Big Boss Character Analysis

Big Boss works at Real Change, a social service organization in Seattle whose mission it is to alleviate poverty and homelessness. Homeless people like Jackson go to Big Change to make money by selling the organization’s newspapers. Big Boss is unwilling to loan Jackson the hundreds of papers he would need to sell to earn the $1,000 required to buy back his grandmother’s powwow regalia—he knows that Jackson would never be able to sell enough papers, given that the average profit for a day of selling papers is only $30. Instead, he makes what he believes is the most generous offer he can and gives Jackson 50 papers for free, which would leave him with $50 if he managed to sell them all. Big Boss is blind to the reality that the small actions that both he and his organization take are insufficient to accomplish their stated mission about poverty and homelessness.