John's Blog
The Big Issue's Founder & Editor in Chief on the issues getting under his skin...
Big Society on a small scale at the Fringe: August 18th 2010
TBI’s eye danced about the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this weekend. With ideas for a Big Society in the pipeline, worthy facilitators may need an urban muse to get things going– TBI recommends this year’s Festival for its smiling efficiency and awesome productivity.
Everyone was working in double-time – stewards repeat their toilet directions and lose their voices, performers peddle their shows during the day and whittle away their earnings at night, even the lucky punter must dedicate time to the fringe guide and cash machine queues.
The Fringe celebrates its 30th birthday this year and TBI registered more entrepreneurial activity than ever on the streets. From the canvas bags on sale in the volunteer-run ‘Forest Cafe’ to the aged flautist who accompanied TBI, melodiously, up the Royal Mile for £1; local links were being forged.
Likewise, propping up the festival financially, those all important city sponsors were heavily involved behind the scenes. The resulting August joie-de-vivre demonstrates the possibilities when Artists and Corporate-types come together. TBI applauds.
Panic Not! Free museums stay free despite severe DCMS budget cuts: July 22nd 2010
With DCMS reporting cuts to their budgets like never before, TBI is happy to read in the Guardian that Jeremy Hunt ‘wants to keep publicly subsidised free entry to national museums’. TBI just thought it would lend its support to that line of thinking.
Ever since the Public Libraries Act was passed in 1850, free libraries across England (and shortly after, Scotland and Wales) have been recognised as socially valuable spaces of learning. It only took about 150 years for the majority of museums to follow suit in 2001.
For any self-respecting autodidact on the streets, museums and galleries are the first port of call after the library. In the recent report released by the Centre for Policy Studies, ‘So why can’t they read’ by Miriam Goss, it appears that 25% of all London primary school children cannot read by the time they are 11. Similarly, Boris Johnson’s foreword highlights the 1 million illiterate adults resident in the UK. Clearly, we must dedicate some attention to our literacy deficiency but equally, support must be maintained to those museums and galleries that freely inform through multimedia communication channels.
Aside from lofty intellectual stimulus, gallery spaces speak to the finer things in life. TBI is quite partial to loitering on the bridge overlooking the Turbine hall in the Tate Modern or the steps opposite the Diplodocus in the Natural History Museum (although TBI is pretty sure the curators do not want you to sit there).
XMAS : December 21st 2009
Estonians, Latvians, South Africans; Scots, Irish, Mongolians; English, Americans, Moldavians; Australians, Kenyans and Outer Mongolians all have one thing in common: they all buy The Big Issue.
And at this time of the year, by the cartload. A feast of new readers come to us at this time of the year for a number of reasons, not all of them known.
The personalities on the cover, the fun and games, the sense of exuberant optimism; all contribute to our sales figures. Added to this is the general feeling of wellbeing and goodness that causes the public to burst the seams of their generosity. To become incontinent Big Issue buyers and givers.
Christmas has that effect on us all, and long may it last. But it would be good to keep many of our Christmas readers for the whole year round.
Come back, now you know that The Big Issue is a good read; an award-winning, at times, cutting edge piece of social hardware in the fight to bring change to the streets and the lives of the needy.
We sell bundles, in other words, which aids our vendors in having a better Christmas and year end. It helps us because it gives us the money to be more effective in intervening in the crisis of homelessness. And it helps you in understanding how inspiring it is to be socially useful.
But it is not all cakes and ale in the land of The Big Issue. Next year we have to address something that will snuff us out if we do not take action. And that is to change the high
level of people’s generous but misplaced kindness.
Eighteen years ago Gordon Roddick and I started The Big Issue to give homeless people an alternative to begging. Our cities were full of beggars. So what we wanted to do was give the homeless a means of making money, of participating in labour: of earning their own money.
Not to rely on the mind-rotting handout that only keeps people on the street. Keeping them dependent on the handout, and the generosity of strangers.
As a former beggar I can tell you it does not improve your mind to be constantly reliant on handouts. On giveaways. Better to earn your own money and begin to create your way out of dependency.
So The Big Issue was intent on bringing homeless people to the marketplace so they could earn, and learn. To look after their money. To buy and sell, like the rest of us; we are all buying and selling ourselves in the marketplace. Why not extend that opportunity to the homeless.
Currently we have on average 3 out of 4 people who give money to our vendors not taking the paper. Saying “sell it to someone else,” or something like that.
So just at the stage that we are getting homeless people earning their own money a majority of the public are saying, “here’s a handout.”
This will kill all of our good work. And it will ensure that homeless people will have lost one of the vital means to grow up and grow away from the streets. To grow away from needing to sell The Big Issue.
That is denying our vendors the chance of developing the power of their own hands, their own minds. They will remain internal refugees who clog the streets, the hostels and the temporary housing programmes. Always relying on the next handout. Always relying on the casual life of a taker.
We say “take the paper”; read it, pass it on. Don’t refuse to give them the one chance someone has of learning to be more like us, to have to work for our hard-earned pennies. Don’t rob from them the dignity of beginning to reverse the abuse, the falls and slips that have got them homeless in the first place.
Give them the same chance you would any member of your own family. That is to grow and develop and learn and control the way they spend their precious earnings.
Take the paper. Read it. Often people are surprised at how tough and positive is the message; how much fun and excitement it has within its pages. And tell everyone you know that they should take the paper and don’t turn homeless people back into beggars just at the stage that The Big Issue has got them working.
2010 will be a time of great change in the pages of The Big Issue. We will be trying to convert all those who have supported our vendors in the short term by giving, into readers so that they can help in the long term.
Take the paper and help us to help the homeless help themselves. Working, not begging.
A bright and useful and loving and caring Christmas to you all.
BIRTHDAY: September 11th 2009
The warm handshake I receive in a small town in England makes up for the arguments, the bad blood that often flows when you are going about your work.
The misunderstandings, the feeling that you are not being taken seriously in your work,
all disappear when a Big Issue vendor puts out his hand.
He is a big man and his hand is big. He has a beard and is well kempt. And he has a smile.
The phone calls of a few minutes before about people misunderstanding our work fall away. And are made insignificant.
For a moment, just a moment, I begin to under-stand what it might be to be a person who buys The Big Issue. And encounter the warmth and optimism of people who have decided to fight back.
To not stay down because they were trodden on and pushed. Who have presented themselves to the world in order to make their own money and transform their lives.
And in that moment I begin to understand some-thing that I have not understood over these 18 years. The Big Issue vendor’s encouraging, firm hand and look was like a good blast of humanity. Like a plus that was suddenly conjured out of a minus.
We talk about where he is staying. He describes the hostel he is in and says that it is probably the best one he has been in. He says he still has a lot of ground to cover. But for the first time in ages, after selling The Big Issue for a year, some kind of corner is
being turned.
The thing I grasp after the above encounter is so simple that it is dumb. A dumb thing that has avoided my understanding these near two decades trying to help the homeless to help themselves.
And it is this: before the 11th of September 1991, for a homeless person to get money from the public they had to contort themselves into the most pathetic person imaginable.
They had to appear ground down and broken. They had to sit and be beaten. They had to be uncared for. They had to look desperate.
Imagine if a homeless person given to begging came up to you with a bright and encouraging smile on their face. And with a spring in their step. You might well look at them and think, 'Well, he must have something going for him.'
It would not be a recipe for giving. It would be a recipe for refusing. It would be a recipe for ignoring.
Only when the abjectness is foremost can you then be assured of pulling the strings of the public’s collective good heart.
The day after The Big Issue launched, the home-less who flocked to sell it had to immediately change their tack. They had to present themselves as ‘with
a bounce’. With a sense of their own worth. And even if they were beaten down they were coming back from it all.
Instead of being victims in the struggle to gain control of the damage done to them in their lives, they had to come back as victors.
Of course, you could still see some former beggars selling The Big Issue with a commitment to putting forward the most compelling sense of failure they could muster. But on the whole, many and most homeless sellers could see that the public were set alight by one thing.
They were set alight by the sight of homeless people fighting back. Standing up and going for it. Not seeming to be defeated.
It was as if suddenly the psychology of the homeless had to change overnight in order to get public support.
Change it did, and support they got. The public flooded in to take, rip and grab those Big Issues, often causing the homeless to feel that Christmas had come early. And often.
So The Big Issue added to homeless people’s bow another string or two. And though they may still be broken and in dire need, the public’s engaging encouragement helped make a solution seem possible.
One of the worst things about having to resort to begging is that you have to present the whole of your life as a negative. And that is a pretty bad state and place to be in. It means that you cannot feel encouraged or positive about little things that you do. All you can rely upon is the way the public will give to the broken.
But The Big Issue changed that equation. Suddenly the public were offered an alternative response to homelessness. They could see and help support a homelessness that could be overcome.
That there were homeless people who would not hang around for the generosity of strangers but would work their way out of the bad and make their way towards the good.
Even if, as said, the good was thin and un-nurtured, at least it could be encouraged and grown.
That is what I did not understand. That we created an appetite among the public, or in enough of them, to say, "Yes, let’s give this fighter support."
As I walked away from the vendor with the big hand and warm handshake, I could see therefore what an encouraging symbol of new possibilities could be seen; simply by engaging and buying from a Big Issue vendor.
But then I also began to understand the people who formerly I did not understand; the people who said that Big Issue vendors were only putting on a show when they sold. It was just another piece of conning. And that they remained defeated and beaten but now with
an ability to put a better face on it.
Now I could see that in a way we were encouraging homeless people to be like other people. And that is, ‘get on with your job, however hard it is.’ Trouble in your life? Tough; but someone still has to drive the bus.
And then I understood, this late in the day, that yes, it was not wrong to get homeless people, like the rest of us, to put a good face on trouble. And that that was a possible way of making changes. Grinning and bearing it, rather than falling to pieces and staying in pieces.
Yes! Life is like that. And we were giving the homeless the chance to find the steel to cope, even if they did not have much of it. But believing that if you can get through without giving up, it increases the chances of getting out of the grief.
This was definitely my learning day. One of those days when thoughts and solutions drop into your head and your understanding heads upwards. Yes, by realising that we were bringing homeless people to the marketplace to earn their own money. And to gain in self-esteem, it always involved behaving in the market place as if you had a good product. And you were good and pleased to sell it.
I walked round the small town and on walking back to the station encountered the same vendor. He was doing his selling and I didn’t want to stop him earning his living. But he called me over. I went.
And then he shocked me. He said, “You know, of course, that The Big Issue gets more support than you think it does.” I looked at him and thought, ‘Well, thank you for the earlier insight. But don’t start telling me my job and what is and what is not The Big Issue.’
So I said, “Well, I’m glad to hear that.” I put my hand out to shake a goodbye, desirous of getting the next London train. But he stood firm. He said: “People come and give me money.
And I take it. I try and give them the paper and they say, ‘Sell it to someone else.’”
I said: "I know. Some people have been doing that since the beginning. They don’t want the paper. They have a choice."
He said: "Oh, I know they have a choice. But think, at the point you’ve got me working for a living. Getting myself together, someone is 'treating' me. Is giving me a gift. Imagine how many more papers you would sell. And how many more people you could help if they took the paper."
I shook his hand and rushed for the London train. He was right. We did a survey once. In spite of having good sales year in and year out, a vast amount of money was going on to the streets in terms of gifts and donations. I was not against that. How could I be?
But it did occur to me: if we had more money from more paper sales then we could do more to help the homeless to help themselves.
But don’t knock the 'drops', as they are called, I mused. Just find a way of converting the non-readers into readers.
And that, I reasoned, was the best thing we could do in our 19th year. Push up the value of the paper. Load it down with value. Saturate it with value. So that those reluctant readers but great supporters of our vendors could help us even more to help the homeless to help themselves.
I do love birthdays. But this 18th one has been one big ‘thinking’ one. So keep thinking. Keep reading. Keep supporting. And any ideas about converting supporters into readers would be greatly appreciated.
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