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Standing outside the QFC grocery store, rain or shine (in Seattle, it’s a 50-50 proposition at best), you’ll see a few different faces every day selling copies of Real Change, a weekly publication of news/arts/politics/photos/poems/editorials produced in the main and sold by Seattle’s homeless. Never mind that it discusses topics most other publications wouldn’t dare touch. This is a real paper full of honest discussions about real problems facing Seattle’s growing homeless, unemployed and under-employed population. And by any standards, the journalism is excellent.

The Real Change Homeless Empowerment Project began in 1994 out of storeroom provided by the Pike Place Market Senior Center, who extended their nonprofit umbrella status to embrace a much needed movement to serve the homeless.

RCHEP was granted its own nonprofit status 1996.Under the careful professional watch of its founders and editors, the Real Change newspaper, which started with a run of some 200 copies a month, is now produced weekly, boasts a circulation of well over 1,000 per issue, and is sold on street corners by hundreds of vendors, many of whom are homeless or who are headed that way.

Each paper sells for a dollar, of which the proceeds are split evenly between the vendor and the publication (for costs and professional staff). It’s a bare bones operation that provides the homeless and the under-employed a way to earn without the degradation that comes from holding up a cardboard sign.  While the newspaper is the main program, the Empowerment Project also offers a Homeless Speakers Bureau and various classes on writing, bookkeeping, and other tools the homeless need to hold their heads up in society and just to survive their bad
situations in complex economic times.

Other cities now offer variants of the RCHEP and have their own editions of Real Change. It is fast becoming a national industry providing much needed jobs for those who most need them.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll offer a personal introduction to a few of the vendors working (and I mean working) in front of the QFC at 45^th & Wallingford in Seattle and in front of Bartell Drugs just down the street. It has been my privilege to meet a few of the regular vendors, and I think you will enjoy meeting them as well.

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