Author: Andrew Warburton
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SOBER GRID: A smartphone app for the recovery community
It’s the day after Sober Grid was released and the new geo-social mobile app’s headquarters in Boston’s Back Bay is abuzz with excitement. “You wouldn’t believe the response we’ve had so far,” emotes Beau Mann, the 33-year-old creator of Sober Grid. “We’ve already had a few thousand downloads and the responses are through the roof.”…
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LAST WORD: Larry Thomas
Larry Thomas sells Spare Change News in one of Boston’s most bustling spots: outside of the 7-Eleven on Washington Street in Downtown Crossing, across from the Old South Meeting House. The downtown crowd is a colorful blend of Freedom Trail tourists, wealthy residents from the local high rises and groups of homeless people who mingle…
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LAST WORD: Beatrice Bell
It’s the morning of Good Friday at Spare Change News, and Beatrice Bell, one of the newspaper’s longest-serving reporters, is telling me an amazing story. At the age of seven, after a terrible asthma attack, she found herself having one of those life-changing experiences that are called, in the literature, “near-death.” For three days, which…
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LAST WORD: Mark G.
Selling Spare Change News provides an obvious financial reward for the newspaper’s homeless, formerly homeless or financially strained vendors. But for some, the reward has an extra therapeutic dimension, which proves beneficial in their transition from the streets, as the story of this week’s profiled vendor, Mark G., makes clear. Anyone who’s experienced addiction to…
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LAST WORD: Tommy D.
Tommy D. has fantastically blue eyes. Outside the Spare Change News headquarters, in the bright sunshine, it’s a little hard to tell exactly whether they’re blue, green or a mixture of both. When I mention how amazing they are, he replies jokingly that it must be something to do with his mixed Cuban/Italian ancestry. The…
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LAST WORD: Joe M.
One of Joe M.’s earliest memories is of jumping into bed at night and his mother saying, “Quiet, I’m praying.” Joe always respected his mother. Telling me about her now, he laughs at the little quirks in her character—for instance, the fact that she would always make Joe and his sisters go to church on…
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LAST WORD: SCN vendor Jon Denning
If you’ve ever passed through Harvard Square on a national holiday, you may have noticed a Spare Change News vendor in his early 20s carrying a holiday-inspired, cardboard sign. That’s Jon Denning. When we posted a picture of Denning with his last sign on the Spare Change News Facebook page—a message inspired by Martin Luther…
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LAST WORD: Algia Benjamin
Alabama in the early 1960s wasn’t the easiest place for an African-American woman to raise 10 children, but Algia Benjamin’s mother did just that—until they left for Boston in 1966. Growing up during the Civil Rights movement when segregation was still in place, Benjamin remembers his mother being so afraid that she sometimes felt reluctant…