Since Rhode Island's largest homeless shelter closed its doors in March, Brown students and local advocates have collaborated to revive Street Sights, a street newspaper that addresses homelessness in the state.
Street Sights seeks to provide a forum for students, advocates, state officials and homeless individuals to "bring light on the subject not often addressed, and to some degree, ignored," according to its vision statement.
Street Sights' current model - a newsletter that is distributed by staff members to various homeless shelters and service organizations within Rhode Island - is designed to serve as a creative outlet for homeless people, who are invited to submit artwork and writings to the newsletter, according to organizer Elizabeth Ochs '07.5.
The most recent Street Sights issue, published in July, features poetry written by homeless people.
In addition, Street Sights aims to help homeless people feel more secure by providing them with information they need on a daily basis, Ochs said. The newsletter features updates on current and future shelter openings and discusses how people can gain access to those shelters.
The goal of developing better communication infrastructure within the homeless community prompted Street Sights' revival in March.
Earlier that month, Gov. Donald Carcieri '65 shut down Cranston's Welcome Arnold, the largest homeless shelter in the state. Street Sights organizers used the newsletter to raise awareness about Welcome Arnold's closing, according to Ochs.
The closing threw three women and 100 men out on the street, said Bob Pangborn, a formerly homeless individual who joined the Street Sights staff after landing back on his feet.
To Street Sights organizers, "what was most difficult about the closing was not the closing itself but the fact that the people living there at the time were not informed on how their lives were about to change," Ochs said. "There was a great sense of insecurity, and a lot of that insecurity came from a lack of communication."
The newspaper also seeks to inform the general public about what it means to be homeless, said organizer Dan Meltzer '09.
"There's a common stereotype of what a homeless person is," Meltzer said. "But it's important to realize that there are a lot of complex reasons for why homelessness is an issue in Providence."
High housing prices are currently a major cause of homelessness in Rhode Island, Pangborn said. According to Crossroads Rhode Island, a homeless services organization, housing costs have increased twice as fast as income in the past few years.
"Informing people on the issue is just one aspect of the newsletter, but it's an important one," Meltzer said.
Most street newspapers employ homeless individuals, giving them the opportunity to purchase the papers at approximately 50 percent of the cover price, sell them to the public and then keep the profits, according to the International Network of Street Papers' Web site.
In one of its earlier versions, Street Sights used this vendor model, but had to discontinue the approach because of Providence's lack of street traffic.
"The vendors were not making a lot of money," Ochs said.
Street Sights founder Claudia Solari '99.5 would like to see the newspaper transition toward the vendor model.
"The vendor effort is such an important component because it's where people who are homeless interact with people who are not," Solari said. "This is a good way to help them reconnect with the rest of society."
Solari began developing the paper in the fall of 1999. She was initially inspired by Spare Change, one of Boston's street newspapers, which she learned about while conducting research on street newspapers during her senior year.
"The model had worked so beautifully in Boston," Solari said. "I thought, 'Why not try it in Providence?' "
Solari wanted volunteers to help put together the street paper, and she estimated that more than 70 Brown students showed up at the first meeting. Those volunteers visited homeless organizations in Providence, gathering writing samples from homeless individuals. Solari used a $500 writing grant to print the first issue.
Meanwhile, the People to End Homelessness group was leading an effort to demand more emergency housing from the city, and Solari saw an opportunity to distribute the newsletter for free to politicians and others surrounding the statehouse. "We didn't charge for the paper at the time. Our goal was simply to get our name out there."
Solari printed her last issue in July 2000, as she left Providence to attend graduate school on the West Coast. Despite student efforts to keep Street Sights in circulation, high leadership turnover prevented the newspaper from sustaining itself in recent years.
Since its first revived issue in March, Street Sights has been distributed monthly to a circulation of about 600, Ochs said. To attract more readers, the group is transitioning from its current newsletter style to newsprint.
Each of the previous issues has been funded by donations from different organizations - most recently, the Rhode Island Coalition for the Homeless - but the group is establishing a subscription system to ensure the newspaper's sustainability, Ochs said.
"We hope that Street Sights will become more like the other street newspapers around the country - with more readers and a wider range of readership," Meltzer said.
To work toward this goal, Ochs attended the North American Street Newspaper Association's conference in Portland, Ore., beween July 26 and July 29.
The conference was hosted by Street Roots, a nonprofit, grassroots newspaper based in Portland that seeks to create employment opportunities for homeless individuals. The conference served as a forum for vendors, editors and directors to share technical skills and collaborate on various homelessness issues, according to Street Roots' Web site.
For Street Sights organizers who attended the conference, the event served both as a networking tool and a space for street newspapers around the country to get together and motivate one another.
"It was inspiring to us to recognize we are part of the larger movement of people trying to change the lives of individuals who are having to deal with homelessness," Ochs said.
