Anica was starting to hit her stride as a Liceulice vendor when the pandemic hit. Then came fourteen and a half months in isolation: Anica lives in a retirement home, as she needs supported accommodation, and had to isolate to protect the other residents. Now that she can get out into the world again, Anica hopes to leave the retirement home for her own living space. She is also hopeful that other people with disabilities will raise their voices along with hers in a world that often ignores them.

Mei-yu Lan sells The Big Issue Taiwan from her pitch at the IKEA Taipei City Shop Arena. She has been working as a vendor since the launch of the magazine 13 years ago and is part of the community where she works. She is a straightforward woman who believes in treating people right; it’s led to her building a large customer base. It’s these loyal customers who keep her motivated.

A unique Housing First effort in Düsseldorf combines art, newspapers and advocacy to pair the unhoused with apartments. The brainchild of the city’s street paper fiftyfifty, revenues from sales of works by famous artists are used to buy apartments for those who need them most.

Regular street paper readers will recognise the long running technique of profiling a street paper vendor. Swiss magazine Surprise has chosen to reverse the perspective. Urs Habegger (65), who works as a Surprise vendor in Rapperswil, provides a portrait of one of his regular customers. Katharina Hiller is a pastor; here, she reflects on her path towards the religious life and on the importance of giving voice to social issues.

In recent months, cities and states across the United States have dramatically increased their efforts to sweep and displace homeless encampments and to criminalize people on the streets. A series of posters as part of the nation-wide campaign ‘Housekeys Not Sweeps’, led by the Western Regional Advocacy Project, is raising awareness and combating criminalization efforts and anti-homeless legislation occurring across the country.

As the US repeals Roe v. Wade and rolls back abortion rights, Washington DC street paper Street Sense covers what effect this will have on those on the margins, highlighting the already significant barriers that poor people have to obtaining healthcare, especially those seeking an abortion.

Tennessee is Vicky Batcher’s home, and it is a place she is witnessing turn against people who don’t have shelter and must make their home on the street, a position she knows all too well from past experience. In the latest in INSP’s Housing for the People column, she writes about the jarring experience of seeing the place you live criminalize homeless people – people Vicky has a kinship with – as Tennessee will do with the passing of a new law.

Gary Barker, who sells Portland street paper Street Roots, writes for the latest in INSP’s Housing for the People – a column that allows those with lived experience of poverty, homelessness and insecure housing tell their story – writes about being “in a hell of my own doing”, but how with the pandemic making the world seem like world was falling apart, circumstances in Gary’s life suddenly made things start to come together. He writes about his work as an ambassador for Street Roots and leading on its MoJo scheme to get vendors into journalism, and how being in housing allows him to “find a way to get problems off my mind”.

What if the Queen had the vision of a Big Issue vendor? The street paper asked its team, who sell the magazine across the country, what they’d do if they were Queen for a day as the UK’s reigning monarch celebrates her Platinum Jubilee, marking 70 years on the throne. The insights are intriguing.

Megaphone storytellers and vendors of all street papers, including the writers featured in the pages of this Vancouver and Victoria street paper’s Voices of the Street literary anthology, regularly face a host of challenges, all linked to the inequities that come from living in poverty. When Megaphone hosted a series of writing workshops earlier this year, it became clear what was of great importance to participants: our environmentally distressed planet. As a result, the pages of the new edition of Voices of the Street (Stealing Looks at the Sun: Writing About Climate Change in 2022), which is on sale now, are packed full of prose driven by the growing impacts of climate change.

Yu-fu Hsieh is a veteran Big Issue Taiwan vendor who started selling the magazine in April 2010, after he retired from his sales rep job, from his pitch at Exit 2 of Gonguan metro station in central Taipei. He has never moved pitch since then. Hsieh delights in his work, crediting it with bringing enjoyment and happiness to his retirement, and he looks forward to many more years of working with The Big Issue Taiwan.

It’s all happening for Big Issue vendor Oprea, 48. Originally from Romania, he has just moved to a new selling point – at Bristol’s Temple Meads train station as part of a partnership with Network Rail – where he is perfecting his sales technique, and he has a new card reader to offer digital payments. He is studying a business course at university too.