The Big Issue: Jobs, Not Begging

“What the Hell Is the Big Issue?” asked a teaser line on the cover of a new monthly that appeared on L.A. streets in April.

Those who bought copies for $1 from homeless vendors learned that it was an alternative publication whose mission was to advocate for social change and to provide income for the vendors, who would keep 60 cents of every dollar.

Launched in 1991 in Great Britain, the Big Issue was such a success that it expanded throughout the U.K. and to Australia and South Africa. Los Angeles was chosen for its American start-up.

So how have things worked out?

It didn’t take long, says co-founder John Bird, to realize that Los Angeles is not London, “where there’s been kind of a tradition of selling things on the streets.” What we didn’t understand is that if you’re standing on the street selling things in L.A., you’re labeled as a failure.”

The vendors would stick around only a few weeks, he adds, “and then they would disappear. All we were doing was just being a stopgap, and that was not the philosophy of the Big Issue.”

It was time to regroup.

“After really banging our heads against the wall,” Bird says, “we decided we would try free distribution and employ people to distribute it in teams. Miraculously, it worked.” Today, five people are paid $7 an hour to take the magazine to 950 distribution points citywide and to work in the office. Circulation is around 50,000.

The Big Issue, headquartered in Venice, has shifted its bottom-line focus to advertising revenue from companies that are into “ethical consumerism.” It counts among its advertisers Levi-Strauss and the Body Shop, whose chairman, Gordon Roddick, originally bankrolled the Big Issue in England.

Bird knew there had to be a big change for the Big Issue when his vendors began telling him it was easier to beg than to sell on the streets. “Panhandling is not so frowned upon in Los Angeles” as in other cities of the world, “and I think people are a bit more generous than one is led to believe. They’d rather give them something” than buy the paper from them.

Bird, a self-described social businessman, decided the Big Issue would operate in a “uniquely American way.”

The magazine is not yet in the black, but Bird anticipates it “breaking even” by spring, at which time he hopes, too, it will be a fortnightly able to provide more jobs. “I’m not discouraged,” he says, even though “everything’s going to take us a year longer than we thought.”

Meanwhile, says editor Cara Solomon, writers are being paid 25 cents a word for articles that “kind of keep that strain of promoting artistic phenomena and news stories not reported in the mainstream media.”