Several times a week I make a trip to my local Safeway in the U-District. Almost every time I visit, I encounter a friendly, even gregarious man outside the store, who greets every visitor with a hello and a question. "Spare a little change?"

The man's name is Edward McClain, and he isn't begging. He's working. Edward is one of some 250, often low-income, vendors of the bi-weekly newspaper Real Change.

For most people, Real Change is simply "the homeless paper." In the words of its Publisher Tim Harris, "The stereotype is...it's a paper by homeless people, for homeless people."

Nothing could be further from the truth. Founded ten years ago to both help the homeless financially while serving in advocacy capacity for the homeless and impoverished, Real Change currently has a paid readership of around 18,000 per bi-weekly issue. In February, the paper is planning to take the next big step forward: Real Change will become a weekly, and in response to what Harris characterizes as readers' "hung[er] for alternative media," Real Change will expand to "more broadly progressive coverage of issues."

"What we want," he put it simply, "is to become Seattle's best community newspaper."

The newspaper's office occupies a somewhat diminutive first-floor space not far from the corner of Second and Blanchard. The brightly lit windows feature various notes, posters and images of the newspaper's cover, and inside a burly cat can be found sitting next to the door.

In person, Harris is a man of measured words as he sits at his desk in the back office.

"What [people] expect to find in the paper are some sob stories about homeless people," he says. "Maybe some depressing advocacy articles on poverty issues, maybe some really crappy poetry that's well intentioned but still bad. That perception can be so strong that people can buy the paper and not actually open it because they've already decided that there isn't anything in it worth reading. What we've found is that once people start reading the newspaper they continue reading it because they find that it's a quality paper that writes about the issues they're concerned with."

For the last few years, poverty and homelessness have been threatening to overwhelm the already scarce resources allotted to help them here in Seattle. With unemployment rates higher than average due to the particularly sharp decline in the tech sector, the explosion of outsourcing and the burden of thousands of laid-off Boeing workers on Seattle's economic recovery, many people are at risk for homelessness. Add to that a dearth of affordable and low-income housing, and it is fair to say that Seattle is a bad place to be poor.

"I think that people do still think that most people are homeless because of bad decisions they've made," says Harris. "But it takes roughly twice the minimum wage to afford an average apartment in King County. You need to make about $14 an hour to be able to afford that, and by affordable I mean 30 percent of your income or so...And in real terms, the minimum wage hasn't increased since 1973. Considering that rents keep increasing, it's not hard to see why more people would wind up homeless."

Noting that most homeless people are not continuously homeless but rather homeless for a period of three to six months, Harris admitted that his preferred metaphor for the situation was that of musical chairs. As resources diminish, some people lose out, and "those people are the ones who are less able to adapt," because of issues like drug abuse, mental illness, or more mundane (and pervasive) problems like single-parenthood, which places an almost impossible burden on a low-earning parent.

For a liberal, progressively minded activist newspaper, the results of the November 2 election are, to say the least, disheartening. One of Real Change's accomplishments is the degree to which policy makers in the mayor's office consider their positions. Asked about the city's response to the increased demand on social services for the needy, Harris was remarkably upbeat, applauding Mayor Nickels and the City Council for promising "not to balance the budget on the back of the poor." Still, Harris was fairly caustic about the overall results of the election in terms of benefit for the needy.

"The problem is higher up," he says. "It's in the state legislature. We're never going to be able to fund social services to the extent that it's needed in this state until there is a different sort of a tax structure. And the prognosis for getting a progressive taxation system in Washington state is grim at best. And then on the federal level we're looking at nothing but cutbacks in poor people's programs as far as the eye can see. So it's sort of an on-going problem where at the local level we're winning, but if you look beyond that we're getting creamed."

Which perhaps explains the major changes underway at Real Change. If the first decade of the paper's existence was primarily oriented towards advocating for the poor and the homeless, while helping out a few like Ed McClain in the process, suggests Harris, then the next decade will be devoted to making Real Change into a powerful force for the statement that serves as its name. Despite being a community newspaper, as Harris makes clear, it is important to think beyond the local since it is becoming increasingly apparent that no matter how dedicated the people of Seattle are to making our city livable for the less-well-off, those efforts will be thwarted unless they receive backing at the state and federal level.

Lofty goals indeed. But as the Democratic Party struggles with its soul after an embarrassing defeat, there is something inspiring in the tireless dedication of the people at Real Change, who recognize that politics does not end with elections but is part of parcel of our daily lives. One of the newspapers most important assets, as Harris repeatedly said, was the fact "that in every issue, there's information on how to get involved." Their website realchangenews.org regularly calls for readers to join in mail writing campaigns, and Harris expressed pride in the efforts his newspaper and its advocacy group had made to organize and activate voters from and on behalf of the poor during the last election.

And yet, one of the most lasting experiences that Real Change offers its readers is the face to face contact with the hard-working, dedicated vendors who make the paper available all over the city. While it may strike some readers as cliche to have opened with a description of one of these vendors, the fact of the matter is that I have encountered Ed McClain probably hundreds of times. He's a nice guy, polite, often tossing out those sweet little nothings (like calling an elderly woman "young lady") that make people blush. Despite having met the publisher of this paper, despite having been in their offices and having pet their cat, in the end, it's Ed that I'll always think of when I think of Real Change, and that is a testament to their success.