Aside from our story in this issue about street newspapers, we seldom talk about the global movement of street papers in our pages.
Today, of course, we make an exception. For years, the North American Street Newspaper Association — a coalition of 47 newspapers at its peak — worked alongside its global counterpart, the International Network of Street Papers. In July, at a joint conference in Montreal, NASNA papers were inducted as members of the INSP. With only a volunteer board and two paid staff members, it is more community than bureaucracy, built on the power of a free alternative press and the will of people to overcome adversity.
Overall, our readers won't notice any change in Street Roots for this affiliation, but our resources to improve the paper will continue to grow, most notably with the content of news from around the world. In this international issue of the paper, we're able to bring you eyewitness coverage of the violence in Darfur and AIDS in Papua New Guinea — reports our small nonprofit cannot do on its own. In the past we've been able to bring you news from Namibia, South Africa and Russia, among other countries, and likewise reports in Street Roots have reached people across this country, Canada and Europe.
In the future, with more coordinated efforts to translate stories into more languages, all street papers will be able to provide a greater scope of content, with a variety of viewpoints and insight on the larger issues of poverty, homelessness and civil rights. Because economic injustice does not happen in a vacuum. The events shaping policy in Portland are not so different from the dynamics on the other side of the world. Nor is Portland buffered from the ripples from Africa and South America with regard to poverty, AIDS, human trafficking and violence. Homeless people have been systematically murdered on the streets of São Paulo, and Portland has learned about it in our pages. The battle for civil rights for people on the streets is being waged along the West Coast, and people in the Czech Republic are reading about it over coffee. Those connections have the potential to push global campaigns on universal issues.
We've done only limited work with this network, the Street News Service, but there is so much more potential. One of the hallmarks of a street newspaper is its role as a chronicle for the poor, a record for history in the same manner as archived newspapers serve other populations. The INSP has the opportunity to amplify that voice even further with input drawn from more than 80 newspapers in 26 countries on six continents. The organization is currently working with Reuters news service to provide more content in our papers, along with training for journalists to improve the reporting in individual street newspapers.
Today, a young man in Philadelphia is working to start a street paper in his war-torn native land of Liberia. The INSP members are committed to making that happen — to help him provide a new opportunity for the poor in his country and a new voice to the global chorus of social justice. We look forward to hearing what they have to say.