris | December 27, 2017

When my girls were little, there was a story that I read them once before throwing away. Here’s how it went: A hungry moose shows up at the kitchen window and a kid gives him a muffin. Then the moose thinks he should have some jam as well. From there, things quickly spiral out of control.

“If you give a moose a muffin,” the narrator says, “he’ll want another, and another, and another.” ...