My mind's clear! Next year, we fight on

Twenty-eight Christmases ago we had our first Big Issue Christmas. It was incredible. It launched a few months before Christmas and almost all the doubters began to eat their words. Or moved their doubts into other areas.

Were we really helping people to get out of homelessness? "Wasn't it like sticking a plaster over an open sore?"

Charging homeless people money to buy the paper seemed to fly in the face of the generosity associated with charity.

Of course, we would have never started if we didn't have a vision of what we intended. The Big Issue was started as a crime-reduction programme. London, the launch site, was awash with thousands of homeless people sleeping rough in and around the West End. And they were getting into trouble with the police and the public.

Many of them had drink and drug problems. They may not have had them when they arrived on the streets, but the streets turned them to palliatives soon enough. To anything that would blind the reality of cold and desertion felt in a bustling city.

So we wanted to stop people getting into trouble first of all. Then we could hopefully begin to stabilise them through working with The Big Issue.

Working not begging became our mantra, as a stage away from the destitution of street life. A comradeship could be and was developed. Slowly our work took on a common sense, and questions raised about what we were trying to do got fragmented by our obvious achievement in giving people a hand up.

Although, I had to repeatedly explain to countless doubters and questioners why we got our vendors to pay for the paper. "How else would The Big Issue survive", I said. We had to pay our way.

We had not started a charity - we had started a social business, which meant we had to have income and pay our way through street sales and selling ads. The difference between us and other businesses was that the surpluses went back into the business and not to shareholders.

If you could get people who had fallen into homelessness to start working and earning you were giving them the chance to participate in our general world of commerce, where we are all controlled by market places. This stops them from being walled off in the at times invisible, at times visible, ghetto of poverty. 

The enormous thrill of seeing thousands of people talking to our vendors – buying from them, humanising them by social contact - it was a source of great joy. Millions of people over the years bought and talked, something people thought they could not do with beggars.

Fast forward to today, 28 years, three months, and six days since The Big Issue was born, I am not emptied of my love for the fight to destroy poverty, prejudice or injustice. I just hope to do it better with a clearer head.

Next year's a big year. Our twenty-ninth. Let it come! And let's use it to kick 10 holes in poverty and hate, prejudice and need.