Editor's Note: The Eastern Echo staff is meeting regularly with interesting people both on and off campus. Engage in those conversations with us, through our weekly Q&A report. This week, Lindsay Calka, director of Groundcover News.
As director of Groundcover News, Lindsay Calka acts as a news editor and an advocate for the homeless community in Washtenaw County. Groundcover News is a newspaper that focuses coverage on underrepresented communities, along with providing distribution jobs for the homeless. She has been the director of the operation since the summer of 2020, after being involved for more than two years. She also lives at Hospitality House Ypsilanti, a home that provides a warm meals, showers, and laundry facilities to the homeless community at specific times during the week.
Q: Please introduce yourself.
A: My name is Lindsay Calka, and I am the director and the publisher of Groundcover News. I also live, which is an important piece of my life, at a House of Hospitality in Ypsi, right by the bus station in Downtown, and also do community organizing within housing justice, homelessness and things like that. My involvement in Groundcover is my day job, and a really important one to me, like it's a big part of my life, but I do see it as one piece of, you know, the many things that I'm involved in.
Q: What is a House of Hospitality?
A: It is a home that is open to people on certain days and times. Think of it as like a shelter, but the priority isn't necessarily just like services and resources. It's like [a] home feeling. Twice a week it's open to the whole community. People come and primarily get a meal. We have a big home cooked meal. But also during that time, [people] are able to take showers and do laundry, and we have in our basement a free store, and try to have as much stuff and things that people need to get some basic needs met. It's a place for people to come together, build community, strengthen relationships, so that we can fight back against the reasons people are without housing.
Q: How did you get involved with this Hospitality House?
A: I moved to Ann Arbor for school. I grew up in Tampa, Florida. My folks are from Detroit. So I chose to come to U-of-M because I wanted to kind of return to Michigan, where my family is. But I was in Ann Arbor, it was my first or second week being in school and I went to Mercy House [another House of Hospitality] for breakfast, which happens on Saturday mornings. So, I went to that and had a wonderful, amazing experience. Met a lot of people. It continued to be something that I did while I was at university, on and off. A lot of my relationships, actually, with Groundcover vendors and just with the larger kind of homeless community, were born from being there.
Q: How did your involvement with Hospitality House help with you working at Groundcover News?
A: There were people that I met just from the breakfast that were Groundcover vendors or were involved in Groundcover in some way. There also was a student org that I was a part of that would facilitate people volunteering at these different places. So, I ended up volunteering at both Groundcover and Mercy House. I was just a volunteer for about a year and a half. I was at the office, working on my computer, doing some design thing for a magazine that I was doing on campus, and was using InDesign. And Susan, who was the founder and the director of Ground cover at the time, was like, oh, you know, looks like you can use this program, our designer’s wanting to move on. That was the end of the year in 2019, and by the beginning of 2020, I had started kind of doing that. That summer, I kind started getting more involved in the operations. I was in the office every day, getting to know people even more, getting to know how the organization runs. And by the end of [summer 2021], I was asked to take over as director.
Q: What is Groundcover News?
A: Groundcover is a community street newspaper. Our mission is that we exist to do three things. One, to provide economic opportunity for self-determined individuals impacted by poverty. You can show up and get trained and get to work right away and have the ability to get paid that same day too. The second thing that we do is produce a street newspaper that uplifts marginalized voices in Washtenaw County. That's what most people know, we're a newspaper, and we function like any other newspaper does. And then, three, we promote an action that contributes towards a just, caring and equal society. So, all of those things come together when there's a vendor who’s working, selling a newspaper in person, strengthening relationships in the community. We also try and host events and do things constantly, to bring people together, to facilitate conversations, to share information across class, across race, across the things that divide us, and we see that as part of our mission as well.
Q: Share a story about someone you made a connection with through Groundcover News?
A: Jim Clark is a vendor and a writer. We do a lot of stuff; our lives are very intertwined. He's a really important person to me, and I think it shows that being able to connect with people and talk about your vision for a better world, and then use the resources, like the newspaper, to write, and promote those ideas, or to bring people together and work on projects. We've done a lot of stuff together outside of Groundcover, but that has always been the core: having the paper and the community, the network, to promote and move forward on those projects and ideas.
Q: What is one thing you’ve learned since you’ve started working for Groundcover?
A: I have 4,000 things I could say. Like, I'm a different person now from working here. I've been thinking about this most recently, that Groundcover vendors, whether they realize it or not, are fighting against a lot of stigma when selling the paper through the content that’s published, and also the act of selling. But part of what I've needed to do is defend when those statements are being launched more formally at us.
Q: What is one thing people in Washtenaw County can do to better help the homeless community?
A: Paying attention and standing up against oppression and attacks against poor people. Housing isn't the only issue that we are focused on, but it is kind of like a great unifier. A lot of people can relate and identify as being, at one point, housing insecure. I would say, everybody has a part to play. And keeping their eyes open to the ways that neighborhoods are changing, being more gentrified. People are being pushed out, people are being evicted, not being able to even access housing. In general, what we're fighting for is, you know, a better world. People become homeless because they don't have a house, it's not some like, critical moral flaw that people have. So, I think for people to like, understand that, get to know people, and hear their stories.
