In 1983, at just 19 years old, Sean Cononie received more than $1 million in a settlement after sustaining multiple injuries while training to be a U.S. marshal.
Instead of splurging on himself, Cononie donated most it to the homeless and, in 1997, started a small newspaper to help those living on the streets and educate the public about their plight.
“It’s not that hard to help poor people,” he said.
Now, 50 years later, Cononie remains dedicated to that mission.
The Homeless Voice, based in Hollywood, Florida, seeks to raise awareness about homelessness and poverty, provide temporary employment and raise additional funds for sheltering.
Owned by the Coalition of Service and Charity (COSAC) Foundation, it also helps feed and connect homeless individuals with social and medical services.
Funding comes from Cononie’s personal finances, street sales of the paper and donations.
“There was a lady who saw me pulling my vendors off the street during the pandemic for their safety – and everyone else’s – who told me she’d write me a check,” he said. “It was for a million and a half dollars.”
Vendors stand at street intersections, offering newspapers to drivers in return for donations. About 75% of the earnings go to the vendors; the rest supports two shelters and the paper itself.
For 13 years, COSAC operated a 22-room hotel in Hollywood, providing shelter for over 200 homeless men and women. In 2015, the city paid Cononie to shut down the shelter, with the condition that he would not be allowed to live in Hollywood or create shelters there.
“Hollywood wanted to redevelop downtown, so they bought all the buildings I had for $5 million,” he said. “They told me I could come back in 30 years, but they didn’t want to open it up to the homeless – and made me sign a contract to make sure I stopped.”
The Homeless Voice now has shelters in Lake City – and vendors there and in Tallahassee, Gainesville, Jacksonville, Daytona, Orlando, Tampa, Fort Lauderdale, Davie and Miami, he said.
As Cononie grew his nonprofit, he met a troubled 18-year-old named Mark Targett, who needed service hours for school in Fort Lauderdale. As a teenager, Targett was arrested for using and selling drugs. After his mother kicked him out of the house, Cononie took him in.
“The first time I ever vended with him, he gave me this poem about someone doing cocaine and throwing their life away,” Targett said. “… I always told him if I wrote a book about him, I would call it ‘Robin Hood’ – because he gives so much to the poor.”
In the late 2000s, the Homeless Voice organized weekend retreats, during which journalism students from Florida Atlantic University would create an edition of the paper. Cononie and Targett were blown away by the students’ outcome, naming theirs the best edition of the year.
One of the student reporters, Andrew Fraieli, later reached out through his journalism professor, expressing interest in taking over the paper and professionalizing it. Today, a few years later, Fraieli serves as editor-in-chief and manages the paper from Denver.
Fraieli’s ties to homelessness go beyond the newspaper. Himself unhoused during his senior year of college, he slept in stairwells and, as a form of protest against the university, on campus fields.
At 20 years old, he went on a backpacking trip across Europe with only $300 in his pocket. He often slept outside, which led him to interact more with well-educated people with full-time jobs who lived on the streets because they could not afford housing.
“The experience made me more interested in reporting on it,” Fraieli said.
Florida ranks third in the U.S. for homelessness, with 30,000 individuals living on the streets.
In October, the state legislature adopted a bill making it illegal to sleep in public spaces like sidewalks, parks, benches, etc. The state has allocated $30 million to help municipalities enforce the law and provide unhoused people with mental health and substance abuse treatment.
However, organizations like The Task Force for Ending Homelessness argue that the law disproportionately targets those with substance abuse issues, ignoring the broader population of people struggling with unaffordable rent, domestic abuse, PTSD, age or disabilities.
With costs continuing to rise, many people such as Samuel Denton in Gainesville cannot afford permanent housing. Local apartment complexes require three times the rent to sign a lease, and but for cold or severe weather nights, shelters only accept families or couples, Denton said.
“I think the law is trash…” he said of House Bill 1365. “They’re trying to get everyone off the streets, but what are you going to do with them?”
The latest Homeless Voice edition focuses on hostile architecture, a strategy to make public spaces and structures unsuitable for unhoused people to use. The most common forms are benches with bars, boulders placed under highway overpasses and spikes under windowsills.
Melbourne recently removed bus benches from its streets to prevent unhoused people from using them. In 2019, West Palm Beach began using amplified sound in certain public areas, including beaches, to reduce disturbances caused by unhoused people. The city said it hoped to create a more peaceful environment while still maintaining access to the beach for everyone.
Fred Wutcher, a Homeless Voice vendor, expressed gratitude for the bed, shower and job that the nonprofit provides for him and others in Lake City. A decade before being homeless, he was a regular donor to the organization, not knowing that one day he would need it, too.
These days, Wutcher greets motorists at Northwest 34th Street and Hull Road in Gainesville with a constant smile, telling them to “stay safe” as they drive away. It’s important to remember the humanity behind being homeless, he said, and to “never judge a book by its cover.”
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