6 GROUNDCOVER NEWS LIVING ARCHIVE JULY 25, 2025 Real Change is possible, starting small and thinking big “Real Change! Real Change!” exclaimed the man on the Seattle sidewalk as I passed through the supermarket doors. I was confused. Did he think I’d be giving him wooden nickels? Upon learning he was homeless and offering to sell me a newspaper, I eagerly traded my dollar for his paper and had an aha moment — this was a brilliant application of microenterprise here in the United States! Twenty years of working on solutions to global poverty familiarized me with microcredit projects of many forms. The Grameen bank became famous when it and Mohammed Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize, yet it was a Kenyan micro lender, Jamii Bora, that sprang to my mind. After a couple of years of lending money to the very poor so they could start their own small businesses, Jamii SUSAN BECKETT Publisher emeritus Bora experimented with offering beggars small items like ribbons they could sell instead of begging. It was immediately apparent that most people preferred selling to begging and many of them went on to become successful entrepreneurs. Joyce Wairimu eventually opened six businesses and now employs many of her former colleagues. Wilson Maina, once a thief, now owns four businesses. He scours the streets for boys like him and has convinced hundreds to get started in a business instead of stealing. In 1999 Jamii Bora started with loans to 50 beggars in one of the worst slums in Nairobi. By the end of 2007, they had 170,000 savers and 60,000 borrowers. Microcredit offers the poorest of the poor a chance at economic self-sufficiency. For many it is a path of redemption; an opportunity to overcome poor choices made or circumstances thrust upon them earlier in their lives. They have a saying at Jamii Bora: “We have fast climbers out of poverty and we have slow climbers, but everyone is a climber.” That’s my wish for this newspaper: that it provides an economic toe hold for our vendors to use in their climb, and the wisdom and awareness we as This year we're activating the archive If you’ve ever been to the Groundcover News office, you know that there is a treasure hidden on the back wall of our one room office: the 15-year-old print archive. Stacks of bundles of street newspapers so tall they nearly hit the ceiling. Annually we rearrange and reorganize, purging extras and making space for more papers to be added every two weeks. The first time I came to the basement of Bethlehem United Church of Christ I was stunned by the magnitude of it. So many editions, filled with even more timeless stories, perspectives and ideas. I wanted to read them all! And that was in 2018. Seven years later, new people are still learning about Groundcover every day. This might be someone’s first purchase and read of Groundcover News … that’s a lot of catching up to do. Even back when the plan for celebrating the 15th anniversary of Groundcover was still just a private brainstorming document on my Print is important, and it has staying power. From July 25, 2025 to July 3, 2026, Groundcover News will be publishing 26 outstanding pieces from our LINDSAY CALKA Publisher computer, "activating the archive" was top on the list. Multiple times a week, if not every day, we dive into the archive at the Groundcover News office. It might be to build upon the reporting of a local issue or happening, sometimes it's to respond to or reference an idea, to check in on a date of something or someone. Vendors will often want copies of the past pieces they authored to share with new customers and friends. archive. “From the archive — 15 years of news and solutions from the ground up” aims to uplift pieces that tell the story of Groundcover News, tell the stories of our vendors and writers, and provide narrative on the past 15 years of the homeless and low-income community of Washtenaw County. What things have changed for the better? The worse? What can we learn, or learn again, from the folks who’ve “been saying it this whole time …” If you can’t wait to see what we come up with, the entire digital archive is already accessible on our website, under the “Street News” tab. Soon, there will also be a catalog of all pieces published in all 247 issues of Groundcover, searchable by title, author and topic. That will be accessible under the "Groundcover 15" tab. Reading, organizing, categorizing, preserving and activating has been a group effort. Special shoutout to the students of U-M’s English 221 Fall 2024 and Winter 2025 classes, who under the direction of Professor John Buckley and archivist Mira Simonton-Chao, prepared this digital archive catalogue. We will be able to compensate the authors of these reprints, and afford the extra printing cost of the page expansion it necessitated, thanks to a mini-grant from the University Michigan’s Year of Democracy project. Glenn Gates, with recent help from Libby Chambers, has been a longtime guardian of the print archive, repurposing food pantry boxes and old, curbed shelves as it has grown over the years. Bella Martinez has put in hours converting the digital PDFs to raw text documents that we can input into upcoming editions. see ARCHIVE next page a community need to nurture their efforts. Originally published in the July/ first edition August 2010 edition of Groundcover News — the Groundcover. of
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