Belong & Contribute
Just being a kid
7-12
Special delivery: The Reporter arrives weekly via kids using traditional paper routes
Photo and reporting by
The Reporter (Dorchester)
Cam, 11, picks up his papers off Mary O'Brien's front porch in Dorchester every week and delivers them to 10 customers, charging 50 cents a paper after paying O'Brien a quarter for each one. His mother walked almost the same route with her brother thirty years earlier, delivering the same paper.
The parent worked alongside
Christina didn't set any of this up herself, her own parents called Mary O'Brien to ask if Cam and his sister wanted the route, the same way they'd called for her three decades before. She said yes and let the porch pickup, the quarter owed to O'Brien, and the collecting from ten customers happen exactly the way it always had.
Why we picked this one
The route hasn't changed in thirty years and neither has the price, fifty cents, and that's most of the point. Nobody streamlined it, nobody built an app for it, a kid still walks to a specific porch on a specific day and hands over a quarter of what he's about to collect. The system runs on kids forgetting to collect and customers forgetting to pay and somehow it still runs.
Find the one neighbor on your street who has a dog and never enough time for it. Three walks a week, same days, same time, and collect at the end of the week the way Cam collects his fifty cents. It's not complicated, it's just a route with fur on it.
Read the full story at
The Reporter (Dorchester)
Where it happened:
Dorchester, MA
Mary O'Brien's porch has had the same offer sitting on it for thirty years, somebody just has to say yes when the phone rings. Is anyone offering yours anything this year?