It was 2008 when Raelene Johnson first heard about The Denver Voice.
She was living under a bridge in Boulder. She had been living on the streets for nearly four decades, since she first left her family’s home in the city as a teenager. She was at a resource center when she saw the advertisement that changed her life.
“It said: ‘Be your own boss. Work your own hours.’ I asked what it meant, and I was told about the newspaper,” she remembered.
The Denver Voice is a “street newspaper.” It’s sold on city streets by people experiencing poverty and homelessness — an accessible way to make money and build relationships. It has provided community and income for hundreds of people, and its vendors are a familiar sight around the Denver metro — but all that is under threat as the nonprofit faces a major financial crisis.
Johnson started out as a vendor, which helped her get off the streets, and found a community in the organization. Before long, she was getting paid to write, too, about her experience recovering from addiction and homelessness.
“I'm over 16 years clean of a 30-year crack cocaine addiction because of the paper,” she told us. “It was the paper giving me a job opportunity, to where I was able to rent a room.”
The Voice has been in financial trouble for years, but its future was thrown up in the air last week, when its fifth executive director in three years quit. The organization’s bank account hit zero and paychecks stopped coming. On Friday, the paper posted on Facebook that it would be suspending operations for at least a month.
But there are still a lot of people, Johnson included, who say they love and need this publication. They’ve pledged to find a way to rescue it.
“If this paper don't go back up, I'll be on Folsom and Canyon [in Boulder], sitting right there with a sign that will say, ‘Beat cancer. Lost job. Anything helps,’” Johnson said.
This crisis for the Denver Voice has been simmering for a few years.
The Voice launched in 1996 as a “grassroots newspaper” that was “by homeless people for homeless people.” In those early days, it included everything from muckraking reporting on public housing to personal ads, like one in 1996 that read: “Mom, we came to Denver looking for you. Please call us. We love you.”
Its earliest editions featured a message on the front page, “donations accepted,” but that soon morphed into a suggested price for the paper. In 2000, it was $1. Today, it’s $2.
Elisabeth Monaghan, the Voice’s editor for the last five years, said buyers today usually give $5 for a copy, though they can pay whatever they want.
With each sale, 50 cents goes back to the organization to cover production costs. The rest goes to the vendors, most of whom are currently homeless. Johnson said she can make as much as $200 selling papers at a weekly Boulder farmer’s market. The organization itself relies on grants to fund most of its operations.
The Voice also went on hiatus back in 2006,when finances got tight, but was soon saved when local businessman Rick Barnes offered money and office space to support its mission. It nearly closed again in 2010 because of the Great Recession.
“We've been through some very difficult financial times. We've been through a period where it was, ‘Do we have to shut the doors?’ And we made it through that time,” Giles Clasen, a former Denver Voice board president and longtime contributor, told us. “I don't know what's going to happen here.”
The year 2022 presented extra difficulty, Clasen and Monaghan said. Early that year, a beloved contributor died after he lost housing. Then, a trusted executive director left for another job. They went months without anyone at the helm, and the paper has dealt with several more leadership changes since.
“The pandemic was really rough, and there was some poor leadership decisions, and we lost some funders — and we really have not been able to recover from that,” current board president and former contributor Robert Davis told us. “Our bank account is at zero, and we are in between grant cycles and haven’t been able to land one yet.”
The October issue has been written, Monaghan said, but it probably won’t go to the press.
The paper’s finances and operations have faced trouble for the last few years. Grants and contributions have declined every year since 2020, recently hitting their lowest level since 2016, according to tax documents. While the paper had about 150 regular vendors before the pandemic, it’s down to 50 or fewer today, staff said.
The Voice currently prints about 3,500 copies per month.
The paper’s latest nonprofit filings indicate it brought in about $200,000 of revenue in 2023, of which $135,000 came from contributions and grants. It had almost no savings or other assets besides its dwindling bank account.
Expenses for that year totaled $277,000, of which about $129,000 in total went to compensation for three staffers. About $17,400 was spent on printing and publication, and about $22,000 went to the nonprofit’s work program.
The organization spent the rest of the money on things like rent; work from freelancers and contractors, including people experiencing homelessness; grant writing; fundraising events; office expenses; and other standard nonprofit spending categories.
The situation is dire, but there’s energy to save the Voice.
The paper’s board still exists, for now, Davis said. He doesn’t see this moment as an ending.
“We’ve hit the pause button, but we know we can’t hit the pause button for long,” he told us.
The Voice’s vendors, at least, are fired up to keep it going. Last Friday, Monaghan and Clasen informed vendors, including Johnson, that the paper might close for good. A dozen of them came to visit the Voice’s Santa Fe Drive office that day. Each of them, Clasen said, affirmed their commitment to the cause.
“They heard, ‘You're closing down,’ and it went in one ear and came out the other ear as, ‘F*** no, we're going to raise some money,’” he said.
Davis said the board hasn’t met since things became so dire, and he’s not sure if a unified fundraising campaign to save the organization will emerge. They are waiting to hear whether any pending grant applications might work out.
In the meantime, Clasen and Monaghan said they’ve already told their networks that the paper needs help. Johnson said she’s been telling all of her customers to spread the word.
They’re all hoping the Denver Voice gets a rebirth, both in terms of funding and leadership. It’s a serious matter for people like Johnson, who’ve relied on it for survival and self-expression. Whatever happens, she said, the paper has already offered her a lot of that over the years.
“The story of the Denver Voice isn't that we ran out of money. The story of the Denver Voice is that, for 27 years, we were a place where people experiencing homelessness could come and find an environment that was welcoming and excited to have them,” Clasen told us Saturday.
He continued: “And that for 27 years, we provided people a means to create an income for themselves when no one else would hire them. For 27 years, we offered food and water and —”
“Socks,” Monaghan interjected.
“And socks,” Clasen echoed. “And recognition.”
Andrew Kenney contributed reporting.
