Spare Change News

Category: Profiles

  • Daily Table: An Innovative Approach to Accessing Healthy Food at the Grocery Store

    In the years after his 2012 retirement, Doug Rauch began to formulate a plan for a grocery store with healthy food options sold at a reasonable price. Three years later, in 2015, the former president of Trader Joe’s opened Daily Table, a non-profit retail grocery store, in Dorchester. In 2018, a second location opened in…

  • Horace Seldon: Fighting Injustice, Celebrating Civil Disobedience

    Horace Seldon: Fighting Injustice, Celebrating Civil Disobedience

    Horace Seldon was happily lying on his back, waving his hands and feet in the air the first time Shay Stewart-Bouley saw him. Shay was just starting out as Executive Director of Community Change, Inc., the anti-racism non-profit Horace founded in 1968, and she was at the organization’s forty-fifth anniversary party. It also happened to…

  • Bill Murray chats about his late-career dive into music

    Bill Murray chats about his late-career dive into music

    Bill Murray and Jan Vogler Bill Murray is on the road. Calling from Charlotte, North Carolina, where it’s well after midnight, he and classical cellist Jan Vogler are winding down after a performance on their unusual tour, which sees the famously quirky movie star singing – yes, singing – and reciting literature with a chamber…

  • Hari Kondabolu Brings Humor and Hope to the Trump Era

    Hari Kondabolu Brings Humor and Hope to the Trump Era

    Photo Credit: Yoon Kim During the days of the Trump presidency, stand up comedy has, in many ways, become a  tool to comprehend our political frustrations as much as it has been an escape from them — and one comedian we can thank is Hari Kondabolu. It’s business as usual for the Queens, New York,…

  • Vendor Fred Boykin: Life in Dorchester, life with cancer

    This is for all the victims of the world, all the people like me: we were not born with cancer, but it still chose us. You can be young or old, it still picks you. I had lung cancer at first, at the end of 2015. The hospital, Boston Medical Center, wanted to take a…

  • Who-ray for her

    Who-ray for her

    The Doctor (JODIE WHITTAKER) – (C) BBC – Photographer: Steve Schofield There aren’t many roles on UK television that garner the kind of media attention that Jodie Whittaker received last year, when it was announced that she would be replacing Peter Capaldi to play the time-travelling alien called the Doctor in BBC’s long running science…

  • Cecile Richards on Planned Parenthood

    Cecile Richards on Planned Parenthood

    It started with a relatively small action: A black felt armband worn to her Texas grade school as part of a nationwide protest against the Vietnam War. Cecile Richards was only 13 at the time, and it was her first big leap into the resistance. As a result of her act of rebellion, she was…

  • Q&A with Tray Johns, Advocate for Incarcerated Women

    Tray Johns is head of Fedfam4life, a sisterhood to restore incarcerated women and former prisoners, focusing on women of color and LGBT women. Her knowledge of the law, her ability to stand up for her rights and for those of her sisters and brothers is astounding. It’s fitting, since as a child Johns dreamed of…

  • Insane Clown President: Matt Taibbi on Social Justice in the Age of Donald Trump

    Spare Change News was able to track down busy journalist and author Matt Taibbi to talk about President Trump’s potential impact on social justice, healthcare and homelessness. Taibbi also spoke about his new book, released in January, titled “Insane Clown President: Dispatches from the 2016 Circus”, which gathers his reporting for Rolling Stone during the…

  • From Homeless to Hopeful: One Woman’s Battle Against Addiction

    From Homeless to Hopeful: One Woman’s Battle Against Addiction

    In the back room of East Boston’s Meridian House, a long rectangular table is covered with blank paper. A group of about 20 people chat idly, sitting on all sides. Some have dyed hair and tattoos. Some speak in thick Boston accents. Some curse. Soon, they are quieted by a woman with bright pink hair…