Real Change launches cashless payment app with Google

By Laura Kelly

Seattle street paper Real Change has partnered with tech giant Google to launch an app that allows customers to pay for their paper digitally and have it delivered straight to their phones.

Vendors have had increasingly difficulties selling the paper, since fewer and fewer people carry cash with them, said Timothy Harris, founding director of Real Change.

“Cashlessness is a challenge our vendors face on a daily basis,” he added. “This app will help our paper survive in the digital age, when fewer people have ready access to cash and more people prefer to read news content on their mobile devices.”

From today, each of Real Change’s homeless and low-income vendors will each get a unique QR code on their vests to allow them to sell digital versions of the award-winning street paper, as well as the usual paper copies.

After downloading the free app to their iOS or Android phone, Seattleites will be able to scan their local vendor’s unique code to buy their digital paper for $2.99 (including a fee from digital content providers). 

Vendors will make $1.49 every time someone buys a digital copy of Real Change, whilst they will still get $1.40 from every paper copy they sell. The paper copy will still cost $2.

“We designed this with our vendors and customers in mind,” said Harris. “This app will build on the strong relationships our vendors have with many of their customers, while helping customers benefit from an increasingly seamless buying experience. The paper is just a scan away.”

The project was started two years ago by a Google employee who volunteered at Real Change as part of Google’s annual week of service. 

Since then, eight Googlers have volunteered their time to develop the cross-platform app, the first of its kind for the paper.

The app in action.

“Being on the volunteer app development team has been a gratifying experience,” said Jill Woelfer, a Google User Experience Researcher who has been volunteering with Real Change since early 2014. 

“The whole team has worked very hard to create a technical solution to provide opportunities for those who are in need.”

“Street newspapers around the world are looking for a solution to how they can better adapt to the changing media landscape, while still staying true to the signature street paper model,” added Darcy Nothnagle, Public Affairs Manager for Google. 

“We hope that this app will be a model many street papers can use, globally.”

Real Change’s app is just one of the pioneering digital adaptations coming from INSP’s members. 

Others include Chicago-based StreetWise’s partnership with PayPal and The Big Issue South Africa’s SmartBibs, both of which also allow customers to pay online using their phones.

In Europe, Amsterdam’s Z! magazine and Scandinavian papers =Norge, Situation Sthlm and Faktum are working on pilot projects to provide vendors with card readers, so that customers can pay with debit or credit cards. 

In addition, some papers, including Situation Sthlm and Norway’s =Norge, use payments through text messages. 

“Many of INSP's 114 street papers, in 35 countries, are facing issues based on the continuing march of our cashless society,” said INSP chief executive Maree Aldam. 

“Innovative solutions such as Real Change’s app show how dynamic street paper organisations can continue to provide employment to some of the most vulnerable people in society, despite the new challenges they face.”

Our vendors: Robert Smith - Real Change, Seattle, USA

A couple of years ago, Robert Smith went to the Seattle suburb of Kirkland to sell the street paper Real Change.

As a "stereotypical big black guy" he was worried: "This is an upper-class environment. There's not that many black people around. I was afraid they were going to call the police on me."

Robert Smith. Photo: Mike Wold

While he now has many regular customers, Robert says that "a lot of them don't understand. If I had an opportunity like what they have, I wouldn't even be selling the paper."

For the past nine years, Robert has been on and off the streets, starting in Las Vegas, where he grew up. His mother is dead and his dad, a Vietnam veteran, is serving time in prison. He moved to Seattle five years ago but had a hard time finding a decent job.

"A lot of jobs are just modern-day slavery," he said. "You got people working two or three jobs, making eight, nine dollars. You can't survive off that."

But he adds that being homeless "makes you count your blessings for the little things, just to wash, wash your teeth, take a shower. When you're homeless, these things are all taken away from you."

Sometimes, when he doesn't see a customer for a while, Robert worries that they stopped buying from him because he's too outspoken or even because he doesn't look down-and-out enough.

"Sometimes I've got to be quiet, because I'm a very real person, and a lot of people don't like to hear real things."

Either way, he thinks people would be missing the point.

"The underlying point is to help somebody that's less fortunate. You don't go to church to hear the preacher. You go to church to hear the Word. Just buy the paper."

This is a summary of an article by Real Change reporter Mike Wold that was published on INSP's News Service. Street paper editors can view, download and republish the full article here.

Real Change turns 20: Seattle Street Paper Celebrates

Real Change celebrated two decades in print yesterday with a fundraising breakfast that brought in more than $103K to support their work with homeless and low-income people.

Started in 1994 by Timothy Harris, the paper was one of the first American street papers to become a weekly publication and continues to win awards and change lives.

“Every paper sold has put money into the pocket of someone who needs help,” said Real Change Executive Director Timothy Harris.

“Every paper sold has spoken up for very poor people, and every paper sold has supported the kind of long, hard and relentless organizing that building a just society requires.”

The celebratory breakfast on Thursday morning saw more than 500 Real Change vendors, staff, board members, volunteers, supporters and community partners come together to recognise the organisation’s accomplishments and talk about their goals for the future.

Harris also looked forward to the INSP’s 2015 conference, which will be held in Seattle next June.

“We’re honoured next June to host the annual conference of the International Network of Street Papers. Staff and volunteers from papers all over the world, from Denmark to South Africa and Japan to Australia, will come to Seattle University to learn from each other and help grow this incredible movement that we’re a part of,” he added.

A massive congratulation to Real Change from everyone at INSP on this incredible milestone. We look forward to seeing you in June.

Image shows Interim Real Change Editor Rosette Royale addressing the 2014 Real Change Breakfast at the Washington State Convention Center. Photo by: Real Change Art Director Jon Williams.

INSP Conference Illustrations by Tony Mckay

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www.tonymckay.co.uk

"We are a movement built upon love"

Tim Harris, director of Real Change in Seattle, addressed the INSP’s 20th Anniversary dinner at Crowne Plaza, Glasgow on 15 August. This is a transcript of his moving speech. Real Change will host next year’s INSP Conference in Seattle.

Like John Bird and several others, I’m up here because I’ve been doing this work a long time, and have seen and learned a lot.

I began in the late 80s, inspired by Mitch Snyder and the Community for Creative Non-Violence, and their refusal to accept homelessness as being remotely normal or OK. My first arrest was in Washington DC in 1985, where I got to spend three days in DC Central Cell Block supporting his hunger strike that lasted 51 days.

Snyder lost 57lbs during that fast, and when asked by a reporter if he was afraid to die, he said, “No. It’s painful, but I have a greater fear of allowing people to languish like animals, and sometimes I’m afraid I’m not doing enough.”

We can all relate to that. Homelessness, at its core, is about the dehumanization of those whose hard lives can often be predicted from birth. The outsiders we are taught to fear and despise. Who, at best, are seen as invisible, and often come to doubt their own value as human beings.

When I started Spare Change in Boston, back in 1992, it was as an answer to a few basic questions: how do we organize a movement that includes those hardest hit by growing inequality? How do we help people meet their own basic human needs? How do we reach across class and race together to build a better world?

Others were asking similar questions. The early 90s was a period of inspiration and invention. Papers like Journal l’Itinerare in Montreal, StreetWise in Chicago, and The Big Issue in London were the first wave of the modern street paper movement.

When we started these papers, we often didn’t see what others were doing. We all took this idea, pioneered in 1989 by Street News in New York, and then, we made it up as we went along.

And we found that we weren’t alone; that we were part of a movement. The Big Issue created the International Network of Street Papers in 1994, and the North American Street Newspaper Association was founded in 1997 by StreetWise, the National Coalition for the Homeless, and Real Change. And now, we are all part of the same movement.

We have not always agreed with each other. At the founding NASNA conference, for example, about a quarter of the delegates walked out of the by-laws plenary after losing a vote on consensus verses majority rule.

But we’ve since learned that our diversity is our strength, and that what we have in common trumps our differences.

Each of our vendors is a hub of human relationships. Each newspaper is a stone thrown on pond, and creates ripples that have effect. And these ripples accumulate, to form a vast movement for human dignity and economic justice.

And our roots are deeper than many of us realize.

Our roots are in the economic disruption of industrialization, and the dislocations this created, and go back to papers like The War Cry, founded by the Salvation Army in London in 1879; to Hobo News, founded in 1915 in Cincinnati and sold by the International Workers of the World across the country; to the Catholic Worker, founded in 1933 by Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day in New York.

All of these papers gave voice to the voiceless, and were sold on the street as a survival strategy by the economically marginalized.

My airplane book on this trip has been a biography of Peter Maurin, the philosopher-saint behind the Catholic Worker movement. This has been a better match as a conference read than I imagined.

In 1933, the Catholic Worker published their first issue of 2,500 copies for $57. I’m sure that many of us can relate to this as well. A year later, they had a nationwide circulation of 35,000. Five years later, it was 165,000, and international.

This is a growth curve we can all envy. And here’s the thing. I can assure you that it was not owed to the brilliance of their business plan. They couldn’t have been less interested in that. The Catholic Worker was a prophetic voice that spoke to the enormous gap between what is and what should be, and ran on pure passion.

They stood up for human dignity, and were about the reinvention of human relationships. They saw the emptiness of consumer society, and worked toward a world where everyone could find dignity in work, and in caring relationship to others.

This sort of vision and audacity is a part of our history that we need to own.

We don’t need to be saints like Maurin, committed to lives of celibacy and poverty, and living like medieval mendicant monks. But we do need to speak to the tragic gap, the difference between what is and what should be.

We need to be practical prophets, who live at the center of our passion for a better world, but can also write a business plan. Who can build inclusive organizations that improve and endure, but never, ever, become boring.

We end this conference, our Twenty Year celebration of the INSP, knowing that are all in this together, learning from each other, healing a broken world, one vendor and one newspaper at a time.
 
We are a movement built upon love, and that is an amazing and awe inspiring thing. We should never forget this.