For the last five months, I have been volunteering with an organization called Pivot Legal in the Downtown Eastside (DTES) neighbourhood of Vancouver. Pivot is dedicated towards improving the lives of residents in this low-income neighbourhood by implementing social change on many levels of society.⁽¹⁾ As part of this aim, they operate a project called Megaphone, which is a micro-enterprise streetpaper which they sell to DTES residents.⁽²⁾ In turn, these “vendors” would sell Megaphone to members of the general public for a profit. During my time volunteering, one of my tasks was to manage the sale of Megaphone papers to the vendors. As such, I was able to observe this program over a prolonged period of time and gain a sense of how this micro-enterprise was able to contribute to a sense of belonging, identity, and community for residents of the DTES.

For a neighbourhood where many struggle to make ends meet, the Megaphone program provided an important source of income for the provision of basic necessities. Our vendors are generally unemployed, so this formed a significant part of their subsistence. Additionally, being able to play an active part in earning their own income (by selling papers, building relationships with customers, etc.) often cultivated a sense of pride and self-worth. I spoke to several vendors who spoke positively about being able to “run” their own micro-enterprise, how selling papers gave them something valuable to do with their time and allowed them to subvert stereotypical, discriminatory notions of the “lazy” unemployed. Thus, Megaphone was able to contribute to the perceived self-worth of DTES residents.

Megaphone also serves as a vehicle for the communal identity of the DTES. The fact that most of the contributors to this paper are residents from the DTES, including vendors themselves, means that it is a platform for airing ideas about what the DTES actually is, what living here actually means to its residents. This is reflected in countless articles, interviews, and op-eds concerned with the culture, achievements, and general self-conception of the DTES community. Through Megaphone, residents were able to cultivate and propagate a narrative that valorized the day-to-day efforts of the DTES community to survive and to fight for its own rights in wider society. In a media culture that generally views the DTES in the negative – as a problem, a dangerous place, an aesthetic blight – Megaphone is an opportunity for locals to recast their community in a better light, to form a distinct self-identity that people could feel attachment and belonging to. Examples of this include articles chronicling the fight against gentrification, the campaign against abusive landlords, communal festivities, and the organization of art and photography contests.

By providing a source of income for its vendors and by serving as a platform for the sharing of ideas, Pivot’s Megaphone program helps people in the DTES to build a positive social identity both at the individual and communal levels. It is a great example of a grassroots-level initiative that implements positive social change in a way that reflects the needs and local sensibilities of the community which it serves.

1)      “About.” Pivot Legal Society. N.p., n.d. Web. 09 Sept. 2014. <http://www.pivotlegal.org/about>.
A link to Pivot’s website describing their mission statement and work in greater detail.

2)      “Hope in Shadows.” Pivot Legal Society. N.p., n.d. Web. 09 Sept. 2014. <http://www.pivotlegal.org/hope_in_shadows>.
Refer to the “Vendor Program” section to learn more about the Megaphone project.