About the authors
Cole Haddock & Maria Toldi are journalists and researchers whose collaborative work centers on homelessness, displacement, and community resilience in the Bay Area. Their partnership began in 2023 producing the documentary Unhoused and Unseen for San Quentin News, and has continued through ongoing collaborations with Street Spirit. Over the past three years, their work has centered on dignifying and respectful journalism, mutual aid, and collaborative storytelling.
About MariaMaria Toldi graduated from University of California, Berkeley in 2025, where she earned her degree in Interdisciplinary Research Studies with a minor in Political Economy. Her academic work has integrated sociology, public policy, ethnic studies, and psychology to critically examine structural inequality and systems of social control.
About ColeCole Haddock is a graduate of the Geography Department of the University of California, Berkeley and the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley Law. He will work this summer as a daily news reporter for the Daily Sitka Sentinel in Alaska.
THE JUDITH LEE STONACH PRIZE
This project was fully funded by UC Berkeley’s Judith Lee Stronach Baccalaureate Prize, which supports intellectual and creative pursuits that heighten awareness of issues of social consciousness and contribute to the public good.ADVISORS
Alastair BooneExecutive Director of Street Spirit and KALW Beat Reporter
COMMUNITY PARTNERS
Our community partners helped us become embedded in the Bay Area cities of Richmond, Berkeley, Oakland. This aided our education about the policies and practices that shape the region’s response to homelessness. SOS RichmondSOS Richmond is a community-rooted nonprofit serving Richmond, CA, where unhoused and housed community members collaborate to address homelessness. They operate a wellness center and resource center to offer job support, food and clothing access, laundry services, and direct connections to essential county services. SOS Richmond also delivers hands-on encampment services, including mobile showers, trash pickup, portable toilets, and other supplies. Cole and Maria brought breakfast to the SOS Richmond warehouse nearly every week during their wellness center hours and talked about the Street Spirit newspaper with potential authors, vendors, and readers.
Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd The Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd is a historic congregation in West Berkeley, with a long and deeply rooted commitment to serving its surrounding community from hosting an early Black Panthers' breakfast program for schoolchildren to developing a prototype of the Head Start Program. Today, the church has an active food pantry and weekly food program. Since fall 2024, Cole and Maria have partnered with Good Shepherd for their food program, delivering 120 lunches weekly (more than 9,000 in total) to day laborers and encampment residents in the East Bay.
ART & DESIGN
Logo design
Website development and design
SPECIAL THANKS TO
San Quentin News
Yesica Prado
El Tecolote
Paul Kealoha-Blake
Consider the Homeless
Kelsey Hubbard
Oakland Revealed
Brigitte Nicoletti
East Bay Community Law
East Bay Community Law
Jessica Lin-Tupas
U.C. Berkeley
Dr. Alexa Koenig
Human Rights Center
Japjot Sethi
Free Meals on Wheels and Good Karma Water
Bradley Penner
Street Spirit
Street Spirit is an independent newspaper in the East Bay dedicated to covering homelessness and poverty from the perspective of those most impacted. Est. 1995.
Street Spirit is a monthly newspaper that is sold by homeless people in Berkeley and Oakland. It is written by and for unhoused people and others who are interested in producing original journalism about the crisis of homelessness, and the issues with which it intersects. We report on the politics and policies that impact our community, and publish personal essays, profiles, and poetry, which illuminate the experience of homelessness with unique intimacy. Our mission is to provide economic opportunity for our homeless neighbors while also creating a platform where they can share their own stories.