Help us pay our award-winning journalists

We need your support to ensure young reporters from all walks of life can participate in our internship program.

If you’ve ever bought a Street Sense paper, read one of our articles online, or seen a post from us while scrolling social media, you’ve seen Street Sense interns at work.

Our interns, often in or just out of college, are the backbone of our newsroom. These brilliant young journalists are often the first or only reporters to cover issues impacting people experiencing homelessness in D.C., and win local awards for doing so. Talented designers create the eye-catching covers you see on the streets, and help us lay out the paper. Sharp-eyed photographers capture the realities of homelessness, and astute social media experts make sure our reporting reaches a wide audience.

Unfortunately, we aren’t able to pay most of these interns for their work. We’re asking for your financial support to help raise $10,000 to pay one intern a semester through the end of 2027.

While we believe strongly everyone should be paid for their time, our budget has never been able to sustain a paid internship program. Several years ago, our past editor-in-chief, Eric Falquero, was able to turn a journalism award into a once-a-semester fellowship, ensuring three interns a year would receive a stipend for their work. This has allowed people who have experienced the issues we write about, or come from backgrounds underrepresented in journalism, to learn from us here at Street Sense.

A few years ago, that fund ran out. With summer intern season upon us, we’re asking for your help to refill it, so we can support talented and diverse journalists. Breaking into journalism is difficult and requires experience, often through unpaid internships. We recognize these internships are not accessible to everyone, and favor those with wealth, connections, and privilege while leaving out many promising reporters. By guaranteeing one stipend, we can make our program more accessible to low-income students, who can't always choose unpaid work over a job to support themselves.

We’re asking you to support us this summer, so we can support our interns all year long. All funds raised through this campaign will go directly to stipends for interns, who will continue to write, design, and post to get quality reporting into your hands.