Category: Voices from the Streets

When I came out to my parents a long time ago I was already out of the house, living on my own 3,000 miles away. I was worried about what the conversation would be—how I would actually say it, what they would say, how the conversation would end. But I also was fairly sure that…

I was late to graduation, just like I was late for everything. I was flying down the right-hand lane on South Livingston Ave. doing close to 90 miles an hour in my 1958 Plymouth Belvidere convertible top-down when I heard a police car hit the wailers and saw the lights in my rearview mirror. I…

“I don’t know exactly what happened to drive that young man in Aurora to shoot those people, but I do know that many people like him suffer while undiagnosed and untreated,” said Jess Shatkin, an associate professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at New York University. July 20 marks one year since James Eagan Holmes…

Bank of American and the United Way Partner on Youth Homelessness Summit BOSTON, Mass.—The United Way, partnered with Bank of America, held the Boston Youth Homelessness Summit on Thursday, June 20. The audience included members from prominent organizations like Youth on Fire and Bridge Over Troubled Waters, alongside a few private companies. The summit was…

George Orwell famously quipped, “Journalism is printing what somebody else does not want printed; everything else is public relations.” When most of us read that, we think of muckrakers uncovering bribes, criminality and corruption. Images of Woodward and Bernstein meeting with Deep Throat in dim alleyways spring instantly to mind. This is especially true after…

The other day I was going through my regular routine, watching and reading the news, when I came across an interesting little story about Red Robin, a fast-food establishment that had recent-ly pulled an ad of theirs from television and their website almost before it had time to sink in. Their latest commercial talked about…

There are an estimated 6,000 high school students in Massachusetts who are currently homeless, according to the state’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE). Thousands more are believed to be homeless and are not counted in DESE estimates because they have dropped out of school. Of those homeless youth, a disproportionate number—upwards of 40…

Water is the blood of the Earth. As the industrial age of humankind has developed, ecological devastation has taken place. How many of us go to the ocean for rest, sit on the beach and listen to the waves roll in to bring peace to our spirits? We have love affairs with the ocean, wilderness…

The paper you hold in your hands has a long, proud history. I am honored to be a part of it as interim editor-in-chief. Founded in 1992, SPARE CHANGE NEWS is the oldest continuously published street newspaper in the country. Over the past 21 years, it has never missed an issue. Most impressively, its model…