Big Issue North’s #VendorWeek celebrations enlisted notable political figures, musicians and sports stars to face off against each other alongside street paper vendors in a selling challenge over the course of the week.

This year we asked vendors: if you could give a song as a present this Christmas, what would you choose? The result was the INSP Vendor Playlist, which is now available for your listening pleasure. Dave from Big Issue North dedicated this song to his heroic fellow vendors.

Victoria came to the UK from Romania a year ago and has been a Big Issue North vendor for around nine months. She wants to build a future for herself and her partner, Ionut, here in the UK and to find a stable job. Victoria enjoys her work as a Big Issue North vendor and is grateful for all of the support and help that she has had from her customers.

If they weren’t regular customers already, the people who generously gave up their time during #VendorWeek to try selling Big Issue North for an hour vowed not to walk on by again.

Nicusor, 56, comes from Romania and has been selling Big Issue North since 2016. He tells us about his hopes of finding work as a carpenter in the future, learning English and the joy that he finds in playing music.

Richard Wilkinson’s work is dedicated to exposing deeply rooted societal inequality and to showing how much better off people are when living in a more equal society. With ‘The Spirit Level’, the book he co-authored with his colleague Kate Pickett, he brought the results of that work to a mass audience. After his keynote speech at the 2017 Global Street Paper Summit, Wilkinson told INSP about the growing problem of inequality and what street papers are doing to combat it.

The CEO of the Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES) Neil McInroy brought his outspoken and enthralling way of striving for a more progressive economy to the 2017 Global Street Paper Summit in Manchester. He spoke in greater detail with INSP about how he perceives himself, and his organization, as outside the mainstream and how the work of street papers fits in to his worldview.

After witnessing pigs being fed perfectly edible food that had been branded as waste while working on an Australian farm, Adam Smith returned to the UK to establish The Real Junk Food Project, the goal of which is to take food deemed inedible and cook it up into delicious meals, eradicating food waste in the process. At this year’s Global Street Paper Summit, Adam Smith told INSP about his plans to really feed the world.

This year’s INSP Awards took place in Manchester during the Global Street Paper Summit. Take a look at how the evening unfolded.

Frank Turner rocked Manchester’s iconic music venue, the O2 Ritz, on the final night of the 2017 Global Street Paper Summit at fundraising gig Street Noise.

For the second keynote speech of the INSP 2017 Global Street Paper Summit, economist and CEO of the Centre for Local Economic Strategies Neil McInroy addressed delegates on the social problems our failing economy has created.

Adam Smith, founder of The Real Junk Food Project, gives after dinner speech to INSP 2017 delegates at Manchester’s Victoria Baths to round off day one of this year’s Global Street Paper Summit.

Epidemiologist, and writer of the best-selling book The Spirit Level, Richard Wilkinson, grabs the attention of delegates with the opening keynote speech of the 2017 Global Street Paper Summit.

The 2017 INSP Global Street Paper Summit kicked off on Monday at a welcome reception at Manchester Town Hall. After speeches from Lord Mayor Eddy Newman, INSP Chief Executive Maree Aldam and Chair of The Big Life Group Edna Robinson, we heard from delegates about what they expect from the week ahead.

Gig at O2 Manchester Ritz on August 24 will raise funds for INSP and Big Issue North Trust.

Our global survey of vendors’ ambitions hits the UK today, as we speak to Ken and Macca, who both sell Big Issue North.