Editor's Note
Wednesday, September 1, 2010 at 03:44PM 
By Tim Covi
We want to start this month with a resounding “THANK YOU.” Everyone at the VOICE, our vendors and our staff, are extremely grateful for the outpouring of support you gave us last month. Throughout the year, VOICE readers are extremely supportive and involved, but the past month has been extraordinary. We still have a long way to go and we still need your help.
In August we started a major fundraising drive, with a need to raise $68,000 by the end of the year to keep the VOICE alive. Your generosity has helped us nock that down to $61,000. In one month, supporters have given $7,000; if we can get that to $15,000 then we have a donor who will match that amount!
The support and donations you give to the VOICE translates into creating an award winning news-magazine, with in-depth stories and analysis on your community and region as well as personal narratives of Denver’s homeless. That magazine is a product that hundreds of homeless vendors are proud to sell each month, bringing much needed money to over 1000 homeless vendors in 2009.
It’s heartening to see so many letters of support and donations flying in, but without your help this month we won’t make it. Please consider donating whatever you can.
We still have a large gap to fill in our budget. Sixty-one thousand dollars is nothing to scoff at. But for a program that puts $3 in a vendor’s hand for every $1 spent, that $61,000 is urgent. For some vendors it means lunch or dinner. For nearly half of our vendors, it’s a big portion of keeping a roof over their heads.
John Alexander is a perfect example. I ran into him in mid-August at Walgreen’s on the 16th Street Mall, just days after he signed his first lease in years. He was outside the entrance at 7 P.M. vending the paper, a huge smile across his face. He’d been paying his way in different places with the VOICE for a while, with family or in a hotel. Now he’s talking about the furniture he’s going to get, having people over for coffee and tea. He said the first couple nights he was there he could hardly sleep he was so excited.
Before the DenverVOICE started our jobs program in 2007, one of the only viable alternatives to day labor for the homeless was panhandling. The city recently reported that in the past three years panhandling has gone down by as much as 90 percent in downtown Denver.
Personally I have no aversion to people asking me for change. I give as much as I can when I can. But I do think there is more dignity to earning a dollar from selling a product you’re proud of, something all of our vendors can attest to. That dignity carries over into every aspect of their lives.
Like all community-supported media, we rely on your donations. Please help us continue to bring you a great newsmagazine every month, and help our homeless vendors stay in business with the VOICE.
Denver VOICE, Editor, John Alexander, editor's note, finance, money, non-profit in Editor's Note
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