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[Editor's note: This article first appeared in Street Spirit.]

The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) has announced that after 22 years of sponsorship, they will cease funding the operations of Street Spirit as of December 31, 2016.

Terry Messman, founding editor of Street Spirit, said, “The news came as a complete shock to all of us, especially since Street Spirit had just completed our most successful year ever, with an amazing outpouring of good writers, and our participation in some highly meaningful solidarity campaigns with activist groups. Also, the AFSC had just funded a $15,000 evaluation and planning process to guide the paper for the next 3-5 years.

“So it came completely out of the blue. We were given absolutely no advance warning that they were planning to shut down the program due to AFSC’s budget shortages. I was stunned to realize that more than 100 disabled, elderly and homeless vendors would lose their livelihood. And all the dozens of writers who have done such dedicated work for Street Spirit would be silenced, and all the activist groups we stand in solidarity with would lose their major media outlet.”  

Messman said he was still grateful that the AFSC had generously funded Street Spirit for the past 22 years, and made 20,000 copies of the paper available for free for homeless vendors every month for over two decades. “AFSC has done a tremendous amount of good during that period,” he said, “and I have been treated fairly as an AFSC staff. I have no complaints for myself.” 

But, he said, “The sudden abandonment of all the extremely poor vendors who depend on Street Spirit will cause terrible damage. And this casts aside all the writers and community activists who have given so much of their time and energy and devotion to Street Spirit and AFSC over the years.” 

AFSC’s announcement of the rationale for shutting down the program was terse. The AFSC West Regional Executive Committee, facing serious budget shortfalls across the organization, determined that the AFSC will no longer prioritize this poverty and homeless program and that it will “lay down” Street Spirit as of December 31, 2016, and stop funding it. 

AFSC’s farm worker program in Stockton and its American Indian program in Seattle will be terminated next year. All three of the terminated programs serve impoverished people from oppressed and marginalized communities. 

The Editorial Advisory Board of Street Spirit responded with a resounding and unanimous “NO WAY” to this decision and began planning to continue publishing Street Spirit as an independent voice of “Justice News and Homeless Blues.” 

AFSC has agreed to allow the paper to go independent. The Editorial Board has decided to launch a “Save Our Street Spirit Campaign” to raise the resources needed to keep the paper alive. 

Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness, the publisher of San Francisco’s Street Sheet said, “Street Spirit is essential in ensuring truthful, hard-hitting coverage that reflects the daily reality of the Bay’s poorest residents. The paper has played an essential role in ensuring East Bay residents are educated on poverty issues, and more importantly activated to forge solutions. The beautiful thing about the paper is that it not only does all that, but directly transfers hard cash into the hands of people who have no access to the traditional job market.” 

Street Sheet Editor Sam Lew echoes that last point, saying, “Street Spirit is invaluable means of employment for more than 100 homeless and low-income people who depend on the newspaper as a key source of income.” 

JC Orton, the vendor coordinator who actually delivers the Street Spirit newspapers to the vendors on the streets, pointed out, “The economic benefit of newspaper sales alone is over $250,000 in the pockets of some of the poorest people in the Bay Area.” In effect, every dollar that is contributed upstream results in two to three times more financial impact at the street level. 

So, the most immediate and tragic impact of losing the paper would hit the community least able to absorb the blow — an all too familiar story. But the loss of the paper would have an incalculable impact on many other issues as well. 

Advocacy and Education 

The investigative reporting, education, coalition building, and movement mobilization work of the Street Spirit has shaped public awareness and public policy on the most vital issues facing low-income and homeless people. Street Spirit has been a key voice in the battles to stop the criminalization of homelessness in San Francisco, Berkeley, Santa Cruz and Oakland. 

“I’m baffled by the AFSC’s decision not to fund Street Spirit, because it has been so effective.” said Carol Denney, one of Street Spirit’s Editorial Advisory Board members. As a writer, musician and community activist in Berkeley for decades, Denney has extensive first-hand knowledge of Berkeley politics. 

She said, “Street Spirit articles have been used in commission meetings, seminars, and national workshops to educate people about policy, especially as it relates to principle or the way things really play out for people on the street. But it’s more than that. People who have a chance to tell their own stories are transformed by the opportunity itself. I’ve seen this happen, and it’s compelling. It’s unforgettable.” 

Other social justice advocates also reacted with shock and dismay at the idea of losing one of the area’s most important platforms bringing issues of poverty and homelessness to the public. A sentiment commonly expressed by those that know the paper’s long history and parentage is “No way Street Spirit can be shut down.” 

“No way AFSC can’t afford Street Spirit,” said Paul Boden, Executive and Organizing Director of the Western Regional Advocacy Project (WRAP). “For American Friends Service Committee to allow this vital resource to cease to exist is a damn shame. I can only hope AFSC will look deep in its heart and decide that the massive positive impact Street Spirit has achieved with such a small budget is worthy of their continued support.” 

The Influence of Street Spirit 

Boden points out that Street Spirit’s influence spreads far wider than just the Bay Area. “The artwork, writing and investigative journalism in the Street Spirit is second to none when it comes to the voices, issues and lives of poor and homeless people in the Bay Area and beyond. Homeless street papers across the country look up to and work hard to reach the quality and integrity of Street Spirit.” 

Furthermore, Boden said, there couldn’t be a worse time to cut back on programs advocating for the rights of homeless people. “As we all know, gentrification and criminalization continue to grow under America’s neo-liberal economic and social policies. Street Spirit is needed today more then ever!” 

Daniel McMullan, a longtime advocate for homeless and disabled people, and a City Commissioner on Berkeley’s Human Welfare Commission, said, “When I heard about Street Spirit losing its funding, I was devastated. This was the last real paper that wasn’t completely suborned by big media or destroyed and pulled under by the tides of indifference and pure sabotage. Free speech is dying and free speech in print has been the biggest enemy of fascism the world has known. 

“But even beyond that, Street Spirit had the double edge of telling truth to power and empowering marginalized writers, homeless and poor street vendors and the reader who might be hearing the other side of the story for the first time ever. I, for one, am not willing to let this happen without a fight.” 

Peter Marin, the founder of the Committee for Social Justice in Santa Barbara, is a prolific journalist, former university journalism professor and the author of the book Freedom and Its Discontents. Marin wrote one of the most highly influential articles ever published about the national struggle over homelessness and human rights. His seminal essay, “Helping and Hating the Homeless: The Struggle at the Margins of America,” published in Harper’s Magazine, was passed around homeless advocacy circles all over the country. He has worked with and written for Street Spirit for nearly 20 years. 

Marin said, “I have tremendous admiration for Terry Messman and Street Spirit, and I know the homeless up and down this coast, and their advocates, are indebted to him and the AFSC. As for the work Terry does, and what Street Spirit achieves, there’s nothing like it anywhere I know. It is something of a miracle it’s kept alive this long, and an immense irreplaceable loss if it must come to an end.” 

Marin has spent over 30 years defending the civil rights of homeless people in Santa Barbara, organizing lawyers for their legal defense, and creating essential lifeline services for them. Fighting those struggles for human rights is how he first became involved with Street Spirit. 

“I think Terry Messman and his paper, Street Spirit, have for decades been essential to, and at the very heart of, the fight in this country for homeless services and rights and justice,” Marin said. 

“I know of no-one in the community of advocates who has sacrificed as much as Terry and his wife have for the ongoing struggle for those on the margins to be recognized as the democratic equals of those with power and money. Perhaps most important of all, Street Spirit has given the homeless a voice, an arena for speech, not only or even mainly for complaint, but for the celebration of all that remains beautiful and significant and perhaps even holy among those who struggle to survive among us and whose lives otherwise go unseen and voices unheard.” 

Marin said that Street Spirit also has given a voice and a home to the writers and advocates who work so hard to defend the rights of the poor — and whose deeply important work is ignored by the government and corporate media. 

Marin said, “Terry has also provided something of absolute importance to those who advocate for the marginal and the poorest of the poor; he has created a home for them too, has created a web of connection and a source of information without which many of us, who operate in certain kinds of isolation and without much sense of community, would lose much of our senses of hope and endurance. What Terry has done, which may not be recognizable at very first glance, is this: he has understood precisely what is missing at the failing heart of this culture, and he has spent his life in trying to provide it.” 

Amir Soltani, a human rights advocate and film director who fought the closure last month of a West Oakland recycling center, said that the losses of Street Spirit and the recycling center in the same month are a double tragedy for the poorest Oakland residents. “In both cases, we were creating jobs, employment, income and a sense of community,” he said. “I don’t think we can surrender or sacrifice all this if the recycling center goes down or if your funding dries up.” 

Street Spirit worked in close collaboration with the activists and film-makers who created the PBS documentary Dogtown Redemption to save the jobs of hundreds of poor and homeless shopping cart recyclers. 

Soltani added, “I understand that shock of losing a source of funding so suddenly, and at this moment. It is a terrible blow. How ironic, you have helped us so much with keeping the recycling center open and now you are threatened with closure, in almost the same month. I can’t let that happen. Not after what you have done for us.” 

When Soltani first learned of Street Spirit’s termination, he said, “Let me express my deep love and gratitude to you for Street Spirit. I think of you as a national treasure. What you have and can create is breathtaking, and beautiful. It is prayer in action, love in words. The community that you have nurtured is powerful and resilient.” 

Exactly why AFSC has chosen, after 22 years of continuous support, to cut off Street Spirit has not been explicitly explained by AFSC Executive Committee members, but several sources close to AFSC said the decision was caused by the organization’s serious budget shortages, which also will lead to the closure of the farm workers program in Stockton and the American Indian program in Seattle, and may result in further cuts next year in other regions of the country. 

Large nonprofit corporations increasingly are driven by bureaucratic decision-making and fundraising priorities that focus on gaining favor from the most affluent donors and largest funders. 

And while Street Spirit has very high visibility and is a highly successful program, under the AFSC’s new model of national fundraising implemented about ten years ago, it falls outside the organization’s focus areas. AFSC has spent a great deal of time and money in creating nationwide goals and centralized focus areas for the organization that can attract big foundations and wealthy liberal donors. 

And let’s face it, fomenting a radical, pacifist, direct action ethos, which strengthens the autonomous, self-directed political activity of extremely poor and disabled people who have been pushed to the margins of society, is not going to become the darling of corporate funders anytime soon. 

But deep education about the theory and practice of nonviolence and consistent advocacy and action for the human rights of homeless people are exactly what our society and our community needs. And we, in turn, need to develop alternative income models that don’t reduce our political and spiritual aspirations to a corporate cost-benefit analysis. 

In response to the decisions made behind closed doors that doomed Street Spirit, Amir Soltani said in a letter to the advisory board, “I know that this is a brutal and painful experience and transition. But, as an outsider who has had the benefit of working with you and Street Spirit, I think that what you have at Street Spirit is incredibly valuable. You have the content, the experience, the team, talent and networks to serve an incredibly important population. If AFSC does not see the value, that is their shortcoming. All I see is value. Sure some accountant looks at the books and thinks of you as a cost, but what do they know? Street Spirit is a magical organization. 

“I have deep respect and admiration for the extraordinary work and value you and your team at Street Spirit have generated. Honestly, Terry, when I hear you speak or the staff and other board members speak, I’m blown away by the passion, intelligence and commitment at the table. I understand that you have every right to experience this as an assault on yourself, the staff and vendors, but in my eyes, they can’t discount or slash the value of what you have here. There is a tremendous investment of time and labor of love in Street Spirit. You dignify the life and work of the poor, so both the vision and the voice are sublime, even if, until now, the market or the AFSC has failed to valorize Street Spirit.” 

The Legacy of Dr. King’s Poor People’s Campaign 

On the day he was told Street Spirit was to be terminated, Messman reminded AFSC that it had always venerated the legacy of Martin Luther King — who spent the last months of his life building a Poor People’s Campaign and marching in support of low-wage sanitation workers in Memphis. Messman reminded AFSC that Street Spirit was attempting to follow this same path by standing in solidarity with homeless people’s movements and supporting low-wage shopping cart recyclers in Oakland. The response from AFSC was that this kind of homelessness and poverty program was no longer their priority. 

Messman said, “When I began this homeless organizing project, the most highly respected national staff of the American Friends Service Committee, including Barbara Moffett and Jane Motz, told me that they considered homelessness, poverty and housing issues to be the most important and vital social justice issues of all for the AFSC.” 

When Messman emphasized the sacred historic commitments and the central values of the AFSC, and the mission of the civil rights struggle, he was told that the AFSC of today is a very different organization from the one he joined back then. 

Lynda Carson, a prominent tenant rights activist and journalist in Oakland, said, “The decision of the American Friends Service Committee to terminate Street Spirit is a great loss to the homeless, and also to our spirit, and the community at large. Fascism is at our door, and the homeless are cold, hungry and dying in the streets. 

“They have been victimized, criminalized, brutalized and are being run out of cities throughout our country. Never-ending rent increases, poverty wages and mass evictions are creating more homeless families by the moment. Street Spirit is the voice of the people.” 

A New Day for Street Spirit 

In the coming days and weeks, we will be reaching out to Street Spirit’s readers, allies and homeless rights activists to pull together a comprehensive solution so that our advocacy journalism can not only survive this crisis but be strengthened so it can continue to work with the new generation of activists whose passions for justice are rekindling movements across the country. 

On Sept. 22, 2016, as a first step in this journey, the Youth Leaders and Board of the Berkeley-based Youth Spirit Artworks (YSA) voted to invite Street Spirit to build a new home under their auspices. 

Executive Director Sally Hindman said, “The Youth Leaders of Youth Spirit Artworks are passionate about making this work. We think we can make a difference here for the betterment of the whole community so we are stepping up to lend our help.” [See the accompanying story about the new partnership with YSA on page 2 of this issue.] 

Hindman is a Quaker who began developing her social justice ministry with poor and homeless people more than 20 years ago. After graduating from seminary at Berkeley’s Pacific School of Religion, Hindman approached Messman, the director of AFSC’s Homeless Organizing Project, and suggested that he create Street Spirit. In 1995, Hindman organized the first team of Street Spirit vendors by reaching out to homeless shelters in the East Bay and served as the director of the vendor program for its first few years. 

Hindman said, “Spirit has been at work in this process in exciting and creative ways. We believe this new collaboration between Street Spirit and Youth Spirit Artworks has the potential to utterly benefit and empower homeless and other underserved youth.” 

She said, “The most important thing in my life is serving God through this ministry of fighting for justice, and facilitating a means for the voices of those on the margins to be heard through faith-based art for liberation — art for social justice!” 

Save Our Street Spirit (SOS) 

As news of the shutdown is filtering out to the community, many others are also standing up to be counted. 

Amir Soltani, co-director of the film Dogtown Redemption, has been working with recyclers in the Dogtown neighborhood of West Oakland. Earlier this year, he started providing Street Spirit vendors with hundreds of copies of the Dogtown film on DVD to sell to the public. 

Soltani has pledged to support the newspaper in its new home, saying, “I’m deeply moved by what Street Spirit has done for more than 20 years, by what it represents, and ultimately, by the deep humanity, the sense of justice and witnessing. Street Spirit is a jewel, an incredibly valuable source of community and connection.” 

Soltani has volunteered to head up a fundraising committee for the Save Our Street Spirit campaign, and having raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to make Dogtown Redemption, a movie celebrating the dignity of homeless shopping cart recyclers, he has some great experience and a wide range of contacts he will be mobilizing for this effort. 

JC Orton, Street Spirit Vendor Coordinator, reports that vendors aren’t going to take this sitting down either. They have been discussing a strategy of vendors turning in 5 cents per paper starting in October and raising that to a dime in November (with plenty of compassionate exceptions as needed). This is estimated to raise over $600 a month almost immediately. Vendors are the bedrock of the paper’s ability to communicate its mission. 

Their willingness to invest in its continued publication is one more example of just how important this paper is to so many different people. For 22 years, 20,000 issues of Street Spirit have been given for free every month to its poor and homeless vendors, who sell it to the public and keep 100 percent of the proceeds. 

Street Spirit is one of the very few street newspapers in America, Canada and Europe that has been given to vendors without any charge. Most street papers charge vendors 25 cents or more per issue, up to half the purchase price. 

Editorial Board members have also started discussing hosting benefit concerts, reaching out to parish social justice groups who can provide matching funds for printing costs, and launching an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign. 

This is a strong beginning to a campaign to continue the legacy of the AFSC Homeless Organizing Project, the parent program of Street Spirit, that under Terry Messman’s direction has been advocating for the rights of homeless people for more than 30 years. 

Messman, who built the paper from nothing starting 22 years ago, is confident that Street Spirit will pull through this crisis. “Street Spirit has literally never been a stronger program,” he said. “We have received lots of great media coverage lately, radio interviews, accolades for our articles and stronger community response to our work than ever before. We have built a dedicated team of writers and activists and a stronger team of vendors than ever in our history.” 

Amir Soltani said the crisis faced by Street Spirit carries the seeds of its own renewal. “My thinking is that maybe we don’t have to absorb these blows or let them land on the communities we serve,” Soltani said. “Maybe now is the time to turn to that community and its allies and friends for support and solutions — so that we are not necessarily thinking in terms of endings, but new beginnings.” 

You are invited to help this community institution stay alive and thrive. The campaign will announce next steps in coming weeks. More information will be posted at http://www.thestreetspirit.org. where you can also sign up for email alerts.