Washington, D.C., is a city built around power.
Its streets lead to the White House, Congress and the headquarters of some of the most influential institutions in the United States. But on those same streets are people whose lives rarely make it into the national conversation.
For more than two decades, one local publication has been trying to change that.
Street Sense Media is a newspaper and multimedia organization created with and for people experiencing homelessness and poverty in Washington. Its motto is simple: “Real Stories | Real People | Real Change.”
The beginning
The idea began in 2003, when two volunteers, Laura Thompson-Osuri and Ted Henson, approached the National Coalition for the Homeless with the idea of creating a street newspaper for the nation’s capital. Other American cities already had similar publications. Washington did not.
The first issue of Street Sense appeared in November 2003, with 5,000 copies printed.
The concept was straightforward. People experiencing homelessness could become newspaper vendors, earning money by selling the paper on the streets. Today, vendors are independent contractors. They buy the newspaper at a wholesale price and sell it for $2, keeping the profits.
But Street Sense has become much more than a way to make money.
Its vendors are also writers, photographers, poets and artists. In 2017, the organization expanded beyond the street newspaper, becoming a multimedia center that gives people with lived experience of homelessness opportunities to tell their stories through journalism, photography, film, theater and other forms of art.
Putting people behind the statistics
Homelessness is often discussed through numbers: how many people are sleeping outside, how many shelter beds are available, how many encampments have been cleared and how much the city is spending.
Street Sense puts people back into those statistics.
Its pages cover housing, poverty, employment, encampments and the daily realities of surviving without a permanent home. Its reporting has examined encampment clearances in Washington and the relationship between local agencies, police and the federal government. Other stories have followed people who remain homeless despite having jobs and examined programs designed to help people move into permanent housing.
The people selling the newspaper are not simply its distribution network. They are part of its community.
Street Sense also provides case management, helping people navigate systems connected to housing, employment and health care.
There is something striking about that model in a city like Washington.
A person can walk past a federal building where decisions affecting millions of people are being made and, a few blocks away, meet someone struggling to find a safe place to sleep.
Street Sense connects these two sides of the city. It brings the experiences of people living on its streets into the same public conversation that usually takes place inside its government buildings.
And sometimes, the first step toward changing the way a problem is understood is allowing the people living through it to describe it themselves.
More than a label
A person experiencing homelessness is often reduced to a single word: homeless. Street Sense tries to complicate that label.
Its vendors have jobs, families, talents, memories, political opinions and ambitions. Some have experienced homelessness for years. Others came to the organization after losing housing because of rising costs, unemployment, illness or personal crises.
That idea is reflected in the simple exchange that takes place on Washington’s sidewalks.
Buying a copy is a transaction, not simply a donation. The vendor is selling something. The buyer receives a newspaper. Somewhere in between is a conversation—sometimes only a few seconds, sometimes much longer.
In a media environment increasingly dominated by screens and disappearing print newspapers, Street Sense has preserved something remarkably old-fashioned: the relationship between a newspaper and the person selling it on the street.
But it has added something else—the opportunity for people who are usually the subjects of journalism to become its authors.
Washington has no shortage of powerful voices.
Street Sense makes room for some of the voices that are easiest to overlook.
This story is based on information gathered during a visit to Street Sense Media in Washington, D.C., and additional background information from Street Sense Media’s official website and published materials.
