The "Phoenix Effect"

By Gretchen Crowe

It’s close to 9am on any typical weekday morning, and a group of volunteers and staff are hustling to make sure we’ve gotten everything done for the paper’s distribution from  9 A.M.  to 11 A.M. at our Park Avenue and Champa storefront. We unlock the doors as the room fills with the smell of coffee, and our morning begins with talking, training and distributing papers. The room swirls with the chaos of personal stories and needs, advice, and the celebrations of successful days vending the paper. Regardless of socio-economic distinctions, everyone at the distribution center is connected by a newspaper, one that creates community around its very existence.

Overall, the vendor program truly is a thriving community, and has a true heartbeat of its own that can’t quite be seen in the individual vendor on the 16th Street Mall or in the quality of the words we print. Our home office tethers us all to the program, and vendors have a rich and deep connection to their vendor community, to us and to the mission of the paper. In fact, vendors themselves vet and recruit the new vendors.

We all have nestled into our respective roles. Ali Barnes or Amanda Keller, vendor program assistants, are stationed at the sales station selling papers for $0.25, updating vendors on their sales numbers, awarding sales incentives and passing on information about territory updates. Ron Herrera, volunteer extraordinaire, makes the coffee, keeps order and counts the papers once money has passed to the desk. Joe Williams, volunteer and “orientation-master,” prepares new recruits for the hour-long orientations offered from 10:00 to 11:00. Ayla Thayer, Donovan Cordova and Jeffrey Haskins rotate stations and we come together giving respect and skills to people who need the work and rely on vending the VOICE for their income.

I also rotate between all the roles, sometimes conducting work-place trainings, but I also manage the conflicts, a sort of Judge Judy role, navigating between desperate situations and personal arguments and the substantial problems that inevitably arise in such a human-based collaboration. I make the calls to stand up for vendors’ first amendment rights, help verify our nonprofit status to private businesses or fill out substantial paperwork helping people get qualified for food stamps, fill out applications for housing or workplace references. I stand back as a conductor of sorts, always humbled by the “phoenix effect” of the VOICE on people down-and-out.

Nearly 1,000 people have signed up to vend over the past year, and around 150 actively vend per month. Our distribution is currently at 16,000 papers per month, putting around $32,000 per month in the hands of those who need it the most. The vendors are the true heroes of this publication, distributing 99 percent of the papers.

Recently, we put together a sales and customer service training as a four-week series. Doing workshops with around 45 vendors, they came up with their own Vendor Program core values: Community, Quality and Empowerment. This group actively talked about the self respect and value that they have discovered within themselves through the VOICE, but also the difficulties experienced out in the field. We then covered tactics on how those core values radiate into and outside themselves. These sessions weren’t dumbed-down. They could have been given in any corporate environment, and the results were apparent.

I am truly amazed every day by Denver VOICE vendors. Each individual that walks in our doors could have any background. I often get asked, “Aren’t they all just addicts or mentally ill?” To that question, I want to yell out, “Hey, these are real people, no different than us! One universal is the lack of safety nets.”

The real answer is absolutely not; they’re not just addicts or mentally ill. Respect is the name of the game, and when you interact with each person, what demons they may carry start to slip away. Categories of addiction or mental health crumble in the face of one person’s concern for housing. Maybe their feelings were hurt by a rude passer-by or some other situation, like needing advice on what to do in the face of prejudice, fear or joy. Yes, we have people that struggle, but as my grandmother, a lifetime advocate and leader for people living with disabilities, would say, “It’s a roll of the dice where we end up, no matter where you came from or how much or little you may have been given, it’s still that roll of the dice.”

Growing up with her picking me up from school and going right down to the Center for the Physically Challenged to volunteer, I learned that the impressions or stereotypes or even the actual problems facing each person do not, and should never, take the integrity and value from that person. Each person deserves a chance whether it be the first, second or fifth chance. And gee, this is the United States and I feel we should all hold that extra burden to make sure that opportunity is available to everyone, especially on the local level here in Denver.

When you walk into the vendor office, we have resource and information boards and a much-valued restroom, but we’re not naïve. We’re not offering a cure to the issues facing our community, but a consistent and respectful platform for those needing to work. Not only do vendors participate in a thorough training and sign a contract to adhere to the law alongside the program’s rules, but they are also offered trainings in sales, customer service and a very successful training by members of District 6 police force and the Downtown Denver Partnership. Many faces have come through our doors, all with the purpose of getting the tools to better earn income and develop personal skills. What I have seen, and in retrospect not surprisingly, is that working with vendors has exponentially increased the benefits to all those involved.

When they first start, vendors are given a badge to make them legal, and they get 10 free papers to get them on their feet after going through orientation. Vendors are not told where to go, but forge their turf through a well-organized set of rules. There is a strict one-vendor-per-block rule, and there are two kinds of badges. White badges work on a first-come-first-serve basis on each block, giving that turf up when they leave for whatever reason. The colored badges are awarded to people that have hit 300 in sales through us in one month, and they are awarded with the turf of their choice, theirs when they show up.

We offer rich sales incentives and calculate those on a calendar month basis, or by issue. When a vendor hits 100, they receive an incentive of 10 free papers. When they hit 150, they receive another ten papers. And as a way to give themselves their own raise, when they hit 300, they get 50 free papers, which is extended to each increment of 300 (600, 900, etc.). With ownership and pride, vendors let us know where we need to spend time on discipline.

I don’t have the space to mention all the vendors’ names, but each person that vends is a champion. They are champions to themselves, because in this whacked-out economy, these people work so hard because they haven’t given up on themselves. From elderly women who went broke with medical bills to those looking to buy a bus ticket home, from contractors whose businesses bottomed out to those who have always identified with being transient, from those with head injuries to those deemed as “special needs,” these are valuable people. Our goal is that none of the vendors become or remain homeless, so please don’t get confused when someone looks like they are doing “okay”—they might have gotten there by vending the VOICE. We celebrate that vendors are able to make this income and consistently teach us the benefits of community, all by simply vending the Denver VOICE. •

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