Bird’s words
The Big Issue created its own children. First it created itself and then it created imitations of itself.
Or, more accurately, you could say that Street News of New York created itself in 1989 as the world’s first street paper. And then, inspired by its example, we created The Big Issue, which came into being in 1991.
The Big Issue soon became a London example of what could be done for homeless people if you narrowed the field of effort. If you said such things as “helping the homeless to help themselves”. Or “coming up from the streets”. Or “a crime prevention programme” (street living and poverty providing a fecund backdrop for surviving by wrongdoing).
Or if you narrowed the field of vision, so to speak, to giving people an exit from the intolerable burden of how to survive when there are thousands of people like you filling the streets of London.
Give homeless people the chance of becoming stable so that change in their lives becomes possible.
I was reminded of The Big Issue inventing its own children when I heard about The Beautiful Game launched on Netflix last month. An inspiring story of homeless people reaching out and away from street life through football. Towards something more loaded with chances to turn skills nurtured in poverty into something that could lift you out of poverty.
Not long after The Big Issue was founded we were helping people from Europe and America imitate us as once we imitated Street News. The Big Issue corralled its children at various points and out of this grew the International Network of Street Papers, led by Big Issue’s Tessa Swithinbank, former wife of yours truly.
Hearing about The Beautiful Game reminded me of those early days when we were helping to produce so many imitators of ourselves, including the two who met at a Network of Street Papers conference who, instead of going to bed, sat up drinking all night and came up with that beautiful invention The Homeless World Cup.
I like to use the rather obscure word ‘fecund’, meaning fruitful, in describing the enormous ‘fecundity’ – fruitfulness – of The Big Issue and its founding model Street News. And to speak of how Gordon Roddick, co-founder of The Body Shop, inspired and funded the creation of The Big Issue.
And how out of this came hundreds of
