The nation’s oldest street paper, Spare Change News, was founded in 1992 by James Shearer, Tim Harris, and Tim Hobson and backed by the Homeless Empowerment Project. The outlet has historically primarily been “by the homeless, for the homeless,” and includes everything from news to arts coverage and poetry in a print edition that is sold on corners throughout Greater Boston. As Shearer once explained, they started the paper “to change perceptions and to educate the public by giving ourselves a voice and building a bridge between the haves and have nots.”
Over the past several decades, Marc Goldfinger has been a Spare Change board member, poetry editor, and regular columnist. He is also one of the editors of Spare Change News Poems: An Anthology by Homeless People and those Touched by Homelessness (2018). Join Marc as he recounts the struggles and successes that the nation’s oldest street newspaper has had covering homelessness and inequality in the shadow of America’s most elite university, and learn about the role that Spare Change still has in providing news and income for some of the region’s most vulnerable people.