Lynn Champagne, a street vendor for Montreal-based L'Itinéraire, stopped to chat with Street Roots program director Lupe Garcia Jr. earlier this summer. Credit: Photo by Kaia Sand
Street Roots is not alone.
We are one of 92 street papers, with constellations that are particularly dense in Europe. Germany alone has 18 papers.
Street papers share a basic model — people experiencing homelessness or poverty sell the publication to earn income — and are linked by the International Network of Street Papers, or INSP. From there, models vary considerably. Some publications are magazines rather than newspapers, monthly rather than weekly. Some street papers run other social enterprises such as cafes and flower shops, or publish calendars and literary magazines.
The street paper movement is three decades old in its current form. INSP, now based in Glasgow, Scotland, began in 1994.
Most street papers are in Europe, with a handful in Asia and South America. Big Issue South Africa is the only INSP member paper on the African continent.
Countries with street papers include Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Serbia, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, United Kingdom and United States.
Street Roots is most closely aligned with Seattle’s Real Change. As two of the largest street papers in North America, both organizations publish a booklet of services for our region — the Rose City Resource in the Portland metro area and the Emerald City Resource in King County.
Over the years, Street Roots and Real Change even shared website code. (That code is out-of-date, so Street Roots is gearing up for a website overhaul we can ideally share with other street papers.)
Portland will host the International Street Paper Network Summit next year in September 2025. Newspapers from around the world will send representatives and we are eager to plan ways readers can engage with the varied landscape of street papers.
Over the next year, I’ll profile a number of street papers. First up will be Montreal, Québec, Canada’s L’Itinéraire. The organization publishes a robust French-language magazine and operates two cafes, including the Round House Cafe, which employs First Nations people.
One of the most dynamic elements of a global network is the INSP News Service. The news service shares articles from across the network. This means in any given week, Street Roots can feature a story from elsewhere in North America — or the world. Likewise, the news and features you read here get republished worldwide.
Belonging to a news service is particularly special for me. When I was a child, my father was a wire service reporter for United Press International. This was in the 1970s and 1980s before we were all quickly trading news through the internet. The wire service was that global connection.
My dad, Joe Sand, was based in the basement of the Oregon State Capitol building in Salem alongside the Associated Press. I walked over after school and watched news crawl over the wire on a boxy machine. Content seemed infinite. News was breaking everywhere.
While connecting to news across the globe is now possible via the internet, the INSP News Service creates conditions for sharing news with a more equitable approach, prioritizing the people most impacted by a story rather than just the people with the most power.
INSP also holds annual summits in addition to the news service. Portland will be the first North American host since the 2015 summit in Seattle. Next September, staff and vendors from papers around the globe will gather here, and we’ll let you know about events planned for the public.
In the meantime, I’ll shine a spotlight on individual street papers.
Street Roots is an award-winning weekly investigative publication covering economic, environmental and social inequity. The newspaper is sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and/or extreme poverty as means of earning an income with dignity. Street Roots newspaper operates independently of Street Roots advocacy and is a part of the Street Roots organization. Learn more about Street Roots. Support your community newspaper by making a one-time or recurring gift today.
