Director of Vendor Employment
[email protected]
202-347-2006 x 103
202-649-0146 (work mobile)
Please contact Thomas with questions or concerns about a vendor, or if you’re interested in the vendor employment program.
With his team of Vendor Program Associates (VPAs) and volunteers, Thomas manages the vendor employment program, the low-barrier employment opportunity central to the Street Sense Media mission. His team supports active vendors in collecting their newspapers, their contributions from the Street Sense Media app, and their editorial payments. He runs vendor recruitment efforts and manages the New Vendor Orientation, and he runs all vendor sales training, including teaching the weekly sales and professional skills-focused Workplace Workshop.
Born and raised in Owasso, Oklahoma, Thomas earned his B.S. in Electrical Engineering at the University of Tulsa, and his M.B.A. and J.D. from the University of Oklahoma. He is a licensed attorney in the State of Oklahoma, and worked as a discovery expert in Washington, D.C. from 2010 until he joined Street Sense Media in 2020.
Having been a ‘Street Sense’ customer for many years, he began editing artist-vendor Gerald Anderson‘s second extended article series, ‘Treading the Waters’, in 2018. In April, 2020, he arranged his new remote-work schedule so that he could work as a paper sales volunteer once a week in the Street Sense Media offices. A month later, he began running the weekly Writers Workshop for artist-vendors. Through this intimate artistic work in the first year of the pandemic with the artist-vendors of Street Sense Media he got to know many of them personally. In December, 2020, he accepted the position of Director of Vendor Employment, marking a major career change. And he never looked back.
