Good afternoon, everybody.
Spare Change papers for sale.
With these papers, we help the homeless, we help the hunger.
It also helps me out.
Spare Change News has vendors sell the paper,
and our vendors are individuals who are either housing insecure
or they're homeless.
And one of the things that was very apparent to us
is they had many legal questions and they
did not have resources.
I think everybody's going to grab some [INAUDIBLE]..
You want one?
Of course.
[INAUDIBLE]
These are yours to keep.
We're all students at the Harvard Law School
Transactional Law Clinics and part of the Community Enterprise
Project.
We wanted to introduce you to this legal resource
that we've been working on putting together for you.
If you want to open it up and look at the table of contents
on pages 2 and 3--
After talking with Katherine and meeting with her
and learning a little bit about Spare Change News,
we began to develop a guide that would help those Spare Change
News vendors who are selling in the Boston metropolitan area.
Each of you, when you're doing business on your own,
selling Spare Change newspapers, you're running a business.
You're sole proprietor.
We have a lot of information about personal and business
finance, which includes taxes--
Because we are a transactional law clinic,
we had to approach the vendors' needs
from a business-focused perspective.
But we were aware of the fact that those vendors also
face a lot of issues outside of their work
with Spare Change News.
So part of the resources that we included in the guide
is a reference to other service providers and organizations
in the Boston-Cambridge area that they
might be able to turn to for help with different issues.
I can't explain how hard it is when you see these vendors, who
really are trying to improve their lives,
to see them feel so afraid that, if they make one mistake,
they're going to be homeless again,
or some terrible consequence is going to happen.
Feeling like they have you guys on their side, I think,
is just outstanding, because they feel like, well,
Harvard Law has our back now.
I was excited for it, because it would--
I thought it would benefit us greatly,
so I loved working with these guys.
It was a good experience.
Good experience.
The Spare Change News partnership
was actually proposed by a couple of students a year
or so ago, who submitted a proposal
at the end of the semester that, hey, I
think this would be a really great project for us
to work on.
There are all sorts of clients that students
will have a mix of being exposed to
over the course of a semester.
The students are able to give them
personalized one-on-one attention
with their supervising attorney.
And it really touches the students
that they've had the ability to make
an impact on someone's life.
I've been in Boston for three years,
and Spare Change really is, I think, a Boston institution.
You see the vendors everywhere if you live in this area.
And it was such a privilege to actually get
to know those people on a personal basis.
Through the discussions, you just
realize that these are some of the more
entrepreneurial individuals that I've ever encountered.
They have goals, they have dreams, they have aspirations.
And all they need is just a little bit,
a tiny bit, of hope.
Hey, how are you doing?
What's going on?
Not much.
[INAUDIBLE] papers.
My name is Clifton Fitzgerald.
And I'm originally from Cambridge,
but I've moved around a lot from Boston on and on.
I like being outdoors a lot.
I used to hold a sign, and I had low self-esteem just holding
that sign.
And when I started working with this paper,
knowing it's a vendor license, knowing I'm paying taxes,
it's a job, I feel a lot better.
We are introducing a new program this summer called
our Young Entrepreneur Program.
And we are really, really excited to have
this manual as a resource.
We're hoping that this will help younger individuals,
specifically in the 18 to 24 age group, who didn't really
have a lot of opportunities to network
or educational opportunities, to think about work, especially
for those who are pretty ambitious outside of the
low-wage service job sector.
We're always looking to let people
know that we exist out in the area,
so that they can bring to us their ideas, their needs.
And we try to be responsive to wherever the needs are.
We try to be there.
[PIANO MUSIC PLAYING]
Spare Change papers for sale.
Hey, how you doing?
I'm hanging in there.
Spare Change papers for sale.