Coupons and sports guides still part of Ann Arbor life

Three University undergraduate students made handing out free publications - first in the form of Football Sports Guide and later as coupon booklets and Current Magazine - permanent aspects of campus life.

They began as a small printing company that distributed free booklets of sports information laced with slogans encouraging support for social issues.

Twenty years later, Sports Guides, Inc. is still a character mark of Ann Arbor.

University alumni David Devarti, Greg Hesterberg and Tim Kunin began printing in 1976.

"Basically, we started it as a fund-raiser for the Coalition for Better Housing," Devarti said. "What gave us the idea originally for doing this was in 1976, we did a 10-page promotional flier (for the bottle deposit ballot)."

The flier included football information and slogans that favored the bottle ballot.

Devarti, Kunin and Hesterberg organized the flier operation, passing out about 50,000 fliers in total. The bottle bill passed, creating the 10-cent deposit for Michigan bottles and cans.

The following year, Devarti, Kunin and Hesterberg ran a similar operation for the Coalition for Better Housing by handing out fliers of football and housing information.

Today, coupons are distributed primarily by part-time workers or contracted workers. All coupon distributors are paid $7 per hour.

Coupon booklets are given out primarily early in the semester or immediately after vacations.

Devarti said the contracted work is "totally irregular" since the books are only passed out a few times each year.

Devarti said SGI often employs homeless people.

"I'm very open to somebody who doesn't have a home," Devarti said.

"I probably had one person this winter (who was homeless)," he said. "For us, here's an opportunity for a guy to have an opportunity to get back on track."

Janet Upjohn, the clinical supervisor for the housing program at Michigan Ability Partners, a local non-profit organization that implements programs for homeless people, said businesses should employ homeless when they can.

"It's a way for (businesses) to support the community as a whole," Upjohn said. "It is a community problem."

Upjohn said that contracted labor provides a soft transition into employment.

"That can be very beneficial to clients who haven't worked for a while," Upjohn said. "It's much easier to go from day to day (work) to working 40 hours a week, or even 20 hours a week," she said.

Devarti said he thinks he has helped some homeless people in the past.

"I've seen them a couple of years later with a full-time job and an apartment," Devarti said, adding, "I don't want to take credit. I think it's basically an individual who takes control of their life."

The football guide is distributed differently than the coupons.

"We pay groups to go down and hand them out," Devarti said. "We don't pay individuals."

Groups that have been employed in the past include the Boy Scouts of America, a University business fraternity and the University's Women's Soccer club, Devarti said. Groups are paid $20 per person.

Devarti said the distribution is usually easy work, so groups fill the available positions years in advance.

"On the one day every three years when it's a rainy day, it's hard," Devarti said.

02-16-98