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.

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The Vendor Issue

By Tim Covi

This issue of the paper is dedicated to Denver VOICE vendors, the hardworking folks that hustle hour after hour each day peddling this monthly newsmagazine.

It’s not an easy job. It takes no small amount of grit to handle such a social enterprise, one that involves as much rejection as it does reward. Almost every vendor doubles down on the emotional impact of the work: most people who are homeless at some point internalize that state of being. They begin to feel that they’re not capable of accomplishing much; their self-worth decays; their self-image gets as beat up as hanger meat. So every “no” can be potentially personal at first. And the flip side, every “yes” can be potentially transformational. If you’re reading this, you’ve taken part in that.

I can be pretty disconnected at times from the street side of the paper as an editor. My focus is on putting together a product that will make our vendors’ jobs easier, a product that people will want to pick up each month. Of course some buyers will simply give our vendors a dollar, take the paper and toss it.  But our hope is that by constantly improving our content, we’ll help our vendors get out of that charity niche. Maybe I’m naively optimistic, but I imagine that very few people actually want to live off charity. When it comes to our vendors, I’m quite sure that most want to work for their money, and take pride in their jobs.

I think this synthesis between our vendors and our newspaper is crucial to our product.

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