By Israel Bayer
Executive Director
It’s 8:30 on a Thursday morning, and the monthly vendor meeting is about to begin. People have been mulling about for more than a half an hour – drinking coffee, eating pastries and talking sales techniques and sports.
Nearly 40 people gather around. They are eager to talk about the increase in vendors and how it’s effecting vendor locations throughout the city. In the past month, the number of individuals walking through the Street Roots door and selling the newspaper has increased dramatically. New faces and old assemble around the Street Roots table like a campfire on a chilly night. It’s the same table where, more than a decade ago, five vendors and a few volunteers gathered around to plan the first edition of Street Roots.
In the summer of 1998, the publisher of the Burnside Cadillac, a small homeless publication with about five vendors, handed the paper over to a volunteer photographer and shelter worker, Bryan Pollard.
Pollard recruited Michael Parker, a writer and book buyer from Powell’s books, to help launch a new street newspaper.
With a handful of vendors and a small hodge-podge of friends and volunteers, the group decided to change the image of the newspaper. They would publish art and writings of the streets, while covering issues important to the broader community. They would work to incorporate journalism and art, poetry and activism into a product people experiencing homelessness would be proud to sell. It would be called Street Roots.
In December 1998 the first issue hit the streets. At the time, there were only a few vendor locations in the city. Seven vendors shared the territories, and the going was slow. Still, the volunteer-operated newspaper continued to scrape up enough money every month to publish. Volunteers worked around the clock to keep the newspaper afloat -- running meetings, developing a working board, setting guidelines and deadlines for submissions, recruiting volunteers, and making themselves available at all hours of the day and night to sell the newspaper. In the first year, the press run averaged 1,500 a month with 10 vendors.
At the end of 1999, two things happened: Word on the street spread that Street Roots was a way to make a buck, and masses of people protested the World Trade Organization in Seattle.
Several people from the organization traveled to Seattle for the protests, and the newspaper gathered insight and interviews from other Portlanders who attended the weeklong event. The result was a Street Roots a special edition: "The Battle in Seattle.”
With more folks on the streets and Portland’s political left taking notice of the edition, people on the streets starting selling more newspapers. At the time, Portland was a ball of energy around activism – people were in the trees, in city streets, and constantly planning and acting out social-justice campaigns. For some, change was in the air. Street Roots capitalized on this through the newspaper by highlighting that electricity.
More vendors meant new ways of dealing with turf locations. Local businesses that had once been hesitant to have a Street Roots vendor on their doorstep now realized the benefit of having an individual they knew by name and a central location to call in case problems arose.
The realness of the streets and the politics of homelessness became a reality in the newsroom. Many vendors became housed, and some passed away. Long, drawn-out processes about how the organization would be run and maintained, were developed by volunteers and grizzled veterans of the streets.
Around the same time, Frank Mitchell, a street poet and volunteer, created a writers and poetry workshop. The newspaper drew on poets and artists living in poverty, including Sherry Asberry, Kevin Hull and Jay Thiemeyer. They organized poetry readings, and folks on the streets came to speak. People came and listened. The word was getting out.
In the summer of 2000, Jack Tafari walked through the Street Roots door and became a Street Roots vendor. Six months later, many of the vendors and people on the streets began to camp in numbers – refusing to leave city parks. A handful of homeless advocates along with Street Roots organized the “Out of the Doorways” campaign.
Street Roots served as a launch pad for the homeless activists. The newspaper began to run investigative pieces on the camping ban and other laws criminalizing people on the streets while publishing the opinions and activities of the tent city movement. The organization soon found itself alienated from City Hall and media outlets throughout Portland due to its aggressive stances on the issue. While the politically connected scowled, readership grew. People were standing up – in the streets and through the media. And however you sliced it, the city was going to have to act.
The newspaper would go on to support and cover the campaign all the way through its process of becoming a city-sanctioned tent city: Dignity Village. Street Roots also served as Dignity Village’s fiduciary agent for four years.
Between 2001 and 2003 the newspaper maintained a rugged office on SW 12th and Morrison in the old Danmore Building. The newspaper somehow manages to stay in operation for five years straight, every day, on an all-volunteer staff. Street Roots had around 40 vendors and had established several locations on the east side of the river. Several dozen vendors got into housing; new faces begin to appear.
In 2003, the newspaper and the organization began to evolve. For years, Street Roots had fought the hardships of being a monthly newspaper. Vendors had difficulting selling the newspaper after two weeks. People were being informed but often receiving old news. Writing journalism for a monthly newspaper is torture. Selling a three-week-old paper is worse.
After 16 weeks of extensive meetings and planning, the organization decided to hire a part-time editor and an office manager to go biweekly. Vendors voted to pay five cents more for each paper in order to help support the printing costs.
The newspaper hired long-time journalist and editor Joanne Zuhl and later that year published its first newly designed biweekly edition with a profile on Erik Sten dubbed the “Street fighter.” It was another turning point for the organization.
Throughout 2004 and 2005 the newspaper would belt out news stories on a range of topics surrounding homelessness and poverty, while continuing to highlight the voices from the streets. Street Roots moved from its 12th & Morrison location to a new office in Old Town/Chinatown where it resides today at 211 NW Davis.
Street Roots gained an ally in Erik Sten. The housing commissioner and other City Hall staff members began to feed Street Roots stories – pitching different angles on specific topics to create a dialogue on issues not being discussed by Portlanders.
Street Roots never compromised its journalism through the relationship. Sten never bent on the criminalization of the homeless, and for that we called him soft and drilled him time and again. Still, the newspaper was evolving, and he and others around Portland took notice for the frank discussion our coverage generated.
The vendor program began to thrive. Papers published every two weeks created a more connected regular readership. It became easier for people to engage with individuals selling the newspaper. For years, Street Roots' readers made up a rainbow of people including social-service workers, activists, and poor people. But as Portland grew and gentrified, so did the Street Roots reader. Not only did Street Roots begin to reach those closest to the streets, but we began to reach those furthest away from them economically. More affluent readers began to purchase the newspaper and to build relationships with folks on the streets.
Street Roots continued to publish its own brand of gritty journalism and offer unique voices from the streets. In 2005, a feature in the Society for News Design journal called Street Roots one of the best, if not the best, street papers in the country.
Throughout 2006 readership grew, and vendor success increased. After six years, Street Roots began to see its third and fourth generation of vendors. Some old faces remained, but mostly new faces continued to walk through the door, accessing Street Roots as a means of gaining an independent income, a social network of support, and an outlet for expression and organizing.
Street Roots struggled to find the support it needed to grow. Regular readers gave $26 dollars a year in support of their neighborhood vendor by purchasing the newspaper every two weeks. How were we to connect with donors in a way that communicated that the organization also needed help to maintain the newspaper and vendor program?
Seven years had passed with interest growing in the community. However, we still hadn’t learned how to financially grow the organization in a way that it would be sustainable. While the organization had helped hundreds of individuals find housing, and put nearly $1 million into the hands of vendors, the organization in many ways struggled to find an identity. Many Portlanders still didn’t even know what Street Roots was and continued to believe that the paper was a publication for “those people” -- the homeless. Could a homeless paper be taken seriously?
Street Roots entered into a year-long process with TACS, a Portland non-profit consultanting group, and became more aggressive in how it maintained and developed the organization. An advisory board was created and the organization expanded its Board of Directors. It entered into a three-year strategic planning process and developed a timeline for growth. The three key areas of focus would be to support the vendor program, grow the newspaper and create economic stability.
At the same time, the North American and global movement of street papers were growing. More than 30 papers across the continent and 90 papers worldwide were now communicating and growing together. Ways to improve fund raising and how to improve the vendor program were being shared. The Street News Service, a global newswire made up of street papers, began to grow, and content from 17 languages was being shared. Now Street Roots was able to highlight issues affecting people living in poverty from South Africa to Japan, Seattle to Washington D.C.
Street Roots continued to see more and more people walking through the door to sell the newspaper. By 2007, the organization had seen its fifth and sixth generation of folks on the streets. We had learned the hard way the glacial pace with which bureaucracies dealt with poverty, and that many of the issues Street Roots focused on locally, such as criminalization, were seldom going to be prioritized by local and federal governments. If we were to reach people in a way that we weren’t preaching to the choir, we had to expand and improve our coverage. So we did.
The organization began producing regular special editions to present indepth coverage on a broader range of topics. We remained an outlet to highlight the voices of the streets but also brought in celebrities and high-profile activists and facilitated campaigns to help folks on the streets sell more papers and to reach a new readership. We added the Act Now page to engage readers in ways to take action on local, national and global campaigns working to change the world in which we live.
That same year, the Street Roots Rose City Resource guide, for years a four-page section of the paper, was transformed into a 104-page pocket-sized guide to services available to people experiencing poverty in the Portland region. Today, we work with more than 150 non-profits, government agencies and local businesses to distribute more than 80,000 English guides and 20,000 Spanish guides in the metro area.
By 2008, Street Roots was reaching an entirely new audience. The organization hired a grant writer and began to cultivate a real and working relationship with a wide range of individual donors and foundations. Street Roots now had three full-time staff and a part time person working on development.
Street Roots was recognized with awards from the Portland Trail Blazers, the Oregon Coalition on Housing and Homelessness and the City of Portland. A new turf system was created through a six-week democratic vendor process with more than 50 people selling the newspaper.
In December 2008, the newspaper published “In need of a new deal” a special edition covering the affordable housing industry. After 10 years, the organization had finally put all of the pieces of the puzzle together. But we also realized that we had opened the door to a complex system that very few people in the city understood. We still have work to do.
The organization ended 2008 ahead of its goals and hired a part-time development director and reporter to help with the continued growth – still small in comparison to larger institutions.
We’ve witnessed many miracles and endured much tragedy over the years. We have had doors closed in our face by institutions for our reporting and exercise of the free press. At the same time, we have been celebrated by others for our courage and investigative approaches. We have been told we are enabling some, and empowering others through our low-barrier approach to working with folks on the streets. But nothing on the streets is black and white. For one person it takes a week to climb a mountain, for others a lifetime. It’s Street Roots role to treat with dignity all people living through the hell we call poverty. We are neither judge nor jury. For some this is hard to grasp, for many including us, it’s the only way to meet people where they are at and to offer dignity in a time of survival.
In 2009, Street Roots will continue to improve the newspaper and engage readers in a way that creates dialogue and offers degrees of solutions for problems rooted in a broken system, while offering ways to improve the vendor program. In August/September the organization hopes to open a satellite office in outer Northeast and to work towards going weekly someday.
Today, the conversations around the Street Roots’ table continue, more relevant than ever. As much as times change, they remain the same on the street. There are many reasons individuals become homeless and end up walking through our doors - mostly born out of an unjust system that doesn’t value human life in a way that believes that all people deserve a warm and safe place to call home regardless of their circumstances. Until that day comes, Street Roots will be working hard to inform and educate readers while building relationships and offering individuals a hand up and not a hand out. Together, we will continue walking up the mountain.