The financial future for a series of free writing workshops in the Downtown Eastside for homeless and low-income residents looks uncertain.

Money for the classes comes from a $10,000 city grant. The grant expires in June and whether it will continue isn't known.

The classes, run by the street newspaper Megaphone, teach writing to the paper's vendors and women who live in the Rainier Hotel in the Downtown Eastside. They are also held at The Gathering Place community centre for low-income people in Downtown South and at Onsite, the residential detox centre above the city's supervised drug injection site.

"The end goal for us is that they write something that they're pleased with," said Kevin Hollett, Megaphone's managing editor. "If they want to submit it for publication in Megaphone, all the better because we want to get their voice out into the city, into different communities. But sometimes it's just really therapeutic for people to be able to express themselves, and if that means writing a poem and then just sticking it in their pocket and having that cathartic experience, then it's of value to us."

Workshop participants have made more than 100 submissions of poetry, fiction and personal essays to Megaphone, which has published nearly 40 of them and paid contributors each a $25 honorarium.

Vendor Garvin Snider has sold Megaphone for three years. He published his first piece in Megaphone last month after attending vendor's writing workshops and he used his writing as a platform for his political passions.

"After the first time I participated in the hunger relay for housing and homelessness, the first meal I ate after fasting for a week was a smokie hotdog," Snider wrote in his Megaphone piece. "The effect of all those processed chemicals and meats sent me into a red food dye number 5 delirium high that was the best and worst meal I have ever eaten."

Snider wrote about fasting in the 2010 Homelessness Hunger Strike Relay, which is meant to convince the federal government to reinvest in social housing. It's based on the One Percent Solution, launched in Toronto, which contends that in the mid-1990s, governments spent about one per ent of their budgets on housing but have since cut back on that spending.

Snider wrote that he hoped to travel to Ottawa, where he grew up, with other social housing advocates in June to call on the federal government to reinstate a national housing program, and that he needed financial help to get there.

His bid for donations worked. Youth from the North Shore Alliance Church who volunteer in the Downtown Eastside gave him enough money to buy a $250 Greyhound ticket to Ottawa, pay his cellphone bill and have money for food on the trip.

Others, like those at Onsite, experience the workshops as therapy, sharing their emotions, barriers and experiences with one another. "Our writers are not used to having anyone listen to them," Megaphone states on its website in its bid for donations to continue the workshops.

crossi@vancourier.com