Even if you can’t understand the words, you know what the sign says. It’s the ubiquitous slab of dog-eared cardboard with a handwritten message, beckoning from a sidewalk, propped against the side of a homeless man huddled against the cold.
The image is from Oslo, Norway, but it could just as easily be a scene from Portland, London, Buenas Aires, Cape Town or Melbourne. Every one in the room at the annual conference of the International Network of Street Papers has seen a version of that image in their hometowns, across six continents, in 34 countries.
For four sweltering hot days in June, the members of the INSP, including Street Roots, gathered in Poznan, Poland, to talk about how the street paper movement can make a difference locally and globally, from advocacy to employment. It was also a time to look at what this international body of media and advocates needs to be doing if it is to make a major impact to end the injustice of poverty.
If any group can assume such a tall order, it is this network, comprising people who have seen firsthand the impact a program based on equality, opportunity and dignity can have. In Melbourne, a high-profile campaign led to significant improvements in voting rights for people who were homeless. In Austria, asylum-seekers from Africa can get out of the shelters while they wait for their job permits by selling the street paper Megaphon. In Argentina, the newspaper in Buenas Aires is working with fair trade cooperatives, locally and abroad, to channel more people into work. In Cape Town, South Africa, the newspaper’s coverage has helped spur on a slacking government toward delivering drugs to HIV/AIDS patients. In Munich, Germany, the success of an employment program at the street paper BISS has led organizers there to develop a hotel company based on the same model, coupling employment with mentoring and training opportunities, and needed job development for the community.
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Like any international organization, the INSP must deal with the political and social diversity of its members. In recent years, the organization has struggled with the issue of newspapers employing children as vendors, pitting Southern countries with extreme poverty among its youth population, against those who say youths are being lured by money away from other social services. This year, the membership agreed to follow the guidelines set by the United Nations’ Convention of Child Rights and the minimum age for admission to employment (the INSP has a non-consultative NGO status with the UN, and is pursuing full NGO membership). The UN has developed flexible guidelines to accommodate individual country’s laws regarding schooling, orientation and training programs, and economic development. Under these rules, no vendor could be younger than 14 years of age, which is the age of some of the workers in Cordoba, Argentina, at the street paper, La Luciernaga.
La Luciernaga has created a network of writing and educational programs for hundreds of the city’s street youth. Teachers run a school providing tutoring and mentoring. Programs within the paper’s foundation teach students business and life skills, help them return to school, and encourage family reunification. Four hundred children and youth produce and sell La Luciernaga, raising awareness about politics and social criticism. They sell more than 50,000 copies a month.
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The conference is a time for helping papers become better businesses, broadening their appeal in their community, and most significantly, organizing regional and global campaigns on social justice issues. But as any experienced conference-goer knows, some of the most productive, strategic bonds are formed over the evening beer or the 1 a.m. espresso. And in the case of the INSP, new relationships were formed over a friendly but competitive game of soccer, featuring an international INSP team against the Homeless World Cup champs from Poland.
Geographically, the INSP has been dominated by a preponderance of newspapers in Europe. But in the past two years, the organization, in partnership with its consultancy arm, Poverty Solutions, has made a focused effort to develop new papers in Africa. New papers in Kenya and Zambia are now up and running, and papers are organizing in Liberia, Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania and Zimbabwe. The INSP continues to receive inquiries from people wanting to start more papers in Africa and South America, more than the organization has the capacity to fund at this time. The INSP operates on core funding through membership fees and several Scottish foundations, but appeals to the European Union and other large organizations to fund dedicated to special projects and developing new papers. In St. Petersburg, Russia, for example, the INSP worked with the street paper Journey Home to create a program to reintegrate people back into society, coupling the effort with an awareness campaign to destroy the negative stereotypes fueling the rise in verbal and physical abuse against the homeless. At the opening of the conference, the INSP welcomed seven new members to the organization.
This month, Street Roots and Portland will host the 2007 conference for North American Street Newspaper Association, or NASNA. It’s been a year since NASNA joined the INSP, merging the two largest street paper movements in the world. It’s a relationship that could become a template for other regional networks in South America, Asia, Russia and Africa that could mentor new papers, coordinate news coverage and advocacy campaigns, and create a stronger model for employment and empowerment for people in poverty.
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In the congested world of media, street papers have carved out their niche both locally and globally. The Street News Service, once a small copy-sharing Web site, has become a major enterprise, drawing stories and photos from around the world and Reuters news agency. The service has caught the eye of Inter Press Service, a global civil rights-oriented news source, which is in negotiations to share stories with the INSP. Such a partnership will continue to raise the bar on news coverage in street papers regarding social justice.
The image of the man on the streets of Oslo, Norway, was part of a film made in conjunction with the street paper there. Internationally, papers are building on the grassroots employment model with creative projects. It is that model that the street papers want to see replicated by governments and corporations, which forms the basis of the organization’s first anti-poverty declaration. Street papers from around the world are calling on governments, corporations and society to use the movement’s successful model of enterprise and employment in the global scheme to help end homelessness. The goal is for society to view poverty and homelessness not as the problem, but part of the solution.
