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| Subject: Thursday, 17 September 1992 1st edition Big Issue UK | |
Author: Bad==Bad Guy issue 442 Friday 27/9/2013 to Thursday 10/10/2013 | [ Next Thread |
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] Date Posted: 18:06:48 10/11/13 Fri From and including: Thursday, 17 September 1992 To and including: Friday, 11 October 2013 Result: 7695 days It is 7695 days from the start date to the end date, end date included Or 21 years, 25 days including the end date Alternative time units 7695 days can be converted to one of these units: ■664,848,000 seconds ■11,080,800 minutes ■184,680 hours ■7695 days ■1099 weeks (rounded down) The Big Issue celebrates its 18th birthday Exactly 18 years on from the launch of the Big Issue, this radical street paper is still offering a vital lifeline for homeless people Share 0 inShare0 Ros Wynne-Jones The Guardian, Friday 18 September 2009 'The Big Issue is the only one that has trusted me with a job' . . . Big Issue vendor Billie Bickley. Photograph: Graham Turner Billie Bickley is at her pitch in Covent Garden, grinning at her dog Solo. It is 9.30 on a bright, fresh morning, and she has already sold two-dozen Big Issues to a steady flow of regular customers. Banter streams from her mouth, interspersed by commands that control Solo's ball-chasing acrobatics. "Is that coffee for me?" she calls to a woman hurrying out through the doors of Pret A Manger. "Billie's a legend round here," says the woman, Melissa Bacon, 33, a market researcher who works nearby. "She's always got a smile." She hands Billie her coffee. "We're all very proud of her." You could say that Bickley sells outside Pret A Manger, but locals know it's the other way round. "Billie attracts customers to Pret," one of the waitresses says. "She knows everyone by name. While they're there talking to Billie, they decide to get a coffee." At one point, Pret offered Bickley a job – but there was a problem. "I've got 96 convictions," she says, looking up sheepishly. "I didn't know until they looked at my record. I thought maybe I had 30 or something." She warms her hands on her coffee. "I'm 36, and for 17 years I was addicted to heroin. Nearly half my life. The Big Issue's the only one that's trusted me with a job." It is 18 years this week since Gordon Roddick, who with his wife Anita ran the Body Shop, came up with the idea for a UK street paper. In 1991, at the height of the homelessness crisis, Roddick had seen a street paper on sale in New York, where he was looking at premises for the Body Shop. "Near Grand Central Station, I passed a tall, black homeless guy who was selling a newspaper," Roddick remembers. "I was immediately interested in the interaction with his customers. He was laughing and joking. He wasn't invisible like the homeless people on the streets of London." The only thing that troubled Roddick was that homeless people were being given that paper for free. A pioneer of social business, he thought selling it to the homeless instead might end what he saw as a disempowering and dehumanising cycle of charity. He came back inspired, and asked the Body Shop Foundation to look into the idea of a street paper. "They came back saying 'it's too dangerous – there's an insurance issue, the police won't let you, the local authorities won't let you . . .' I thought to hell with it." But instead of abandoning the idea, Roddick called up his old friend John Bird, an ex-rough sleeper, ex-offender and poet he had met when they drank in the same Edinburgh pub 20 years earlier. "John was the ideal person," Roddick says. "He'd worked in the printing industry. He'd been on the streets. He was very bright. He certainly wouldn't listen to what anyone would tell him he couldn't do." Roddick remembers with a laugh how his late wife and John used to fight. "I liked it," he says, "it gave me some peace. If a notion was important enough, John and Anita were very similar in their entire disregard for other people as they pushed it through. I never had that quality and I admired it." Today, despite the recession, circulation is holding steady with a weekly sale of 147,000 copies, offering legitimate self-employment to 2,500 people in the UK. It is not a charity handout; vendors buy the magazine for 75p and sell it for £1.50. "I hate hearing that people have given money and not taken the magazine," Roddick says. "I always give the vendor exactly £1.50, or ask for the change. I suspect John does exactly the same." Bickley was on the streets four years before the Big Issue existed, escaping a violent home at 14 for London. "I got the first train from Coventry, got off at King's Cross and I've been here ever since," she says. Within her first week of living on the street, she was befriended by a homeless couple who sold heroin. "The first time I took it was 17 June 1987, my 15th birthday. I kept on taking it for 17 years." By the time Bickley was 21, she was also addicted to crack cocaine. "I remember walking through King's Cross one day," she says. "Crack had just come out, and the dealers were hiding the drugs in their mouths. Right next to me, this guy's head gets blown off in the street by another dealer. There was blood all over my face – but I didn't care, I just wanted the crack that had been blown out of his mouth. I was picking up all the rocks off the street out of the blood and guts." An odd Bird Sitting in a cafe in King's Cross, the centre of Bickley's world for 17 years, Bird says he initially refused the job Roddick offered him. "I said no because I wasn't the slightest bit interested in charity." He only agreed to look into it because Roddick offered him £100 a day, "and I needed to put food on the table for my family. "Gordon is a maverick giver," Bird goes on. "Who else would have given a 45-year-old social failure a chance?" But the more Bird spoke to homeless people and to the police, the more he became convinced the Big Issue could work. "I suddenly realised this wasn't charity and it could actually do something. I wrote a report in six weeks." He laughs. "Most of it was bollocks." In the early days, Bird employed friends, family and some people he had met in a cafe. "Most of them were people who knew nothing about papers." The first issue he describes as like "a bad student magazine", and the first person he met selling the fledgling Big Issue was rolling drunk. "It was awful," Bird, now 54, says. "He said I was exploiting the homeless. I said, 'Well, why are you doing it then'? And he said, 'I'm doing it for my baby in Liverpool.' I said, 'Well, it sounds like you need me and I need you then.'" Bird shakes his head. "There's never been any love lost between me and the homeless. People knew I was ex-homeless, an ex-offender. They'd say, 'You've gone to the other side.' They abused me because they had to pay for the paper. It was invigorating." That first Christmas, the Big Issue held a party for its vendors in the crypt of St-Martin-in-the-Fields. "My brother brought in 400 cans of Special Brew," Bird remembers. "It was the unbelievably maddest office Christmas party I've ever been to. It took seven hours to get everyone out of the crypt. St Martin's said we were an embarrassment to anybody who wanted to help the homeless." The magazine was soon losing £25,000 a month of Body Shop Foundation money. "Gordon put a gun to my head," Bird recalls. "He said, you've got three months to break even. I cut jobs, put the price to the vendor up, moved it from monthly to fortnightly and told everyone to work twice as hard. We went from losing £25,000 a month to £1,000 profit." Today there is also the Big Issue Foundation, which gives support and advice to vendors; versions of the magazine are sold from Australia to Japan, South Africa to Namibia. And its founders are still pushing the original model forward with Big Issue Invest – a new social enterprise investment fund that finances social businesses. At its head office in Vauxhall, south London, an editorial meeting is discussing the magazine's sought-after interview with Leona Lewis, ethical food, and the shocking death of a vendor in Regent Street, impaled on glass from a shop window. The story has been reported nationally in lurid detail, but reporters here are determined to investigate the story properly. "Our whole mission is about the vendor," says the editor, Charles Howgego. "We have to see the world through the eyes of someone who's got nowhere to sleep at night. Everybody on the editorial team knows vendors personally, and everyone knows what they go through. That's a very strong motivation." A few years ago, the Guardian ran a story by a former Big Issue deputy editor, Adam MacQueen, suggesting Bird might now be its "biggest problem" – but 38-year-old Howgego says he remains "the soul of the organisation". Below the editorial floor is the distribution office, where vendors collect magazines and drop in for advice and support. It often receives complaints about illegal vendors who aren't employed by the organisation, but are begging with a single copy. Genuine vendors sign up to a code of conduct, and are easily recognisable with a badge clearly on display. "People sometimes complain that they've seen a person selling who isn't homeless," says Paul Joseph, the distribution manager. "But we don't sack vulnerable people just because they've become housed. Exiting homelessness can be a long, drawn-out process." 'I haven't been in jail since I started selling the paper' In Covent Garden, Billie Bickley introduces one of her star customers, Nick Paris, 49, who works nearby in investment sales and has just done the Big Issue's London to Paris bike ride. "He made £5k, the top fundraiser," she says. "He's invested in me, he says." Bickley started selling the Big Issue a decade ago. "I haven't been in jail since," she says. "Not once. After 96 convictions, it's been my life saver." Eighteen years on, though, Bird wishes the Big Issue was no longer necessary. "There has been an improvement," he says. "This government chose to take responsibility for street homelessness. But the problem now is a different one – institutionalised homelessness. "Now we need to dismantle homelessness. You can't just take a really fucked-up person and say, here's a sink and phone and a place to watch TV, and a couple of hours counselling a week. It's like trying to do an organ transplant with a knife and fork. You need more than knives, forks, walls and windows to sort out the damage done to people on the streets." Yesterday, Bickley was one of four vendors chosen to visit Downing Street to mark the Big Issue's 18th birthday. She sold a copy to Gordon Brown within minutes. This summer, she has also been to the Big Chill to sell the festival programme on site. "I don't know if I'd go again," she says, packing up for the day. "The toilets were filthy." Now that she's living in a proper home with her partner Aden, a cleaner at the hostel she had been staying in, Bickley says she has become a cleanliness freak, constantly cleaning and tidying. She grins lopsidedly at her dog. "House proud, you could say." Sign up for the Society briefing email Stay on top of the latest policy announcements, legislation and keep ahead of current thinking. Sign up for the Society briefing email Print this Share Contact us Send to a friend Sender's name Recipient's email address Your IP address will be logged Share Short link for this page: http://gu.com/p/2apgy StumbleUpon Tumblr Digg Google Bookmarks del.icio.us livejournal Contact us Contact the Society editor society@theguardian.com Report errors or inaccuracies: reader@theguardian.com Letters for publication should be sent to: letters@theguardian.com If you need help using the site: userhelp@theguardian.com Call the main Guardian and Observer switchboard: +44 (0)20 3353 2000 Advertising guide License/buy our content Article history About this article The Big Issue celebrates its 18th birthday This article appeared on p10 of the G2 section of the Guardian on Friday 18 September 2009. It was published on the Guardian website at 09.05 EST on Friday 18 September 2009. It was last modified at 03.01 EST on Thursday 11 July 2013. Society Homelessness · Social exclusion · Social enterprises UK news Media The Big Issue More features In pictures: Happy 18th, Big Issue It is 18 years since Gordon Roddick had the idea for a UK street paper. Despite rejections he pursued his plan, and so, The Big Issue was born. Share inShare What's this? More from the Guardian Middle-class people are the benefit fraudsters it's OK to like 09 Oct 2013 Madonna: I was raped at knifepoint 05 Oct 2013 Toe gussets: breaking the ultimate fashion taboo 09 Oct 2013 Red Cross warning on recovery: statistics hide the UK's bottom line 10 Oct 2013 Same-sex marriage: federal goverment will take ACT law to the high court 10 Oct 2013 [?] What's this? 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But is it a viable way to reduce inequality and revolutionise labour relations? 9 Oct 2013 From the archive, 9 October 1940: Hot meals for Londoners hit by the blitz 7 Oct 2013 More benefit sanctions means more suffering for those who live on the edge 4 Oct 2013 London housing crisis: nastiness, stupidity and the benefits cap Rough sleepers find their dream jobs as top chefs 29 Sep 2013 A London hotel is in line for an award for its scheme to help the homeless train as five-star cooks [ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ] |
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Author: Olivia Newton John Princess Di Mag issue 441==Black Friday Greenpeace13/9==to Thursday 26/9/2013 [ Edit | View ] |
Date Posted: 01:33:19 10/13/13 Sun |
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