Syrian refugees, street gangs in Chicago, the ex-Finance Minister of Greece…this issue is a bit different.

Speak Up is a member of the International Network of Street Newspapers (INSP), a Scotland-based charity whose mission is to empower and connect homeless magazines and newspapers from around the world. Their marquee program is an annual week-long international conference. The INSP Summit features speakers, seminars and workshops structured to strengthen the work each organization is doing in their individual communities. Speak Up has been members for a few years, and we sent representatives to conferences in 2009 (Norway), 2014 (Glasgow) and 2015 (Seattle).

This year, I was privileged to attend the event in Athens. The week was incredibly rich with new connections, ideas and cultural experiences. The best moments often occurred during the in-between networking coffee sessions or evening get-togethers. On the my last night of the conference I marveled at privilege of being supported by such a rich international community as I sat swapping stories, laughing and toasting with three veterans of the street paper industry—from Seattle, The Netherlands and South Africa.

We work in an industry that is illogical in many ways: printing magazines when everyone claims that “print is dead” and then the counterculture task of turning “beggars into business owners.” It is a tremendous encouragement when we get together once a year and are able to talk “street papers” without apology. Vendor retention, editorial content, vendor writing, subscriptions, sales, tipping, fundraising—we go deep and get nerdy. It’s fun, uplifting and illuminating.

It is a strange, motley and inspiring group of people that run street papers throughout the world. There’s Steven Persson of the Big Issue Australia, a former business executive, who runs a nationwide street magazine that has millions of dollars in annual funding and a staff of dozens. Karin, from BISS Magazine in Germany, leads an organization that has pioneered a different approach: paying an actual wage to the vendors. In Seattle, progressive activist Tim Harris founded Real Change newspaper nearly twenty-five years ago; they’re a strong voice for social change and racial justice in the community. And then there are the upstarts and newbies like Speak Up—just a couple years old, with a paid staff of one (me), a tenacious team of volunteers and a hunger to see people empowered and hopeful. We are privileged to be part of INSP; year after year, they feel more like family.

This issue is a celebration of that family.

There were some great moments at the Summit last month. My experiences included a tour of the underbelly of gritty Athens, led by a Greek magazine vendor, a visit to a refugee camp, numerous speakers, including the European celebrity, Yanis Varoufakis, a radical economist trying to fight against institutionalized corruption. (Read Laura Kelly’s interview with him on page 14.)

A highlight for me came during the annual awards ceremony when Speak Up won the prize for “Best Vendor Contribution.” For the second consecutive year, we were nominated in this category. Receiving the award was an honor but not a surprise. The “street writing” that we publish every month is authentic, deeply personal and well written. Our winning piece, “Requiem for a Dream” by Dustin LaPres, has been reprinted (page 20) in this issue and is accompanied by an interview with the author.

Elsewhere in this issue, you’ll read about the “hard-hitting zine” now being published by Street Roots in Oregon. When we met the Street Roots editorial team in Seattle last summer and subsequently visited them in Portland, they were extremely impressed with Speak Up’s “Zine” which we published monthly for two years from early 2014 until January 2016. You remember it—a skinny black and white newsprint magazine—most issues featured the face of a homeless person on the cover. It was different from any other street magazine because it was written entirely by homeless and once-homeless authors. The team at Street Roots has created a gorgeous version of their own “zine” that exposes the hardships of sleeping on the streets, and we are thankful that they credit Speak Up as the inspiration (page 16).

So this issue is a bit of a hodgepodge. There isn’t as much writing in it from folks on the streets—that will return next month in our gritty and thoughtful “Invisible” issue. Instead, this contains glimpses of the conference, snapshots from our global network, and an insider’s look at the “street paper world.”