Harvard Law students Antoine Southern and Anne Rosenblum will be guiding Spare Change News vendors through the legal questions that come with being a small business owner. Courtesy photo
We are third-year Harvard Law School students from the Transactional Law Clinics’ Community Enterprise Project, and we are partnering with Spare Change News to address some of the concerns vendors face.
We are excited to be working with Spare Change News!
We will be focusing our efforts on providing education and resources to existing and future vendors to support them as small business owners.
The core part of our project will be collecting and sharing information regarding legal issues inherent in running a small business, including what it means to be the sole proprietor of a small business, tax obligations and how to meet them, how public benefits might be impacted by small business ownership and tips on banking services.
We will also include a section about local rules impacting how and where vendors can sell papers.
In addition to the business-oriented core of our work, we plan to identify service providers and resources that are available to help vendors confront legal obstacles that are not business-related, such as housing discrimination, criminal record expungement and mental health services, to name a few.
This aspect of the project will be less in-depth but will hopefully help to raise awareness and facilitate access to these services and resources for the vendors.
We will create a comprehensive, user-friendly reference guide that can be distributed to vendors in the future. We will present the guide to vendors in April, highlighting some of the key information and resources it contains.
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