T R A N S C R I P T...Today, Homeboy Industry's non-profit economic development enterprises include Homeboy Bakery, Homeboy Silkscreen and Embroidery, Homeboy, Homegirl Merchandise,

2015 Sol Kanee Lecture on Peace and Justice Jobs not Jails: Providing Hope, Training, and Support

to Formerly Gang-Involved and Previously Incarcerated Men and Women

Father Gregory Boyle, SJ Founder and Executive Director, Homeboy Industries Tuesday, October 6 @ 1:30 pm Multi-Purpose Room 210, University Centre, University of Manitoba

Watch the video on the Mauro Centre YouTube Channel

T R A N S C R I P T

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9yb88464FI&t=15m54s

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9yb88464FI&t=15m54s

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2015 Sol Kanee Lecture – Fr. Gregory Boyle, SJ Page 2 of 24

Speaker 1: Good afternoon. Welcome to today's 2015 Sol Kanee Lecture on Peace and Justice, an initiative sponsored by the Richardson Foundation, that features distinguished speakers in peace and justice studies. Welcome to members of the university community. Welcome to students. Welcome to staff. Welcome to supporters of the Mauro Centre, to members of the Board of Directors and to all who contribute their time and energies to make events such as the Sol Kanee lecture a possibility. Welcome to members of the community. Welcome to the community of Fort Richmond. Welcome to the community of Winnipeg, the community of Manitoba and anyone who's from beyond the Manitoba boundaries. Many of you have traveled very far, many of you might have struggled to find parking. You may have rearranged your schedules and otherwise accommodated to be here today, so we very much welcome you.

Welcome to each of you in particular because your very presence attests to the increasing interest in building global and local communities founded much more fully on peace principles and the realization of justice. We are very fortunate to have with us today Father Gregory Boyle, who's the founder of Homeboy Industries, who's managed to make the long trek from his home in Los Angeles to be with us here today in Winnipeg. My name is Michelle Glenn and it's my privilege to act as master of ceremonies today.

As to the format, we will begin today's by hearing a few words from Dr. Chris Adams, who's the Rector of St. Paul's College and he's also the chair of the Board of Directors of the Arthur Mauro Centre. After that, we will turn to hear from Dr. Jay Doering, who's the Vice Provost and the Dean of the Faculty of Graduate Studies. [00:02:00] Then we will hear from Father Eduardo Para Soto, who will introduce his fellow Jesuit, Father Boyle and Father Soto is also a candidate in the peace and justice studies program here at the University of Manitoba. Finally, we will hear from Father Boyle himself, and after he's made his remarks, he's kindly agreed to entertain questions for a few minutes.

We'd ask that you hold your questions until he has finished his speaking. We will conclude with some final remarks from another Ph.D. student, Mrs. Danielle Felicia, who is also in the peace and justice program here at the University of Manitoba. Please, if you haven't picked one up, there are brochures that detail today's lecture, and once again, welcome and with that, I turn to Dr. Chris Adams.

Christopher: I hope you aren't confusing this room with the blood donor clinic next door. If you have blood to donate, that's next door. Good afternoon. My name is Christopher Adams and as Rector of St. Paul's College and the Chair of the Board of Directors of the Arthur V. Mauro Centre for Peace and Justice, I want to welcome all of you to the 12th Annual Sol Kanee Lecture on Peace and Justice, featuring Father Gregory Boyle, the founder and Executive Director of Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles.


At this point in this event, I wish to note that St. Paul's College and the University of Manitoba's campuses are located on original lands of Anishinabek, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Meti nation. We respect the treaties that were made on these territories. We acknowledge the harms and mistakes of the past and we dedicate ourselves as a community to move forward in partnership with indigenous communities in the spirit of reconciliation and collaboration.

The Sol Kanee lecture series on international peace building is supported by the generosity received from the Richardson and Sons family of Winnipeg. [00:04:00] We are grateful for their contribution. As well, we extend our thanks to the leadership of members of the Winnipeg community, such as Mr. Sol Kanee, who is an ardent champion of peace building and human rights and for whom this lecture is named after.

Let us also take a moment to acknowledge the center's benefactor, Dr. Arthur V. Mauro, who is here with his wife Naomi Levine. Arthur Mauro, along with the many others who have contributed to the work of the center and of the students enrolled in Peace and Conflict Studies program, without their support, we would not be here for this type of a lecture. Together, through all of our efforts, we have opened the door for greater opportunities to know, understand and walk the path of peace. I want to know welcome Dr. Jay Doering, the University of Manitoba Vice Provost of Graduate Education, who will bring greetings from the University of Manitoba. Dr. Doering?

Jay: Thank you, Chris. It is a pleasure indeed for me to bring greetings on behalf of the President's office. I'd like to pick up on some of Dr. Adams' comments and roll things back a little bit. I'd like to start by recognizing a few of the significant events that effectively have us all here today. To do that, we go back to 2001, when Dr. Arthur Mauro made a significant donation to St. Paul's College to create the Mauro Centre for Peace of Justice. From there, we gave rise to the Ph.D. program in Peace and Conflict Studies that was started by Dr. Sean Burn and Dr. Jessica Senehi.

Their program's gone on to pick up additional faculty members, Dr. Maureen Flaherty and Dr. Hamdesa Tuso, and is now the academic home to more than 75 graduate students, a not insignificant program. [00:06:00] Last but not least, as Dr. Adams has indicated, is Sol Kanee himself for his leadership and his vision. It only goes to show that if you wrap all these things up, great things happen when we all pull and work together.

I believe that the best is probably yet to come. Winnipeg is now home to the Museum for Human Rights. The University of Manitoba is embarking on a Master's in Human Rights graduate program and the University of Manitoba is home to the National Center for Truth and Reconciliation. We're on the precipice of something probably much more significant than we're currently looking at. I would suggest that a global social justice spotlight is very succinctly


focusing in on Winnipeg and the University of Manitoba, which takes me to today's Sol Kanee lecture. Father Greg, I'm going to avoid the Father Boyle thing because that just gets you in trouble.

One of the characteristics of Homeboy Industries is its website and the quote of the day on the website, and earlier today, someone asked Father Greg for a quote and I was going to slip him the one that I'd written down that I took off the website when I went through weeks and weeks of quotes that are still up on their website. The one that I liked was, "The measure of our compassion lies not in our service to others but in our willingness to see ourselves connected to them." The measure of our compassion lies not in our service to others but in our willingness to see ourselves connected to them.

Think about it. Father Greg, welcome to the University of Manitoba. [00:08:00] Congratulations on being this year's Sol Kanee lecturer. We're so pleased you're here.

Father Eduardo: The first time that I heard about Father Greg was here in Winnipeg. Even though I became a Jesuit 17 years ago, I never heard about him until talking to an ex-offender and gang-related friend who told me about him coming to Canada. He talked with excitement that I quickly bought his book, Tattoos on the Heart, to read about this man that sparked so much enthusiasm in my fellow friend, who now sadly is again incarcerated for home invasion. I have to confess that I have some [inaudible 00:08:48] against Jesuits in the United States, well not only in the United States.

I was caught in the black and white mindset, or prestigious academics supporting well established universities and education centers, or troublemakers sent to the rural South, former third world, unsuitable neither here nor there. All of them were bearing the benefit of the doubt of their good intentions. That is also a Jesuit rule. My mindset was completely teared down when I read his book. I discovered in the pages of Tattoos on the Heart a man able to open up possibilities and get rid of conflict and violence through his fierce appropriation of the reality that surrounds him.

His experience brought myself from a space of opposites and frustration to a space of hope. According to his website, Father Greg [00:10:00] was born in Los Angeles, one of eight children. After attending and graduating from St. Brendan School and Loyola High School, he entered the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits, and was ordained priest in 1984. He received his BA in English from Gonzaga University and MA in English from Loyola Marymount University and Master of Divinity from the Western School of Theology, and a Sacred Theology Master's Degree from the Jesuits School of Theology.

Father Greg taught at Loyola High School and worked with Christian Base Communities in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Instead of going to Santa Clara University to teach, he was appointed in 1986 as a pastor of Dolores Mission in the Boyle


Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. This neighborhood, if you look at the website of the LA Police, have 800,000 population and 5.62 square miles, among the highest densities of the City of Los Angeles, faced activity of 24 violent gangs, even though he said that in the parish, were only 8.

At the parish, Father Greg and many community members developed positive alternatives to address the escalating problems and unmet needs of gang-involved youth. These efforts included establishing of an elementary school, a day care program, and finding legitimate employment for gang people. In 1992, as a response to the civil unrest in Los Angeles, Father Greg launched the first social enterprise business, Homeboy Bakery. The mission of Homeboy's model of social enterprise is to create an environment that provides training, work experience and allow opportunity for rival gang members to work side by side. The success of the bakery created the groundwork for additional social enterprise [00:12:00] businesses. Today, Homeboy Industry's non-profit economic development enterprises include Homeboy Bakery, Homeboy Silkscreen and Embroidery, Homeboy, Homegirl Merchandise, Homegirl Café and Catering, Homeboy Farmers' Market and Homebody Dinner at Los Angeles City Hall.

As Executive Director of Homeboy Industries and an acknowledgment as expert on gangs and intervention approaches, Father Boyle is an internationally renowned speaker. He has given commencement addresses at numerous universities as well as spoken at conferences for teachers, social workers, criminal justice workers and others about the importance of adult attention, guidance and unconditional love in preventing youth from joining gangs.

Father Greg and several Homeys were featured speakers at many places, such as the Whitehouse Conference on Youth in 2005 and in 2009, he was a member of a 10-person California delegation to President Clinton's Summit on Children in Philadelphia.

Father Greg is also a consultant to youth service and governmental agencies, policymakers and employers. This is the activity that brought Father G to Winnipeg 2 years ago. I had the opportunity not only to go to the conference where he spoke, but also to share some free time as a fellow Jesuit and see the profound commitment to boundless compassion rooted in his own upbringing. The love, tears and hope that the book gave to me, and for sure to many other of its readers, were real in his person. Also, I could see with my own eyes that hope has an address in 130 Bruno Street in Los Angeles, California. I had the privilege of visiting this awesome place [00:14:00] and being guided by one of the Homeys, Gabriel, who explained to me the different programs they have, the tattoo removal, the employment services, the case management, the legal and educational services, mental health services and work training programs.

The list of awards of this man is impressive and you can look at on their website, a lot. California Peace Prize granted by California Wellness Foundation, Life


Achievement Award, Bon Appetit Award. He has a Bon Appetit too. Father Greg also won the New York Times Bestselling book, Tattoos on the Heart, the Power of Boundless Compassion, received in 2010 the Southern California Indie Book Service Association as non-fiction book award, and was named as one of the best books in 2010 by Publisher Weekly. The Best Debut Author also was awarded and also winner of the 2011 Penn Center USA Literary Award for Creative Non-fiction.

Homeboy Industries, now located in the heart of downtown Los Angeles, is recognized at the largest gang intervention and reentry program in the world, and has become an international model. Today, I am very happy as you all noticed, to introduce to all of you the great, this great man that is making a difference in the world, in deeds and words. Please give a round of applause to the guest speaker of the 12th Annual Sol Kanee Lecture on Peace and Justice, Father Gregory Boyle.

Father Gregory: Thank you. I'm always sort of a basket case after this because a couple [00:16:00] of those kids are gone. It just gets to me, maybe it's a little homesick too. Anyway, it's a real privilege to be with all of you and what an honor to have been here. People in Winnipeg are so good. I feel a little bit concerned because I spoke of, well we had conversations or very simulating conversation with students in the Peace and Conflict Studies program and that was so stimulating and then yesterday morning, I had an opportunity to speak with a lot of folks and community members, and then as Eduardo mentioned, 2 years ago, I spoke at the Viscount Hotel to a whole bunch of people so I apologize if you've heard some of my stuff before it happens.

Once, I was invited to speak at a foster grandparent gathering, a huge gathering in Southern California. I had spoken at it the summer before, same people. I don't know why they invited me two summers in a row but there you have it. Afterwards, this grandmother came up to me and a foster grandmother and she, I think she liked to talk. She had big tears in her eyes and she grabbed both my hands and she said, "I heard you last year. It never gets better."

I was kind of hoping she misspoke there but anyway, it's the privilege of my life for 30 years to have worked with gang members and the day will never come when I have more courage or I am more noble or I'm closer to God than these folks. [00:18:00] If people like Louis Perez, who was texting me this morning, he helps run the place, been a heroin addict, gang member, shot caller, prisoner, tattooed and now he runs the place, one of the several, and he's become something of a public speaker in his own right. We went out to dinner not long ago and he was giving me tips on how to speak publicly and he said, "You know, you have to pepper your talk with self-defecating humor." I said, "Yeah, no shit."

So, brace yourselves. What brings you here in the afternoon when you could be doing other things? It's a kind of a vision of wanting the world to look differently than it currently looks. All of us have a vision that undergirds what we do every


day. The prophet Habakkuk writes the vision still has its time, presses on to fulfillment and it will not disappoint and if it delays, wait for it, but none of us want to wait around ‘Quedarse con los Brazos cruzados,’ tapping our feet, staring at our watches. We all want to make something happen. We want to roll up our sleeves. We want to create something different.

What Martin Luther King says about church could well be said about at the Sol Kanee lecture. This is not the place you've come to. It has always been the place you will go from. You'll go from here to do something different and something that reflects the kind of vision you have for how you hope the world might look. What I want to suggest in the brief time I have with you that [00:20:00] what I think we're called to create is in fact the community of kinship, such that God in fact might recognize it. Mother Teresa I think diagnosed the world's ills correctly when she suggested that the problem in the world is that we've just forgotten that we belong to each other.

How do we stand against forgetting that? How do we imagine a circle of compassion and then imagine nobody standing outside of it? How do we dismantle the barriers that exclude? How do we inch our way out to the margins? This is a word that Pope Francis uses a lot that gets translated sometimes as edges, the periphery. How do we stand at the margins because the truth about the margins is if you stand there, you look under your feet, the margins are getting erased, precisely because you chose to stand there and you stand with the specificity. You stand with the poor and the powerless and the voiceless and you find a way to do that.

You stand with those whose dignity has been denied. You stand with those whose burdens are more than they can bear, and every once in a while, you just have this amazing privileged moment where you get to stand with the easily despised and the readily left out, with the demonized, so that the demonizing will stop and with the disposable so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away. I suspect that if kinship happened to be our goal, we would no longer be promoting justice. We'd be celebrating it. [00:22:00] Peace and justice really is a byproduct of our kinship, because peace and justice won't happen if you singularly focus on it. I think it can only happen if you work for kinship and connection, if you stand against forgetting that we belong to each other. Peace and justice will be a byproduct of that effort. No kinship, no peace, no kinship, no justice. I think that's just how it works.

The Homeys have taught me everything of value and I couldn't be more grateful to them, but in the last couple of years, they've taught me how to text and I'm so grateful to them. I find that it sure beats the heck out of actually talking to people, and I'm pretty good at it, kind of dexterous, LOL and OMG and BTW and the Homeys have taught me a new one, OHN, which apparently stands for oh hell no. I'm using that one quite a bit lately. I suspect I'm not alone in being vexed by autocorrect, iPhone autocorrect and I had a Homegirl recently just on a Sunday. Her name is Berta and she texted me, "Where you at?" I said, "I'm


about to speak to a room full of monjas, which are nuns, sisters, about to speak to a room full of monjas." I hit send and autocorrect sent her this message that I was about to speak to a room full of ninjas. She thought that was pretty interesting.

My worst one was a Homey who texted me, I've got five of those today that said, "Hey, they cut off my phone [00:24:00] or my light bill or whatever." They just didn't have money. I wrote, "Things are tight." When I pushed send, autocorrect told them, "Thongs are tight." He wrote me back, "Sorry to hear that. What about my rent?" Anyway, there I am in the car with two older Homeys, Manuel and Poncho and they do a variety of things at Homeboy and they're going to help me give a talk at a high school and Manuel's in the front seat so we're driving about 15 minutes in and Manuel gets an incoming text that he reads 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." Snoopy, I've just seen him and I gave him a - I have water, yeah thank you. You all are very concerned about me. Thank you and I appreciate it.

I'd just seen Snoopy and I'd just given him a big abrazote. Snoopy and Manuel worked together in the clock-in room, where they clock in hundreds and hundreds of our workers, and it's a tough job because gang members can occasionally be attitudinal and so, I said, "What's he saying?" He goes, "Oh it's dumb. Hung on. Hey Doug, it's me Snoops. Yeah they got my ass locked up at county jail. They're charging me with being the ugliest [inaudible 00:30:43] in America. You have to come down right now, show them they got the wrong guy."

Well, we died laughing. I almost drove into oncoming traffic and then I realized that Manuel and Snoopy are enemies. They're from rival gangs. [00:26:00] They used to shoot bullets at each other. Now they shoot text messages and there's a word for that and the word is kinship. How do we obliterate once and for all the illusion that we are separate, that there is an us and a them? Everybody in this room is engaged in some kind of service, from soup kitchens to working with gang members or working on a side of town that's underserved. Everybody in this room is engaged in some kind of service. Service is where you begin. You never want to end there. Service is the hallway that gets you to the ballroom and the ballroom is the place of kinship and connection. That's where you want to end up, because truth be told, in service, there's a distance even. Sometimes, I'm the service provider. You're the service recipient. You want to merge even that. You don't want there to be any daylight that separates us between us and them. You want to arrive at this exquisite mutuality.

One of the great privileges of my life was knowing Cesar Chavez as a friend, the great farm worker leader, the starter of a movement. He was probably the best listener I'd ever met in my life. If you were talking to Cesar Chavez, you were the only person in the room. You're the only person who existed. He was never looking over your shoulder to see if somebody more important was on the


approach. It was only you, but quite famously, one of his reporter had commented to him and said, "Wow, these farm workers, they sure love you." Cesar just shrugged and smiled and said, "The feeling's mutual.", which again is the whole [00:28:00] hope that somehow we arrive at this place where there is no distance or daylight that separates us and Homeboy Industries, I'm not the great healer and that gang member over there is in need of my exquisite healing. Truth be told, we're all a cry for help. We're all in need of healing. It's one of those things that unites us together as members of the human family.

I remember no Homey ever found more job opportunities than this guy everybody called Dreamer. I knew him since he was a little [foreign language 00:28:34] growing up in the housing projects, a little guy and he grew up. I knew his family and they were in my parish and I watched him get into a gang and a very intelligent kid with a dangerous sense of humor that I always enjoyed, but he never really did school and in his early 20s, he's in his 40s now, but in his early 20s, he was a yo-yo, in and out of being locked up. I'd find him a job. Nobody, we didn't find more jobs for any other person but this guy, private sector, in one of our social enterprises, but he'd always gravitate back to vague criminality before too long. It's anything, usually something that involved drugs, the sale of or the use of and then he'd wander back to me asking for another job. This went on for some time. He had finished a 4-month probation violation in county jail and there he is sitting in front of me in my office and he says what gang members often say, "This time it will be different."

I go, "Hmm, all right." With him sitting there, I call a friend of mine who runs a vending machine company and he had hired Homeys in the past. I'm thinking maybe he'll do it again, [00:30:00] and sure enough, he says, "Tell him he can start tomorrow." That's a holy man right there. Jimmer began work the next day at the vending machine company. Two weeks later, there he is again in front of my desk. I go, "[foreign language 00:30:17] Here we go all over again.", but this time, he pulls out of his pocket his very first paycheck and he waves it proudly and he says, "Damn, G, this paycheck makes me feel proper. My mom, she's proud of me and my kids, they're not ashamed of me, and you know who I have to thank for this job." I said, "Well, gosh, who?" He looks at me strangely and he says, "Well, God of course." I said, "That's right, that would be God, yeah." He goes, "You thought I was going to say you." I said, "No, gosh. God's number 1." He said, "You are so lucky we're not living in them Genesis days." "I'm sorry, them Genesis days?"

He goes, "Yeah, because God would have been had struck down your ass already by now," he said. All I really recall of that conversation is that we just dissolved and laughed and we fell out of our chairs and I defy you to identify exactly who's the service provider, who's the service recipient. I have no idea. It's mutual. If you'll permit me, I want to take a little higher aerial view, because why would this even matter, and I'm a priest, I'm a Jesuit and I think a lot depends on what kind of God you have. [00:32:00] It helps you see. A couple of weeks ago, the Pope was in the United States and a lot of people were talking


about him. I was talking about Yogi Berra, the New York Yankees catcher and I was a catcher when I was a kid on Little League. I always loved Yogi Berra. Later on as an adult, I discovered that he was famous for having mangled the English language and deja vu all over again. There's a whole list of things.

The Homeys mangle their language too, and they're famous for it all the time. I wrote about it a little bit in my book, like for example, recently I had a Homegirl named Lisa who works for me and her man came to pick her up after work and she wanted to introduce him to me and she brings him in. She goes, "This is my sufficient other." I said, "No doubt." Recently, I turned the reins over at running the place so I have a CEO who does the day to day, which is a nice thing because it's a $15 million annual operation. It's nice to have somebody else run it and a Homey came into my office not long ago and he says, "Damn G, my lady, she is in a bad mood today." I said, "Why?" "Well, she's beginning her administration period." I said, "I just ended mine and I kinda know what she's going through."

My favorite one, and there's my point, happened when I was presiding at mass in a juvenile detention facility in San Fernando Juvenile Hall in Sylmar, and we're in a big gym and there are 300 kids there, [00:34:00] mainly gang members and I'm vested and I had a little OHA, the sheet that has the readings in it, and sometimes as a presider, I'm going to listen to the readings. I'm going to close my eyes. I put the sheet on my lap and I listened to these gang members come up and doing the readings and some kid, I think it was the Psalm. I was listening with my eyes closed and he got up with something of an overabundance of confidence and he said, "The Lord is exhausted." I go, "What the hell?" The Lord is exalted.

I remember thinking at the time, "Wow, it's way better." I remember thinking, "That's the God I want to know, the one that's exhausted." You know how you would go up to somebody and say, "How are you feeling?" "Oh, I'm so tired but it's a good tired." "Why?" "Well, I helped my friend move into her apartment or I had the grandkids the whole week. I'm exhausted. I'm pooped, but it's a good tired." Then just the thought of a God who exhausts God's self in being too busy loving us to have any time left to be disappointed. Yeah, I like that God way better than the exalted one or the one who cares about it being exalted. I know. I think these things matter because how you see God is how you're going to see folks who are broken and on the margins and it's the only way that you can have mercy and recognize your wound and their wound.

Homeboy Industries started a long time ago. I had more hair and no gray. [00:36:00] I was pastor of the poorest parish in the city of Los Angeles, Dolores Mission, nestled in the middle of two public housing projects, Pico Gardens and Aliso Village. It was the largest grouping of public housing west of Mississippi. We had eight gangs in those projects, in my parish. There are more outside, but just in my parish were eight, which is unheard of. Usually, you'd have one and all the enemies would be outside, but we had eight and they're all at war with each other, making it according to the LAPD, the place of the highest concentration of


gang activity in Los Angeles. If LA is the gang capital of the world, my parish was the gang capital of Los Angeles, which I didn't know when I drove up.

I buried my first young person killed in 1988 and I buried my 200th young person 2 months ago, killed for no reason at all, not all of them from that parish but I run a large gang intervention program so I get asked to do this. The first thing we did was we started a school because there were so many junior high aged, middle school aged gang members who had been given the boot from their home school. Nobody wanted them so they were wreaking havoc in the projects. They were violent. They were selling drugs. They were writing on walls. I remember I walked out to them and I would corner them, isolate them. I'd say, "Hey, if I found a school that would take you, would you go?" To my surprise, every single one said yes.

Then I couldn't find a school that would take them, so that forced my hand. Across the street from the church is our parochial elementary school, K-8, first two floors. The entire third floor was the convent, where the ‘ninjas’ lived. I gathered them all together in the living room and I said, "Hey, would you guys mind [00:38:00] moving out and we could turn the convent into a school for gang members?" They said sure. I don't know what we'd do without nuns. That happened and gang members came in large numbers to the church, not to church services but to our church complex, which upset the apple cart a little bit because our church is supposed to be hermetically sealed, good people in, bad people out, so that was a good gospel challenge.

They started saying, "If only we had jobs.", and so myself and the women in the parish, we marched around the factories that surrounded the housing projects, trying to find felony friendly employers and that wasn't so forthcoming. We invented things. A crew to paint out graffiti and a landscaping crew and a light maintenance crew and a crew to build our child care center, and in 1992, Los Angeles had the civil unrest and everybody looked to our community to be one of those that would predictably explode and we didn't. When the LA Times asked me why is that, I said, "I think it's because we had 60 strategically hired gang members working. They had a reason to get up in the morning, a reason not to torch their community. They were invested."

A movie producer named Ray Stark, who happened to have $500 million, summoned me and long story short, he said, "How would you use some of my money?" I'd like to use all of it actually, but that was not on the table. I said, "Why don't you buy this abandoned bakery across the street? It has [00:40:00] ovens. We'll put hairnets on rival enemy gang members. They can bake bread and we'll call it Homeboy Bakery." That's the extent of my business plan that I presented to him and he said, "Sure." We were off and running. A month later, we started Homeboy Tortillas in the Grand Central Market. Once we had plural, we changed our name from Jobs for a Future to Homeboy Industries, as if there was any industry involved in this.


Not everything worked, I'll be the first to admit it. Homeboy Plumbing really was not hugely successful. Who knew people didn't want gang members in their homes? I did not see that coming. Nobody ever intends to do such a thing, but we backed our way now into becoming the largest gang intervention program and reentry program on the planet. 15,000 folks a year walk through our doors and just about anything that you think might be helpful, we try to do. The centerpiece is our 18-month training program. Every gang member wants to get in that. We have a lot of curricular offerings from anger management to parenting, to grief and loss. We still have the school, tons of 12-step programs, a case management for all our trainees, mental health therapy. We have five paid therapists and 42 volunteer therapists and psychiatrists who prescribe medicine when needed, free tattoo removal, no place on the planet removes more tattoos, gang-related tattoos than we do I suppose.

We have three laser machines and a designated clinic. [00:42:00] We have one paid physician assistant but we have 47 volunteer doctors, thousands and thousands of treatments a year. If any of you are starting to regret that University of Manitoba tattoo you have, see me afterwards. You're not laughing so I take it you have one of those tattoos. That's a clear indicator. It all started because of a guy named Frank, who wandered into my office. I'd never met him before. I didn't know him. Two days out of Corcoran State Prison and he's sitting in front of my desk and tattooed on his forehead filling the entire space like a billboard, and pardon my French, it said, "Fuck the world.", filled the whole space. He said, "You know, I am having a hard time finding a job."

I said, "Well Frank, maybe we could put our heads together on this one." I was thinking, "Where do I send him? To McDonald's?" Do you want fries with that? No, I don't want fries. Mothers clutching their kids running out of the store. Naturally, I hired him and he baked bread, he bagged bread for 2 years and so I went looking for a doctor and I found a doctor at White Memorial Hospital who had a laser machine and he gave me 1 hour a month to chip away at Frank's forehead and a few others. Before long, I had a waiting list of 3,000 gang members who wanted the same service, so we couldn't really stay with that arrangement. A parenthesis, Frank is now a security guard at a movie studio in Hollywood and there is no trace left of the dumbest, angriest thing he'd ever done, proving once [00:46:00] and for all, as Sister Helen Prejean says, "All of us are a whole lot more than the worst things we've ever done."

What else? We have all our training programs, solar panel installation training program. That's hugely successful and we're able to locate incredible jobs after that. We have all our social enterprises, which have grown to 10. I can never get them all but the bakery, which is thriving and Homeboy/Homegirl merchandise and Homeboy silkscreen, which is huge, been around for 21 years. Homeboy Diner, which is the only place you can get food at City Hall in Los Angeles. I'm missing a lot. Homeboy Grocery, which is where you buy our chips and salsas at a whole chain of stores in California. Farmers Markets, we have a lunch truck. We have two venues at LAX, so if you fly to American Airlines over at Terminal 4,


United Airlines, Terminal 6, and Homegirl Café, where women with records, young ladies from rival gangs, waitresses with attitude, will gladly take your order.

It's become something of a famous place at any given time. Do you know actor Jack Black? He was in there a couple of weeks ago. Jim Carrey has been there numerous times, pandemonium whenever he's there. It's selfies all over the place. A couple of months ago, with only 2 hours notice from the Secret Service, we had Vice President Joe Biden wanted to have lunch there. It was motorcade and entourage and I was making my 8-day annual silent [00:46:00] retreat so I wasn't there. I get a voicemail message, "Hey, Father Boyle, this is Joe Biden." He doesn't even say Vice President. "This is Joe Biden. Wow, Homeboy Industries.", like an old shoe. At one point he says, "I tell everybody who will listen, the only reason I stay a Catholic is we've got Jesuits and nuns." I said, "Me too, Joe."

I wasn't there so I had to get the debrief and there was a Homey named Louie who came up to me and said, "While you were gone, we were visited by an MVP." I said, "Do you mean VIP?" "That one, VIP." He goes, "Damn G, imagine here at Homeboy Industries, we were visited by the Vice President of the United States, Mick Romney." I swear to you, you couldn't make that up so I'm thinking of adding a current affairs class to our curriculum. Most famously, Diane Keaton came once for lunch and she's a movie star, actress, Academy Award winner, Annie Hall, Godfather movies, big movie star. She's there with a regular, a guy who's there once a week. Her waitress is Glenda and Glenda's a big girl, been there, done that, tattooed, gang member, felon, parolee. She has no clue who Diane Keaton is, and so she's taking her order and Diane Keaton says, "What do you recommend?"

Glenda rattles off the three platios that she really likes and Diane Keaton says, "I'll have that second one. That one sounds good." Suddenly, something dawns on Glenda. She looks at Diane Keaton and she says, "Wait a minute. I feel like I know you from somewhere, like maybe we've met." Diane Keaton decides to deflect it humbly, "Oh gosh, I don't know. I suppose [00:48:00] I have one of those faces that people think they've seen before." Then Glenda goes, "No, now I know, we were locked up together." Honest to God, that just took my breath away when I heard it. I don't believe we've had any further Diane Keaton sightings now that I think of it.

Suddenly, kinship so quickly, Oscar-winning actress, attitudinal waitress, exactly what God had in mind. What is on God's mind? Again, if you'll permit me here, you need I think need only go to hear Jesus say to the gathered that you maybe one. I suppose he could have said more stuff about himself but he doesn't want it to be about himself. He wants it to be about us. I invite you to take a leisurely stroll through the Acts of the Apostles and what you will discover beyond the quaint snapshot of life in the earliest Christian community is in fact the measure of health in any community at all, including here. Things will leap off the page,


things like see how they love one another. That's not a bad measurement. There's nobody needy in this community, equally a great metric, but my favorite one is an odd one and it says just simply, “and awe came upon everyone.” It would seem that the measure of the health of any community at all may well reside in its ability to stand in awe at what the poor [00:50:00] have to carry rather than stand in judgment at how they carry it.

All of us are called to be what Alice Miller, the late great child psychologist called Enlightened Witnesses, people who through your kindness and tenderness and focused attentive love, return people to themselves. At Homeboy Industries, we go out of our way not to hold the bar up and ask people to measure up. We just want to show up and hold the mirror up and tell people the truth, knowing that my truth is your truth and your truth is a gang member's truth and it all happens to be the same truth, then here's the truth. You are exactly what God had in mind when God made you.

Then you watch folks on the margins as they become that truth, as they inhabit that truth and no bullet can pierce it. No four prison walls can keep it out and death can't touch it because it's huge, but it is a task at Homeboy Industries always to reach in and dismantle the messages of shame and disgrace that get in the way, that keep people from seeing their truth. We were talking about this at lunch. Marcus Borg, the late also great Scripture scholar, used to say that the principal suffering of the poor throughout history and throughout Scripture is shame and disgrace. I think that's quite right. That's the thing you have to contend with.

I remember some years ago, I was invited to speak to 600 social workers in Richmond, Virginia and I wasn't paying that much attention. I always say [00:52:00]yes to things and then only months later, what is this thing? I look, pulled out the letter and I figure I'm a keynote, maybe to open, close, lunch, I look at it and it's a one-day conference from 9 to 5. It's a gang in-service. I am to be the only speaker from 9 to 5. I call two Homeys in Andre and Jose. I sit them down and I said, "Look, you're flying with me to Richmond, Virginia." I'd like you to get up and tell your stories, take your time because we've got a long-ass day to fill.

I had never heard their stories. Jose gets up. He's 25 years old and a gang member, tattooed, been to prison of course and started like anybody does in our 18-month program in what we call the humble place, the first 3 months, their first phase is cleaning toilets. It's like an equalizer. Somebody comes in, I'm a shot caller in my gang, great, toilets. Everybody does toilets. It's a great way to start. He worked his way up. He ended up becoming a valued member of our substance abuse team, a man very, very solid in his own recovery and now he was helping younger guys and women with their addiction issues, a man who had spent a long stretch of time as a homeless man and an even longer stretch as a heroin addict.


He gets up in a self-effacing way to begin his talk and he said, "I guess you could say my mom and me, we didn't get along so good. I think I was 6 when she looked at me and she said, 'Why don't you just [00:54:00] kill yourself? You're such a burden to me.'" 600 social workers audibly gasped and then he says, "It sounds way worser in Spanish." We got whiplash going from gasp to laugh. Then he said, "I think I was 9 when my mom drove me down to the deepest part of Baja, California and she walked me up to an orphanage. She knocked on the door. When the guy came to the door, she said, 'I found this kid.', and she left me there for 90 days until my grandmother could get out of where she had dumped me and my grandmother rescued me. My mom beat me every single day of my elementary school years with things you could imagine and a lot of things you couldn't. Every day, my back would be bloodied and scarred. In fact, I'd have to wear three t-shirts to school every day. The first t-shirt, because the blood would seep through, and the second t-shirt you could still see it. Finally, the third t-shirt, you couldn't see any blood.

Kids at school, they'd make fun of me, 'Hey fool, it's 100 degrees. Why are you wearing three t-shirts?'" Then he couldn't speak any longer, so overwhelmed with emotion. He seemed to be staring at a piece of his story that only he could see. When he could regain speech, he said through his tears, "I wore three t-shirts well into my adult years because I was [00:56:00] ashamed of my wounds. I didn't want anybody to see them, and now I welcome my wounds. I run my fingers over my scars, my wounds are my friends. After all, how can I help heal the wounded, if I don't welcome my own wounds?" Awe came over everyone. The measure of our compassion lies not in our service of those on the margins but only in our willingness to see ourselves in kinship with them.

If you don't welcome your own wound, you will tend to despise the wounded. In the state of California, because we don't welcome our own brokenness, we take the broken and we build prisons to house them. Getting the diagnosis right is everything. We were talking about this yesterday with a lot of stakeholders here in Winnipeg. Nobody has ever met a treatment plan worth anything that was born of a bad diagnosis. I don't believe that's ever happened. Years ago, I was diagnosed eventually with leukemia. I'm feeling okay at the moment, I'm here, or as the Homeys still say, "I hear your cancer's in [00:58:00] intermission." I said, "Yeah, apparently it stepped out to the lobby to buy popcorn, may the line be long."

A funny thing giving the blood next door [a blood donor clinic was operating in a room adjacent to the lecture hall]. I used to always give blood. That was a regular feature of my life because myself and my dad, we always had blood that anybody could use. I went to give blood and the guy kind of blanched and he said, "You need to go to your doctor." So, I went to my doctor who I don't ever go to anymore and he said, "You have mono." I think we can all agree there's a difference between mononucleosis and leukemia. Only a year later did I discover that I had leukemia and I had to be raced into chemo.


A bad diagnosis is never neutral. It always puts you behind the 8-ball. You have to play catch up. It does damage, the thought you got it right. You want to get it right, but this kind of thing, urban violence and gang violence, we always get it wrong. We diagnose it so crazily. We always think kids are drawn to gangs, join the gangs, see the world, wine, women and song, not true, then you might even say gang members have told us that's the truth. You believe them? It's easier to say that I joined a gang because I wanted to belong and they're my second family and they have my back. It's easier to say that than to say, "My mom used to put cigarettes out on me and she used to put my head in the toilet and flush until I nearly drowned." That's hard to say. It's easier to say, "I joined a gang because I wanted to belong. No kid is seeking anything when he joins a [01:00:00] gang, always fleeing something. I've never met the exception and I've been doing this a long time.

Gangs are the places kids go when they've encountered their life is a misery. Who doesn't know by now that misery loves company? Gang violence is the urban poor's version of teenage suicide. Often enough, it's how they act this out. If a kid can't imagine or conjure up an image of what tomorrow looks like, then his present isn't very compelling and if his present doesn't compel him, then he won't care whether he inflicts harm and he won't care whether he ducks to get out of harm's way. It's how it works. You want to get this right.

I was telling this yesterday and I hate to repeat myself but there I am on the Dr. Phil Show and I know what was I thinking, but we thought we had talked the producers down for doing something stupid and there I am backstage and I could hear Dr. Phil say, "Now ladies and gentlemen, the Executive Director and Founder of Homeboy Industries, Father Greg Boyle." I walked out there and their bleachers' filled with people and they're clapping. To my horror, there's Phil sitting on the stage on a stool. My empty stool is next to him awaiting me, but on his side of the stage is a gorgeous Mahogany coffin on those four-wheel dollies. On my side of the stage is a perfectly reconstructed jail cell with bed and toilet and sink and bars. They went to great expense for these two set pieces.

They flew out 14 year old, 15 year old, 16 year old boys, African American, Latino, Caucasian, three kids who apparently had been [01:02:00] gravitating perilously close to gang involvement, with their very distraught single mothers. One by one, they brought the kids out and they would sort of, Phil would grab each one figuratively by the lapel and say, "Don't you see where this choice is leading you? To death or prison." Finally, by the third kid, I had to intervene. It was more than I could take. I said, "Phil, how do I break this to you? These kids know this better than either of us know it. They know it will end in death or prison. They don't care that it will." That's the key diagnostic moment. If you know that that's the diagnosis, that will lead you down the path that will lead to a treatment plan worthy of this complex social dilemma.

There is only three profiles of kids who join gangs, not five, not eight, only three. There's the despondent kid who can't imagine tomorrow. There's the


traumatized kid who cannot see his way clear to transform his pain so he keeps transmitting it, and then there's the mentally ill kid and they're all on a continuum of severity, from this kid's more despondent than mentally ill. This kid is more traumatized than mentally ill. If we knew that to be the case as I would bet my entire life on it, we would infuse hope to kids for whom hope is foreign and we would help heal the traumatized and we’d deliver mental health services in a timely and culturally appropriate way.

Thank you for clapping periodically because then I could take a swig of water and I'm very grateful to you. I'm battling some kind of thing. Let me end with this story and then we're going to open it up for some [01:04:00] questions and hopefully some answers. I’ll anticipate a question. One question that always comes up is about enemies working side by side with each other. It's decidedly dicey. A kid will come in and say, "I'm ready, ready, ready." Then I'll say, "Okay, I have an opening in the bakery but you have to work with X, Y and Z and I rattled off the names of rivals, enemies." They always think for a long time and then they say, "Okay, I'll work with them. I'm not going to talk to them."

I remember how in the early days how much that bothered me, because it just did, and I got panicked about it until you discover of course that it's impossible for human beings to demonize people they know. Humans can't pull that off. Humans can't sustain that. I had a kid, a little short guy, 19 years old, everybody called him Youngster. I thought he was ready so I bring him into our Homeboy Silkscreen factory, which is a huge facility off-campus from our headquarters, thousands and thousands of gang members have worked side by side there over the last 2 decades. I introduced Youngster to his 30 co-workers and I watch him as he shakes hands with each one, looks them in the eye, firm handshake and there were a lot of enemies, a lot of rivals. I remember thinking, "Wow this is great.", until he gets to the last guy, and the last guy seems to be wanting to avoid this encounter altogether, a kid everybody called Puppet.

When Puppet and Youngster are in each other's vicinity, they mumble something, they stare at their shoes, they don't shake hands. I know they're enemies because I know what gangs they're from but he just finished shaking hands with a whole bunch of enemies. [01:06:00] I discovered later that this is a hatred that's really quite deep and personal, beyond which neither of them think they can get past. I sensed that much at the moment and I said, "Look, if you guys can't hang working together, let me know. I got a bunch of people who want this job." [foreign language 01:06:21], I hate those, they don't say a word. 6 months later, Puppet leaves his house, walks to a corner store some distance from his home and he buys something. On his way home for some reason, he decides to take a shortcut so he dodges into an alley and because he took this detour, suddenly, unexpectedly, he's surrounded by 10 members of a rival gang, 10 against 1. They beat him badly.

He falls to the ground, and while he's lying there, they will not stop kicking his head until he's lifeless. Somebody finds his body and takes him to White


Memorial Hospital, where he's declared effectively brain dead, but it's the policy there to keep you connected to machines for 48 hours so you can get a flat read with no brain activity, and if it's flat for 2 days, then the doctors can sign the death certificate and make it official. This allowed family and friends to gather. I was giving a talk at St. Louis University. I flew home immediately. I've seen a lot of horrible things in my life but nothing to compare to the sight of this young man with his head swollen many times its size. It was horrifying. You could barely train your eyes on him.

[01:08:00] At the end of the 48-hour period, as a priest, I said a blessing prayer. I gave him [foreign language 01:13:13]. I anointed his forehead with oil. We disconnected and a week later, we buried him. In the first 24 hours, as Puppet was lying beaten in the hospital and I was alone in my office at 8:30 at night, the phone rings and it's Youngster, Puppet's co-worker from the Silkscreen factory. "Hey.", he says, "That's messed up, about what happened to Puppet." I said, "Yeah, it is." Then with a certain kind of eagerness even, he says, "Is there anything I can do? Can I give him my blood?" We both fell silent under the weight of it, until finally he broke the silence, choking back his tears and he said with great deliberation, "He was not my enemy. He was my friend. We work together."

Can I say that always happens at Homeboy Industries? Of course it does. Any exceptions? No. I can't think of a single one. It shouldn't surprise us that God's own dream come true for us that we be one just happens to be our own deepest longing for ourselves, for it turns out, it's mutual. You find your way out to the margins because [01:10:00] you know that if you stand there, look under your feet, the margins are getting erased because you stood there, and then brace yourselves because people will accuse you of wasting your time. The prophet Jeremiah writes, "In this place, for in this place in which you say it is a waste, there will be heard again the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness, the voices of those who sing.", and we're called to make those voices heard, for this lecture is not the place you've come to, it's always been the place you will go from. For the vision still has its time, presses on to fulfillment and it will not disappoint, and if it delays, we wait for it.

Thank you all very much. Thank you. Thank you. Some of you need to go to class and some of you don't want to go to class and they were going to do question and answers. Yes, you want to say something? Sure. Yeah.

Speaker 1: We have two microphones, one on the right and one on the left, so if you just raise your hands, we'll try and bring a microphone around to you as quickly as possible. [01:12:00]

Speaker 6: Father, could you talk a little bit about racism? Much of the margins in Winnipeg relate to racism and I wonder if you could speak about racism at Homeboy.


Father Gregory: I don't think I'm all that good at that. Our program is not for those who need help. It's only for those who want it. You have to walk through the door. It's like recovery. No amount of me wanting that guy to have a life is the same as that guy wanting to have it. It's just like recovery. Recovery, they say it takes what it takes. Who and why walks through our doors? Why would they walk through? It's the death of a friend, the birth of a son, the long stretch in prison, whatever. As I mentioned, those eight gangs we had, seven were Latino and one was African American. Within no time at all, the African American CRIPS set moved out of the projects.

The area in which we moved to our second and our third headquarters was in what they called the Hollenbeck Police precinct, 40 gangs, 10,000 gang members, all Latino. We had that reputation for a time that we only helped Latino gang members, and the truth is we help anybody who walks through the doors. If African American gang members don't walk through the doors, there's not much that we can do. We can't do quotas. We don't recruit, because we know how it works. There isn't a gang member in LA County who doesn't know about Homeboy Industries.

By the time we got to our fourth headquarters in 2008, that's when we started to see [01:14:00] that we were serving the whole county. Of course, in the California prisons, African American gang members and Latino gang members, it doesn't matter anymore who your enemies are among the Latinos. It's about race. That's an added complication at Homeboy. We have men, women, African American, Latino, Asian. We even have white supremacists, which is an interesting mix. They come out of prison. They have Swastikas all over the place, and if they're willing to change their lives, why wouldn't we be willing to help them do it?

We try to model what it is for people to not demonize, and the truth is you can't demonize people you know. There are a lot of systemic structural things in your question and I don't know how to address it except that in the end, kinship will win the day. That may seem kind of lofty, but kinship is about just being persevering in the notion that we have to stand against forgetting that we belong to each other, recognizing that for example in California prisons, they're just filled with poor men of color. All the while, you're trying to announce that as an injustice. You're trying to show a light on that reality, but the truth is, at Homeboy, we're trying to work with people, one person at a time, knowing that if you stand at the margins, people start to question the margins. If you stand at the margins, people start to say, "Why are you standing there?" I think that's important because people will ask you why you're standing there.

It's less about having a program; how [01:16:00] do we address racism. I think you chip away at stuff and it is the slow work of God to acknowledge that we belong to each other and that widening the circle so that nobody is outside of it is a daily constant struggle and you have to engage in it. I don't have any kind of magic wand how to address racism. I think there are so many complex things


especially in the United States in terms of policing that I think they really do believe that their task is to get the bad guy and the bad guy doesn't belong to them and the bad guy to them is often a poor man of color.

That's a cultural shift in how you do policing and we've made progress but we have a long way to go.

Speaker 7: Doesn't the United States itself as a country with racial segregation that is mirrored in the prison populations in the United States, because what you find in terms of empirical evidence about good behavior in prisons, in particular US prisons, is that they're highly racialized. You are from Homeboy. How do you actually take on that task of de-racializing these guys who come in with very fixed notion of race, very ignorant and I guess very brainwashed and with a violent, with high levels of violent tendencies to hate the other. How do you de-racialize Latinos compared to African American, compared to white, compared to Asian? How do you do that at Homeboy? I guess [01:18:00] you've been successful. I've never heard about it, but clearly it's been a successful industry. How do you do it in the United States where people are heavily racialized?

Father Gregory: I don't think we ever - we never deal with things head on. We never said, "Let's talk about we know that you guys are enemies, you're from rival gangs so we're going to sit you down." We never do that. We know that you're African American, you're Latino. In prison, you guys don't get along. We're going to deal with that. We don't. I was saying earlier that Richard Rohr, the theologian says that, "Women work things out face to face. Men work things out shoulder to shoulder." By and large, we work things out shoulder to shoulder. We don't articulate it. It's utterly reliable. It will always work out. Again, there is absolutely no exception to this. After they finish their time here that they hang on to this racial disparity, it doesn't happen. It just tells us something about human nature. Put people together and then pretty soon people go, by osmosis they actually discover, "wow, we're actually similar. We're not dissimilar. My God, we have the same issues. My God, we've been traumatized by the same things. We've shared a torturous childhood. We have that in common."

That stuff happens very, very fast, without anybody sitting down. Let's talk about the racial divide that we've experienced. Never happens at Homeboy. I'm really glad it doesn't because it's more organic. It's more natural and it's utterly reliable, utterly. In fact, you'll find folks being in photographs together and sometimes, they'll comment on it and then they'll have their arm around and they said, "We'd never do this in prison." They always say stuff like that. Again, you don't want to force stuff. People come at their own time. [01:20:00] I heard a Homey the other day describe Homeboy Industries. He goes, "Here, we laugh from the stomach." I'd never heard that before. I thought, "Yeah, I get what it is. It's genuine. It's deep. It's profound. It's universal. We all share it. Yeah, here we laugh from the stomach.


I asked a Homey the other day, a little guy, a minor who came from school. He was just sitting in my office. He deposited his backpack for safekeeping. They all do that in my office. They know that no one will enter my office to steal their backpack, which is true. He's just sitting there and I'm writing something. I said, "Hang on a second." I said, small talk, "How'd you get here today?" "Oh I walked." "Oh okay." Then he says, "actually, I came running." I looked at him and we both connected. I said, "Yeah, that's right. You came running. I get it." It's a place that's spacious and generous and accepting and boundless and it's love. If love is the answer, community is the context, tenderness is the methodology and tenderness is the most foreign thing that a gang member has ever experienced, and it's liberating. Everybody finds transformation. I do not transform that kid but we both find transformation in that place and there's a difference there.

A PBS reporter finished that interview by saying, "How does it feel to have saved thousands and thousands of lives?" I said, "I don't know what you're talking about. All I know is [01:22:00] my life has been changed by the people here in this place. In fact, every day, I come running." Yes?

Speaker 8: I wonder if you can reconcile for me if you will the central image of kinship that you keep on coming back to with people who would speak of language of professionalism and appropriate boundaries and care for the caregiver and a like question is whether there is a union and whether you could imagine your industry being the same with the union.

Father Gregory: Say it again, say that, the second part.

Speaker 8: Is there a union?

Father Gregory: A union?

Speaker 8: Yeah. Is Homeboy Industries unionized?

Father Gregory: No, I'll answer that first part. We're a training program and we're a therapeutic community. It kind of is a language that we wouldn't necessarily understand. We want them to move on after 18 months. It's hard for them because they don't want to, because it's kind of a cocoon. It's a nest. It's a comfort zone. We want them to always feel that way. Homeys will come back. It's a touch stone of tenderness where they can come and a kid came in the other day, used to work for us years and years ago or was in our training program. I said, "What are you doing?" "It's my day off. I came to get my fix." I said, "Fix of what?" He goes, "Love." I get it. I know exactly what that is.

I think the question about boundaries is really a good one. We're so terrified, terrified and in the end, [01:24:00] tell me how we can do this without it being relational. I don't know how, and we think it can happen without entering into a relationship, without being connected to each other and I don't know how,


because then we have this idea that if we just deliver services fast enough, and here are the list of services, and often enough, it's the outsider view designing the list of services without really listening to people.

The people who I want to work at Homeboy Industries are the ones who stop into my office at the end of the day and they say, "I don't know where I would be without this place. This place saved my life today." Senior staff will say that all the time, and I go, "Yes, that's the person I want to have work here." Otherwise, you have people who are there to fix bad people or fix the broken people and I don't want those people working at Homeboy. The people who can say, "I am the healer," instead of, "I need healing." I want the person who says, "I need healing." In the end, they have a greater capacity to receive people because they're connected. Their brokenness connects to the woundedness of those who walk through our doors.

I get the boundary thing but I don't know how we do this unless it's utterly totally relational where you're connected to people. If it's dispassionate delivery of services, well then you're the Department of Motor Vehicles. I'm not that interested in that. Call me old fashioned. Yeah?

Speaker 1: This will be our last question.

Father Gregory: Oh really?

Speaker 9: It's not a question. Thank you so much, Father Greg. At our church, [01:26:00] one of our ministers and colleagues, Dr. Carl Ridd, taught us to say in the Lord's Prayer, the kindom of God rather than the kingdom of God and I really appreciate it you're making me really understand that today, the kindom of heaven. Thank you so much.

Father Gregory: you have one more over there?

Speaker 10: Yeah, it's a nuts and bolt kind of a question. Do you have difficulty finding enough employers to work with after your Homeys have done their 18 months and do you support those employers, let's say as much as you support the Homeys?

Father Gregory: Yeah, it's a tough thing. It's hard to find employers willing to give them a chance. We've been around for 27 years so we've been able to nurture a lot of employers to be able to help them. A lot of times, they're nervous, and again you can't demonize people you know and they'll go, "Okay, send me somebody.", and they're quite terrified of that prospect. Then you send them somebody and they go, "Wow, this guy's great. He's interesting. He's funny. He's on time. Can you send us somebody else like him as well?" That happens but it's just because we have this notion that keeps us from yeah, go ahead shout it out and this will be the last one and I'll end with something.


Speaker 11: I'm just wondering in terms of if you could identify general risk factors for kids and young adults. What I'm wondering is my understanding of gangs is that they provide a sense of false family, to the gang member family. They provide excitement. If you're selling drugs and you're doing well, you may be making a lot of money, so can see how your organization would successfully substitute the relationships, but how do you counteract that need for excitement, that need for more money?

Father Gregory: I think it's all myth. The three things you said are all myths, it seems to me. [01:28:00] We perpetuate myths. We like myths. How are you going to keep them down on the farm after they've made money hand over for selling drugs. It's like a second family. It's protection, excitement. Law enforcement always says excitement. When they go out and talk about gangs, they always say it's excitement. I go, "Are you kidding me?" That's the biggest myth, as if somebody's going, "wow, yes I'm going to join that group because it looks exciting." No kid joins a gang because he wants to belong. He joins a gang because he would like very much to die. Then you go, "no, wait a minute. I've talked to gang members and they've told me excitement." I go, "Yeah, I know they have." No, not even a slice of it is true, and that's really important because you want to get underneath it. You want to say, "Wow, what is this about?"

Again, there's no substitute for having a reason to get up in the morning and a reason not to gang bang at night and a reason for your mom to be proud of you and a reason for your kids not to be ashamed of you. That beats any amount of money you make as a drug dealer. Always, always, there's no exception. You go, "well, wait a minute, there are guys making money selling drugs." Trust me. 95% of all gang members want what every single guy in our office has, which is purpose.

It's like recovery. It's hard for people. It's hard for people to walk in the door but they all want it because they're human beings.

Speaker 11: [inaudible 01:34:54]

Father Gregory: Yeah, because I think in the end, it's important to debunk what we've come to believe. Most of it is mythic. Once you get underneath it, you go, "Wow, this kid [01:30:00] is fleeing something. Let's address what they're fleeing." Every kid who comes into our offices comes with a disorganized attachment. Mom was frightening or frightened and you can't calm yourself down if you've never been soothed and that's how that works. We engage in attachment repair that happens in a community that's real, that sheds light on their fake, false, shallow, empty gang past, but you can't shake your finger at it. You have to help them put their finger on it. Then in the light of real community, they can see what that was, which is really the hard work where they have to re-identify who they are in the world. “I used to be that. That was the old version of me and now I'm this, exactly what God had in mind when God made me,” paradise. Thank you.


Speaker 1: We would now call upon Ms. Danielle Felicia, who's a Ph.D. candidate in the Mauro [Centre] Peace and [Conflict]Studies program to deliver a note of appreciation.

Danielle: Over the past couple of days, I've had the honor of hearing Father Boyle in various settings and community settings and in luncheons and had conversations with him and I've noticed a few words come up frequently. You've all heard them today and their tenderness, kinship, compassion and healing and I think more than anything, Father Boyle embodies these words and it's so refreshing to meet somebody who walks what they talk [01:32:00] and he's brought such humility, wisdom and kindness to our community and I'm truly grateful to have you here and it's my profound honor to present you with this token of our appreciation.

Father Gregory: I have a feeling I will know you forever. I don't know if you have the same feeling. Here we go, let's just take a picture. You got it?

Danielle: All right.

Tuesday, October 6, 2015

END

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