Dear Friend,
Street Sense Media is turning 20! The effort that a small group of volunteers began in 2003 has over the past two decades grown into a full spectrum media company providing employment and powerful means of artistic self-expression to men and women battling their way beyond homelessness.
Will you join us in making even more possible today and tomorrow? We’re not just celebrating our past accomplishments. We are celebrating our partnership with you and great work we are doing now!
Twenty years ago, we published a new paper every month. With each passing week, vendors would sell fewer papers and their income would significantly drop week over week. Since April 2021, we’ve been publishing a new issue weekly, one of only five street papers in the world to publish with such frequency. Vendors can now count on maintaining their income level throughout the month. And rather than diluting the strength of our reporting, since going weekly our professional editorial team has continued to win awards for their journalism and we’ve forged important partnerships with other newsrooms to amplify our reporting and strengthen our investigative powers.
When I came aboard, my focus was on our need to help our vendors find more stability in their lives. In 2017, we launched our case management program which helps vendors navigate to housing, health and mental healthcare, and other community supports. Since its inception, that program has helped over 60 vendors transition to housing.
In 2013, we also began exploring platforms for self-expression beyond the newspaper. Recognizing that vendors who wrote for the paper were more likely to transition to greater stability, we sought to see if that could be replicated across other platforms. By 2015, we were producing content in film, photography, illustration, theater, and podcasts. More and more of our vendors discovered the life-changing power of story-telling and self-expression. Audiences that may never have been drawn to our newspaper were understanding what we already knew, that one’s housing status says nothing about talent, creativity, or work ethic.
Despite all our expansion and success, there remains a tragic sense of urgency about our work. Men and women who are homeless have a life expectancy that’s 20 years less than persons who are consistently and stably housed. I am afraid that this is a fact we know intimately well. Veda, David, Marcellus, Collins, Alice, Chino, James, Moyo and Leonard are just a few of the vendors whose lives were cut short by the harsh realities of chronic homelessness. Adding to the threat is the opioid crisis that is taking an enormous toll on vulnerable populations including our vendors.
More than ever, our work and the opportunities we provide are critical and in need of your support. Much of our recent growth – publishing weekly, adding three new full-time positions to the editorial team, expanding the case management and media arts programs, and a decision to pay vendors for everything they publish in the newspaper – was funded with an array of pandemic related funding streams that have since been phased out. Rather than set that money aside for a rainy day, we were compelled to make important investments in our programs by our understanding that for too many of our vendors every day is a rainy day. Now, we need your help to sustain these important programs.
The support of people just like you makes all of our work possible -- it changes and saves lives. Will you give a gift in honor of our 20th anniversary? Your gift would be an important investment in our future and the future of those your support serves.
Will you support this important work today? We thank you for your support and wish you the very best.