yvens Alex saintil 🇭🇹

This is Jerome Cotton, a vendor with the Denver Voice, an organization with a mission to “facilitate a dialogue addressing the roots of homelessness by telling stories of people whose lives are impacted by poverty and homelessness and to offer economic, educational, and empowerment opportunities for the impoverished community.” Venders earn a portion of every paper sold.
 
I met Jerome in 2021, at the Auraria campus light-rail station. His bubbly-personality and smile were hard to miss. Also, his hat was fire! We talked about his Chicago Bulls hat and what bought him to Denver. I remember him saying the people were good here and that he has two brothers who are also vendors. Years earlier, I met his brother John Alexander, an amazing Artist, and now Peer Coach for the Voice. Like Jerome, John is kind and soft spoken. There were days that I didn’t have cash for a paper, but I never left an interaction with John emptyhanded.
 
You can find vendors like Jerome and John all over Denver. These days, many have Venmo accounts so you can support directly. You can also support the Voice and their mission here:

 https://www.denvervoice.org/donate

There are too many factors that contribute to homelessness. However, it is imperative we address the elephant in the room, which is America’s history of economic inequalities and discrimination—based on race and class. Black, Native American, Hispanic, and Asian people continue to live in poverty at disproportional rates compared to white-Americans. Of the 13.6 percent of Black people in the United States, 21.7 are living below the poverty threshold, second only to Native Americans, who make up 1.3 percent of the population but with an unacceptable 25.5 percent living below the poverty threshold.
 
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/RHI225221#RHI225221
 
https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/poverty-rate-by-raceethnicity/?currentTimeframe=0&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D
 
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