Homeboy Industries
For three decades, gang members seeking a new life have shown up on Greg Boyle's doorstep. A Jesuit priest, "Father G" leads Los Angeles' renowned Homeboy Industries, which offers extensive services and a supportive community to the formerly incarcerated and gang-involved.
The nonprofit is best known for its social enterprises, like Homegirl Cafe, staffed by ex-cons and described as a "farm-to-table breakfast and lunch spot featuring Latino flavors, where homegirls serve tables instead of serving time."
In recent years, Boyle has come to realize that jobs aren't enough. Gang membership is "about a lethal absence of hope in young people," he says. "Violence becomes a language, the language of the despondent, of the traumatized, of the mentally ill."
Thus, more than ever, Homeboy Industries focuses on providing clients with services for mental health, substance abuse, domestic violence support, and relationship therapy.
Boyle decries the trend of government programs that refuse to work with violent or serious offenders, who need the most support. And he likens many law enforcement-backed gang programs to treating lung cancer with cough medicine.
In an interview with HuffPost, Father Boyle shares lessons he's learned about personal fulfillment, building relationships, and coping with death.
Founder and Executive Director, Father Gregory Boyle, S.J at "Every. Angeleno. Counts." 5K Run And Community Art Walk at Homeboy Industries on October 18, 2014 in Los Angeles, California.
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Homeboy Industries
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You've been working with gang members for 30 years, but that it took you some time to realize the importance of relationships to healing. Can you expand on that a little bit?
Yeah. In the early days, I'd say, "Nothing stops a bullet like a job." When somebody introduces me somewhere and they say that, it almost feels creepy. But in the early days, that's what we did mainly. We were dispatching gang members to jobs.
I would always say, a job handles about 80 percent of what needs to get handled. It gives the gang member a reason to get up in the morning and a reason not to gangbang the night before.
But I can see now that, whereas employment and all those things are true, it's kind of superficial. It doesn't get at what this is about. I would find somebody a job, sometimes even a career. But then a monkey wrench would get thrown and something would happen – you know, his lady would leave him or something. Next thing you know, he was back in the neighborhood and then returned to prison. There was the discovery that no healing had happened. He hadn't gained resilience.
The difference now with people is the world is going to throw at them what it will but this time they won't be toppled by it. There's that whole process of attachment repair and gaining resilience. The largest task is to re-identify who they are in the world now. You have to move beyond the mind you have. You will say, I used to think courage meant packing a gun. Now, I can see that that has nothing to do with courage.
So things like that happen. And then, even though they move beyond our community, they're always connected to it. They're resilient. They know that they won't fall for the stuff they fell for before.
And it all has to do with healing, coming to terms with the things that had happened to them and the things that they had done. Their wounds become their friends rather than things to numb with drugs or flee from into violence.
Are there any other recent shifts in how Homeboy Industries approaches its work?
I think there are a lot of things. Actually, reaching back even beyond the work of finding jobs for gang members, in the early days I did kind of shuttle diplomacy between gangs -- you know, peace treaties, truces, cease fires, those kinds of things.
That was a lesson I learned early on. At Homeboy, we don't work with gangs. We work with gang members. If you work with gangs, you supply oxygen to gangs. You keep them alive because of the attention you pay to them.
We're not talking about the Middle East or Northern Ireland, where if you can just sit the sides down, they can discuss issues. I've had people criticize me. They go, "So you're against peacemaking?" And I say: I'm old fashioned. I think peacemaking requires a conflict. And there is no conflict in gang violence. None. Zero. Never.
It's not about anything. It's about a lethal absence of hope in young people. Violence becomes a language, the language of the despondent, of the traumatized, of the mentally ill. It's not about, you know, let's sit ourselves down and iron this out; I want my land back, or I want to practice my religion openly.
There are no issues to be worked out because it's not about what people think it is. The outsider view always drives the inside of what we do, our policy.
But I think more recently, what I've learned is that: If love is the answer, community is the context, and tenderness is the methodology. Tenderness is the connective tissue. You can say it lots of ways. You can talk about relationship and connection. I always talk about kinship.
But tenderness is the thing that moves love, so that it connects people. Love can just stay in the head or it can just stay in the heart, but tenderness moves it out into the world. And that's exactly what gang members long for. But surprise, surprise, it's what we all long for, is to be in kinship with each other, where we all feel like we belong to each other.
I saw someone quote a speech of yours on Twitter. Your punchline was, "They used to shoot at each other. Now they're shooting texts." What was the story there?
I had these two gang members with me who worked at Homeboy, and they were going to help me give a talk at a high school. So we met at 9 o'clock as the day began and we were driving in, and 15 minutes into the trip, Manuel in the front seat gets an incoming text. He reads it to himself, and he chuckles. And I said, "What is it?" He goes, "Oh, it's dumb. It's from Snoopy back at the office."
Well, I'd just seen Snoopy. And Snoopy, you know, greeted me in the morning. And Snoopy and Manuel work together in the clocks room, where they clock in hundreds and hundreds of workers. So I said, "Well, what's the text?"
And he goes, "Well, it's stupid." But then he reads it. And the text said, "Hey dawg, it's me Snoops. Yeah. They've got my ass locked up at county jail. They're charging me with being the ugliest vato in America. You gotta come down here and show them they got the wrong guy."
So we just howled with laughter. And it's at that moment I realize that Manuel and Snoopy were in fact rivals. They used to shoot bullets at each other. Now, they shoot text messages.
So the idea is the inevitability of kinship once you put people in the same proximity with each other, because you can't demonize somebody you know. Not only did they work side by side, they became such great friends.
Has technology changed the nature of the work that you do? Or changed how the people that you work with engage with the services?
Yeah. I would say that it's not really a Twitter crowd, and it's not an emailing crowd. Monumentally it's a texting crowd.
Especially with high school kids, I always talk about how kind of dexterous I am at it. For me, it's a relatively new thing so, you know, OMG and LOL and BTW and all that. I always say that the homies have taught me a new one, OHN. Which apparently stands for, "Oh, hell no." [laughter] So I use that one quite a bit.
But texting, it's almost a ministry, the texting ministry, partly because I'm on the road so much, so there's hundreds and hundreds of
text messages a day. You're always responding to them.
One of my favorite things is to sit in an airport and do kind of Russian Roulette. You just spin down and text somebody out of the blue – it's not reacting to something they've asked of you. You just say, "Hey, thinking about you." "How did that thing turn out?" You know, "Is the baby keeping you awake?" And all those things, you know.
It's a brand new thing for me as somebody who is 60 years old. It's an important thing because you can say something to somebody real quick and in a surprising way. It's real tenderness all the time.
if love is the answer,
community is the context
and tenderness is the
methodology
There has been more national discussion about race. I assume that race is a topic that is enmeshed in the work that you do.
Yeah. And of course I only know what I know, just my own experiences.
We're in our fourth location now. We serve the whole county of Los Angeles, whereas before we were trying to be responsive to the members of eight gangs in housing projects. That's when it started.
There were seven Latino gangs and one African American gang, and the African American gang essentially moved out of the projects. So then the whole Boyle Heights area was like 99 percent Latino. When we moved to our next location, it was all Latinos. It was the 60 gangs in Hollenbeck Police Precinct, which had 10,000 gang members. They're all Latino.
But then, when we moved to our third location and especially now in our fourth location, African Americans are a bigger part of the neighborhoods.
Anybody who works at our locations works side-by-side with numerous enemies, rivals. Everybody does. There are no exceptions to that. But then, especially for guys who have had the segregated experience in prison where, you know, the whites stay over there, the blacks stay over there, and the Latinos stay over here, and the Asians stay over there. There are few places more segregated than California prisons.
This sort of challenges that. Working together, these people can come to a sense of, you know, We belong to each other. We're connected to each other. They find kinship and friendship even in a potentially tense kind of environment.
I heard someone say that women work things out face-to-face, but men work things out shoulder-to-shoulder. And I think that's my experience at Homeboy, that often women gang members are not going to sit on anything. They're going to get in your face and say, "Bitch, remember that time?" They'll really kind of work it out with words.
But guys will just sort of – shoulder to shoulder, you know. They'll be making dinner rolls or whatever they're doing in the bakery. They're together in classes or workshops. And somehow, they're working stuff out, but they don't always need to verbalize it.
We've had very few of them, but we have had some white supremacists that'll work at Homeboy, guys right out of prison who are tattooed and who were of a whole other mindset. We're not going to turn them away because anybody who wants to start all over again and be healed from all the stuff that's held them back, you know, they're welcome.
You write in your book about a period when you had to lay off a lot of staff when you were in dire financial straits. How are things today?
Yeah, this was around 2010. We had grown so big. We're a $15 million annual operation. About 41 percent of that comes from our social enterprises. So it's a heavy lift, always has been.
But it's kind of about priorities. Now we're looking at 2 percent government funding. We've been as high as 25 percent. But we've been around for 27 years, and everybody endlessly wants to reinvent the wheel.
So we get a new government regime in. They're going to start their thing, and it's frustrating. Some of it is born of just, I don't know, the world's worst analysis. Nobody has ever met a healthy treatment plan that was borne of a bad diagnosis. I don't believe that's probably ever happened. Everything is dependent on what you think this is about.
Recently, people have been asking me to evaluate a lot of new programs, ones that are mainly embraced by law enforcement in particular. These strategies are to gang violence what cough suppression is to the cure of lung cancer. I guess it works inasmuch as you can eliminate the cough. But the bad news is the patient is going to die because you have not in any way addressed what this is about.
Every approach and program and strategy is only as good as the analysis which undergirds it. So there are a lot of, I think, just cockamamie programs that are not strategies that get embraced by cities.
A lot of these new programs choose not to work with certain people. They're cherry-picking programs. They only want to work with what they call "the nons" – the non-violent and the non-serious and the non-sexual offenders.
Now, we also don't work with sexual offenders just because it's too complicated for us. We have too many minors and liabilities. I wish, as a society, we could figure that one out.
But we work with the violent and serious offenders only. What we engage them in is pretty intensive healing. These are the only folks who truly have an impact on public safety. But "the nons" really only have impact on your jail populations. That's about it.
The people who really impact public safety are the serious and violent offenders. They need to find healing because, if they don't, then that's what continues to cycle. What's true of a kid who joins a gang, the profile of the despondent kid or the traumatized kid or the mentally ill kid, those three profiles get carried into the very people who walk in our doors at Homeboy trying to redirect and reimagine their lives.
All that is on a continuum of severity, some people more despondent than traumatized and some more mentally ill than despondent. But they're all kind of – they're either all three or one of the three.
That's what we need to address. That's what needs to get healed. Otherwise, the thing continues. That's curing the lung cancer. But because the cost is so alarming and annoying, everybody focuses on that.
Homeboy Industries
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