Fr. Greg Boyle, Homeboy…and the ‘No Matter What-ness’ Factor

“If we lose hope, then we will be unable to give hope.”
Former gang member, now senior staff member at Homeboy Industries

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Thursday night Father Greg Boyle was on Fresh Air with Terry Gross. He’s been on the show several times before but this show was I think the best. It was inspiring, funny—and extremely upsetting because of Homeboy Industries’ present situation.

(Here’s the link to listen to the show online. Do it. I promise you won’t be sorry.)

Fresh Air’s host, Terry Gross, wanted Greg to be on the show, in part, because of the release of his new book, Tattoos on the Heart, which is steadily moving up the LA Times best seller list.

But first Gross was interested in talking about the financial crisis at Homeboy.

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It has been exactly one week since Homeboy Industries announced that it was laying off 330 of its 427 employees because, after nearly 20-years of operation, the largest and best known gang intervention program in the nation simply could not meet its payroll.

The various businesses that Homeboy runs—the bakery, the cafe, the silkscreen business, the merchandise—will keep going because they are largely self-sustaining and becoming ever more successful. But the day-to day-operations—the jobs programs (training, placement and interim employment), tattoo removal, legal and psychological services—which serve upwards of 12,000 men and women a year, need a cash infusion of $5 million dollars to return to fiscal health and sustainability.

To be clear: the $5 million is not needed to square a deficit. Homeboy did not spend itself into a $5 million a hole. It has been struggling for nearly a year to make up for the loss of grants and big ticket donations that vanished into the abyss of the collapsing economy. This slowdown of the funding stream was combined with the burgeoning need for Homeboy’s services, a need that the same economic meltdown engendered. The organization patched together operating cash for as long as it could. Then one day it couldn’t any more. That day was, officially, last Thursday.

The needed $5 million will give give the organization the breathing room to recover to a point of fiscal sustainability, plus provide a cushion so that it is not one emergency away from another cash flow catastrophe.

(To put this in perspective, MOCA needed two separate $30 million endowments to return itself to sustainability. Reggie the Alligator cost $7.9 million to be caught and housed, which as Greg mentions on Fresh Air, is roughly Homeboy’s yearly budget.)

Since last week, there has been a nonstop outpouring of support—both monetary and emotional—from ordinary people. But no deep pocket angels have thus far stepped forward with the necessary big pot of cash. Although the wealthy of Los Angeles universally praise Father Greg as “saintlike” or whatever, in most cases, that’s as far it goes.

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Wednesday, the day he taped the Fresh Air broadcast, was Father Greg’s 56th birthday and the recently-laid-off staff of Homeboy, plus a crowd of others who consider Greg to be “my real father,” came to surprise him with a cake, cheering, hugs, tears and some checks, one check for $1000, funds raised by a bunch of concerned UCLA students.

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(And while we’re on the subject, DONATIONS TO HOMEBOY MAY BE MADE HERE.

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I spent most of the day at Homeboy, in part to be present for Greg’s party. But more than anything, I just needed to spend time on the premises, to be in some kind of—I don’t know—solidarity with the people and the program that I care about so much.

Here’s the thing: I cannot imagine Los Angeles without the services, the community—and the hope—that Homeboy provides. I mean it. I simply cannot imagine it. The thought feels like the what-if-George-Bailey-had never-lived part of “Its a Wonderful Life,“—times ten thousand.

As Greg’s cake was being passed out, I looked around the room at those who had come to celebrate with much joy and much worry. I saw person after person who, at one time or another, had told me that they are not sure they would be alive were it not for Father Greg and Homeboy.

The statements are not hyperbole. Just based on my own knowledge, if pressed, I could list off the top of my head at least 100 people—double or triple that if I made a real effort—who could easily be dead, locked up for a very long time, or mired in some other chasm of despair, if it were not for this place that, with a few notable exceptions, the wealthy and powerful of Los Angeles have thus far not deemed worthy of rescue.

For example, there is Louis Perez, pictured above at the recent ALOUD event with Father Greg that I moderated. Louis, who is 30 years old, spent 12 of his 30 years on earth locked up in some incarceration facility or other, both juvenile and adult. Now Louis is on Homeboy’s senior staff and is one of the most talented people you’ll ever meet at helping younger guys gather the courage to change their own lives. “This place gave me the family I didn’t have,” he says, tearing up when he says it. “Father Greg was the father I didn’t have. That’s the way it is for most of us.”

Wednesday, I also spent time talking to Gustavo Martinez, whom I’ve known since back in the day when he was a young and surly gangster. Even during his bad old gang days, Gus was also wickedly funny with a heart the size of Wyoming, despite the fact that, when he was a child, his mother used to put cigarettes out on his skin—and worse.

Due to the combination of horrific childhood abuse, gang-engendered PTSD, and a series of deaths of friends close to him, in the last few years Gus suffered from clinical depression that sent him into spirals of incapacitation. Therapy at Homeboy, plus the support of the community, has brought him back to himself and he now is working as the assistant maintenance supervisor for the building. (He was busily unclogging a pesky drain in the Homegirl cafe as I was leaving the offices.)

Two weeks ago, before the layoffs, Gus confided to me that he had signed up for a series of cooking classes. “I can cook, no problem,” he told me. “But I want to learn to use spices. Spices are the key.” Knowing him as I do, I was delighted by his admission. It wasn’t so much the cooking that struck me, it was what it symbolized in rebooted optimism.

For Gus too, Homeboy is the only family, the only parent, the one dependably caring place that has allowed him to right himself.

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It’s important to know too that, in many ways, Gus is the exception, not the rule in terms of those who pass through these programs. In fact, most of those I know whose lives have been transformed by Homeboy Industries weren’t there on Wednesday because the party was in the middle of the business day and, having gotten their start at one of Homeboy’s programs, they had long ago graduated and were hard at work elsewhere— on a construction crew, as a PA on a movie set (or higher up the film crew food chain), as a crew manager for an oil and gas company, in administration at a local college, in auto mechanics or, in one case, at a legal firm, in another case, working for the mayor of Los Angeles.

Yet, for each of them, at the crucial moment-–often at many, many crucial moments—Homeboy provided the needed “no-matter-what-ness” as Greg puts it, the firm, unshakable conviction the young man or woman is worth something, that he or she matters and can have a decent future beyond what their past had predicted. Even when homeboys and homegirls are still too enmeshed in gangs to qualify to work at Homeboy, a belief in their possibilities and inherent goodness is held for them, as if in trust —“no matter what.”

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A homegirl I ran into on Wednesday is one of those who, like Gus, has not made it to the graduation goal line. She is at an earlier stage than he is, yet her progress is heartening. Her name is Jessica Valles. When she was young, one of Jessica’s eyes was terribly damaged in a gang shooting. Forever after it bulged, froglike, from its socket, and no parent or family member had either the wherewithal or the desire to see that it got repaired. The eye combined with severe childhood abuse turned Jessica into a very tough and very angry young woman. Yet, to anyone bothering to glance slightly below the surface, the hurt girl beneath the fury was always visible.

I met her a few years ago when she first came to Homeboy. For a long time, her progress was a matter of four-steps-forward, three-and-a-half back. She’d be working, doing well, then would explode and disappear into her old life. The steps forward seemed to take better hold when, last year, through a Homeboy connection, she was finally able to get the needed plastic surgery to have her eye fixed.

After that, the Homeboy staff got her into rehab so that she could kick the meth with which she often self-medicated. She would sometimes call me from the rehab facility, saying she was making progress, that she finally understood that all the rage was masking tears. “It’s hard to face,” she said. “But I’m strong, Celeste. I’m strong. And it’s different from my old strength.”

But now that she is out of rehab, she needs a job. Finding nothing elsewhere, she came to the Homeboy offices for help.

When I saw Jessica on Wednesday, she told me confidently that she was on the waiting list for a job at Homeboy.

I winced at her statement, and asked if she was aware of the recent money troubles.

She nodded. “I know they can’t hire me now,” she said. “But I’ll wait. And I’ll find a way to make it until they can. I’ve gotten this far. I’m strong.” She paused, her expression faltering. “I need to be here,” she said finally. And then she repeated the refrain I’ve heard a zillion times. “G’s like the parent I never had. And Homeboy’s like the home I never had, you know what I’m sayin’?”

I did. I do.

But the more relevant question is does the rest of Los Angeles understand Homeboy’s importance?—both to the homeboys and homegirls who seek its help, and to the city’s own claim to humanity.

As of this writing, it is a question that remains open.

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“My hope is that this will be a moment where people in Los Angeles put first things recognizably first…. A Warhol, the Hollywood Sign, and Reggie the Alligator seem to be of more value, frankly, than the 12,000 gang members who walk through our doors every year. So maybe this is a moment for people to say, ‘That’s not right, actually.'”

Greg Boyle, May 19, 2010, on Fresh Air

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ONE MORE PITCH FOR DONATIONS TO HOMEBOY, if you’re so moved. They may be made HERE.

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