Street Roots held a small celebration earlier this month to honor Sandra Lou Pollard and hang two paintings in her honor.
Sandi, as she was known, passed away in 2009, but not before shaping Street Roots during its late-1990s infancy when the paper was a scrappy, all-volunteer operation recently cofounded by her son Bryan.
Sandi’s best friend, who asked to be referred to as J, donated the money for the building’s elevator in Sandi’s name, and the paintings were hung beside it.
Fighting origins
What we know as Street Roots today started back in 1990 as the Burnside Cadillac. Back then, it was a newsletter published by students and tutors of an adult literacy program.
By the time Bryan Pollard showed up at its front door in early 1998, the Cadillac was run by Sharon Pearson.
“I walked in the front door of the Burnside Cadillac,” Pollard recalled, “and Sharon was sitting there, smoking a cigarette, as she often was, and I introduced myself, and she looked at me very skeptically.”
He was trying to get his start in photojournalism, and offered to volunteer his labor for free.
“She was like, ‘Okay, I need pictures of such-and-such. It’s happening downtown,’” he said. “And so I went out and took pictures, and she liked what I did, and so she just kept giving me assignments.”
But Pearson was burnt out, Pollard said, and she soon started floating the idea of closing the paper that had come to play a crucial role in the era’s blossoming homeless-led housing activism.
“I went to her and I said, ‘Rather than closing it down, would you be willing to basically hand the organization over to me? I’ve got some friends that can help,’” Pollard said.
Convincing her proved time consuming and, at times, outright brutal, Pollard recalled, but the effort succeeded.
“The most important thing was that we kept the newspaper going,” Pollard said. “We still give the vendors something that they could sell and make some money on, and we would have something that we could build on, as meager as it was.”
The group renamed the paper at Pearson’s insistence and Street Roots was born. They put out its first issue in winter 1998.
The computer that kicked it off
Along with the tiny office a Presbyterian church allowed the paper to use, Pollard’s group also inherited a barely working computer in the handoff.
He knew for people to buy the paper from vendors, read it and take it seriously, the team would need to make it look professional.
“I was commiserating about this with my mom — who was a single mother, did not have a lot of resources at her disposal — and I told her that we desperately, desperately needed a new computer,” Pollard recalled.
She bought them a brand new Macintosh computer, allowing the bunch to professionalize its paper. Readers quickly took notice.
“Our readership started climbing,” he said. “And when our readership was climbing, we could take on more vendors, and when we had more vendors, we earned more revenue from the vendor program, which allowed us to do all these other things — and so it all came from there.”
In Street Roots’ archive (the basement), a staff page from a 2002 paper made on that computer caught Pollard’s eye.
“I remember trying to figure out how to do all these shapes and everything on QuarkXPress,” he recalled.
The shape he was talking about was an oval masthead, showing everyone who worked at the paper.
“It was intentional because traditional newspapers, they have a masthead and it is a straight hierarchy, and it’s almost always a white guy at the top,” said the Cherokee Nation citizen. “I wanted to do it different. I wanted to create a masthead that was a circle that showed that we were all doing it together.”
Spaghetti and flowers
“Sandi was my partner in crime,” J said. “I was a single mom. She was a single mom. We were so proud of Bryan and his group.”
The computer wasn’t the only way Sandi helped the bunch.
“These guys were working volunteers,” J said. “They didn’t have any money, so getting a free meal was pretty cool, and she was cooking spaghetti, southern pinto beans over cornbread, probably tacos, and having all of them over.”
Israel Bayer, Street Roots’ longtime executive director who overlapped with Pollard, said Sandi was integral to getting the fledgling paper off the ground.
“Back then we were a collective group of do-gooders and riffraff all working together to move in the same direction,” he said. “And Sandi and Bryan were very much a part of that.”
Pollard said back then no one could have imagined what the paper and organization would grow into.
“We were struggling and scraping and fighting just to make things work, and there was so much that had to be done,” he said. “I’m just so profoundly proud to have had even a small role.”
Pollard himself has also gone far since he was at Street Roots. Today, he is collaborations manager for the Associated Press’ Global Indigenous Reporting Network, senior manager for grant operations at the AP Fund for Journalism and a board member of High Country News.
He’s also been president of the Indigenous Journalists Association and executive editor of the Cherokee Phoenix newspaper.
Back on the ground floor of Street Roots’ office, Pollard reflected to staff about the two paintings by local artist Xochilt Ruvalcaba that now hang above the elevator door. They depict one of Sandi’s favorite things: blooming flowers.
“It’s a very appropriate remembrance of my mom because what we see here in this building is the bloom, is the growth, it’s the flowering of an organization,” he said. “The spirit of my own mom and the many people that have contributed to this organization before all of us is still here and still keeps going.”
This article appears in July 29, 2026.
