But homeless people were more than just an excuse to salve your conscience, they could become dynamic and a force for good. The Big Issue would fight for the space to set them free from their supplicant position as extras in your journey through life.
But all of this felt like bragging words as the days slipped away and I mounted my early-morning bike and cycled to our tiny Big Issue office between two pubs on Richmond Green, five miles away from the streets of London’s West End where thousands of homeless people were about to rise from their troubled and broken slumbers.
I had agreed to enter this teeming mass and try to rescue as many hundreds as we could by giving them a street paper to sell that would give them money, dignity and a public that would talk to them, helping them away from the begging, the thieving, the selling their bodies or whatever the broken of society have to resort to in order to survive.
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Nothing was truly prepared. Vans yes, to deliver papers. A magazine yes, mostly written by people who cut their journalistic teeth on the first issue. As a printer and magazine publisher I had all my ducks in a row concerning the paper itself. But chaos and worries surrounded this D-Day Landing on the streets of Trafalgar Square and Covent Garden on a Monday morning too, too soon.
Not one of us had done this before. A team of 10 playing at change-making. A potpourri of people who had just left school or, though older, found it difficult to find a job. And me who talked fighting talk but was convinced that at the first blow I would be down and out.
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With one exception, other homelessness organisations preached against us. I was a second-hand car dealer who was going to MAKE the homeless buy a paper that they then sold on to the public. Turning the poor into retailers. The police were wary of us. The media thought we were a joke and played at guessing how long it would be before we shut up shop, our tails between our legs.
The homeless people themselves were deeply suspicious of us because they had always, always been given things for free. And now here’s this geezer, yes ex-homeless himself and, like themselves, a one-time frequent offender; here he was going from poacher to gamekeeper.
Fraudulence and imposter syndrome followed me into the pub and at home at night to bed. But you would never have known. My greatest strength 34 years ago was not that I was convinced we were about to revolutionise homelessness, but that I spoke and acted like a pirate who had all the ammunition and bravery to take on the enemies of the poor and win the bitter battle.
My mate Gordon Roddick was my trump card. He did not lecture me on how to build a team out of nothing and create a strategy. He smiled at me. Believed that the nervous boy he met 25 years earlier, skulking every time I saw a copper, was fit for purpose. But surely it was all going to go arse upwards, collapse like a wedding cake left out in the rain? Instead it faltered, it stumbled… and then blossomed. It grew nationwide, worldwide. It put out an investment business that supported people in poverty. It flourished as other homeless charities grew large and solid. It flourished in the marketplace. Street trade not street aid.
The glorious days of selling hundreds of thousands of Big Issues are behind us. We have big challenges. How do you run a social business when our vendors are often given money without people taking the paper? How do you sustain yourself in a climate where the mobile phone distances people from the streets around them? With ear plugs blasting out your own repertoire of sounds?
Fortunately there are still people who unplug their devices and engage with a vendor. But more often, money changes hands but papers are not taken.
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This is a new problem to chew on. So we innovate and reinvent; like Big Issue Recruit that endeavours to get people into work. We create an enormous digital presence. We carry on with Big Issue Invest to get poverty out of people’s lives.
All that fear I carried inside of me in our founding days is an object lesson: that doing big things in life can frighten you to death, but you’ve got to do them. The challenges of the future, the fact that we are street trade not street aid (though in a sense we are) will need a new business plan.
Happy Birthday, Big Issue. And to our vendors. And to you, dear reader, who have been with us on this journey.
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