I have some bad news and some good news in the ongoing fiscal crisis at Homeboy Industries.
FIRST THE BAD NEWS:
Yesterday, I got multiple collect calls from a former gang member whom I know well. He is in prison on a parole violation, but he will be out soon.
When I saw from my caller ID that it was probably him calling, I intentionally didn’t pick up the phone.
I know why the guy—whom we’ll call Carlos—-is trying to get me on the phone. He wants to know if I have talked to Father Greg Boyle about whether or not he has a job at Homeboy Industries when he gets out.
I have talked to Father Greg and the answer is, no. There is no job. Not for him, not for anyone.
Carlos was working at Homeboy when he was arrested. He was doing really well at work, except for….um, you know. The arrest.
At the time of his arrest, his supervisor at Homeboy had assured him he would have a job when he got out.
But that was before the economy went to hell.
Now Homeboy has a hiring freeze. In fact, they will be lucky if they can make payroll for their existing workers. Added to that, the jobs the Homeboy staff used to be able to find for the scores and scores of young men and women who come through their doors weekly looking for work, seem to have all but vaporized.
So what to do?
Carlos is smart, personable, handsome, even—-and determined “to do it right” upon his release. But do it right where? Who will give him the chance? America has the highest rate of job losses in 34 years and Carlos is a paroled felon, former gang member. Who will hire him? Seriously, who?
Unfortunately, Carlos is not the exception; he’s the rule. There are thousands more just like him.
What is going to happen to them now that the city’s biggest job and gang rehab program is in real financial trouble?
Since I didn’t know the answer to that question, I dodged calls.
Today I will be braver.
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OKAY, NOW THE GOOD NEWS:
Carol and Frank Biondi just sent out their yearly Christmas gifts to their lengthy list of friends and colleagues. Frank Biondi, in case you don’t recognize the name, used to be the head of Viacom, and after that, of Universal Studios. Now he’s a director for Amgen, Cablevision, Harrah’s Entertainment and a pile of other corporations.
Carol, his wife, is a smart, extremely savvy activist for juvenile justice. A big fundraiser for Hillary Clinton. A powerhouse.
In any case, this is the note that the Biondi’s sent out in lieu of Christmas gifts and their usual holiday party invitation:
This Holiday Season we feel more urgently than ever the need to support Fr. Greg Boyle’s efforts to help the most overlooked and underserved young people in our community. We have chosen not to hold our annual Christmas party and instead make a donation to Homeboy Industries. Because this non-profit is all about jobs, they have been doubly impacted by the crippled job market and the drop in contributions. The delicious cookies enclosed are a product of the commercial Homeboy Bakery where former rival gang members work side by side learning concrete skills to change their lives in hopes of a real future. I would love to give you a tour of our magnificent facility and then have lunch in the Homegirl Cafe. PLEASE take me up on this offer. We wish you and your family Happy Holidays and everyone a better New Year in 2009. With much love, Carol and Frank
Is it going to solve Homeboy’s fiscal problems? No. But it’s a step. And maybe it will attract to it other steps.
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Photo: J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times
Message to anyone contemplating joining a gang or committing a crime – choices have consequences, many of them long-term. Think before acting. Learn from others’ examples. It’s not so fun and you’re not so big once you’re on the street with a criminal record and can’t get employment.
“Carlos” had his second chance. Someone else who isn’t a repeat offender should get the next job opening.
Hang in there Homeboy and Homegirl Industries!
Hang in there Father Greg and God Bless people like Carol and Frank Biondi and there good works.
“Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them. Does he not leave the ninety-nine in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it?… there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent.” Luke 15:4, 7 “
Woody,
You should know by now that Carlos is good person who was most likely another victim of robber baron repulicans, whitey, gavachos and a host of other boogie men out to get a homie.
Dear another victim.
He’s a guy for whom no adult was ever there, when he was a kid. No one. Not ever. Father ran off. Mother was a hype—a heroin addict. Bounced from foster care home to foster care home as a kid, as was his brother. Finally ran away altogether, and then broke his brother out of foster care too. The brothers brought themselves up on the street. By the time they ran into gangs it was a tremendous relief, a semblance of family, no matter how screwed up and damaging that “family” was. Now he’s trying to set things right in his life.
People like “Carlos” are particularly frustrating, because he’s loaded with natural gifts. One of those about whom Fr. Greg and I have often wondered what he might have been if there had been just one decent adult in his life. Just one. Parent. Grand parent. Aunt. Uncle. Foster parent. Somebody.
But there wasn’t.
I don’t know how I’d turn out under such circumstances. I don’t know how you would.
I do know he’s the person who, when locked up, moved heaven and earth to find out where I was and to get hold of me when he heard my dad died.
None of this, by the way, lets him off the hook for a minute. He had a shitty childhood, but so what? Lots of people have worse. He still has to get a grip and get his life together now. If he doesn’t, it’s on him.
But, look at it selfishly. It’s in your and my best interest that he becomes a working, tax-paying citizen, not one more person we’re paying $35,000 a year to warehouse in the state’s overcrowded prisons.
And there are a lot of people out there just like “Carlos.” He just happens to be the one calling me right now.
Message to “Another victim:”
Your racist hatred is the whole problem.
(Bad judgement to print his kind of comment, Ms. Fremon, as it simply foments more racial division.)
Charles, things have to get pretty far out there for me to delete them.
Yeah Charles, lets just delete the dissenters. Lets hustle them off to a corner and silence their criticisms. Eventually maybe we can either indoctrinate them to “our” way of thinking or better yet, devise a system for their demise. The process you seem to advocate has already been done over 5 decades ago, and it had miserable results.
As for hollering “racism”, maybe you need to cool your heels. This particular commenter, this Another Victim isn’t invoking racism so much as he’s sarcastically poking fun at a prior commenter. Hang around, you’ll eventually untangle the mysterious dynamic afoot.
PS. Good counter w/the Scripture,DQ. Muy suave…
Dear Gava,
Not the dissenters. Dissenters welcome. You’ve deliberately distorted my point. I’m speaking of racists. I reject racial hatred, from any race, and “A victim’s” message is one of racial hatred. It foments divisiveness, and more hatred.
CB
Dear Gava,
Ah, I see your point. I missed the sarcasm in “A Victim’s” cryptic message. So I should revise my comment to say that “A Victim” would seem to be making a point against kneejerk racism, with which I would be inclined to agree.
Thank you for clarifying.
CB
My upbringing was not much different from Carlos: no father to speak of, mother in jail most of my first ten years of life, and I was on my own at 16. It hasn’t been Easy Street. Everything I have (while admittedly not much), I have earned from my own labor. But even though my childhood was as screwed up as Celeste’s friend there is one striking difference: when I “hit the streets”, I was in a different socio-economic bracket: white and middle-class; even with little education, I had more protection and assistance from that insular community than Carlos surely received from his. We need more, not less, outreach programs in the lower and lower-middle class communities. I applaud the Biondis.
Woody, do not blaspheme and claim to be omniscient.
Celeste, thank you for keeping Homeboy in my mind. I’ve known of them for a while, but your post today prompted me to make a donation. I made it as a gift for a friend of mine in celebration of the holiday season. Hopefully, when he receives the e-card from Homeboy, he will make a gift also.
Keep up the good work.
You people need a reality check. Hellloo, the guy was working at Homeboy and still got arrested AGAIN. So obviously having a job didn’t do shit for him did it? And don’t give me the story of no parents. Many working mothers raise good decent kids with no help or father in the picture. The community where Homeboy is will tell you that most of the gangbangers at Homeboy are still active and banging. Father Boyle protects them and like everyone including the Biondi’s make excuses for them. If he wants to help let them live in their neigborhood. Why hasn’t Laura Chick done an audit on this so called non profit? What did they do with the $600,000 they got from the GRP program? Homeboy and Father Boyle’s org. has donated to political campaigns. why is this money being used for campaign donations. Talk to people in the community, talk to the victims these gang bangers assault, these gang bangers aren’t as innocent as people think they are.
“Father Boyle protects them and like everyone including the Biondi’s make excuses for them. If he wants to help let them live in their neigborhood. Why hasn’t Laura Chick done an audit on this so called non profit? What did they do with the $600,000 they got from the GRP program? Homeboy and Father Boyle’s org. has donated to political campaigns. why is this money being used for campaign donations.”
Dear cityactivist,
I will lay it out for you.
Rule #1. YOU DON’T F*CK WITH THE VATICAN OR THEIR POSSESSION’S.
Rule #2. YOU DON’T F*CK WITH THE JESUIT’S, SEE RULE #1.
Oh Chriminee, now we’re equating Homeboy Inc. with the Illumninati. Yeah that’s it. Father Boyle was establishing a clandestine coven to do the devil’s work. Uh-huh.
Listen the whole damned country, at least those who live like the common man, is facing a world of hurt. We need to hunker down and deal with it. Charity is a good approach. Paranoia, finger pointing, and denial won’t accomplish a thing. Of course if finger pointing and retribution is your stick you can send lumps of coal to the money meisters on Wall St.
City activist,
Mighty interesting claims there. No doubt you’ve spent lots of time at Homeboy, right?
So you think Homeboy gave to political campaigns? (A notion that is beyond preposterous.) Prove it. If that’s true, it’ll be easy to find. It’s all public record.
As for the GRP (Gang Reduction Plan), funds, Homeboy gets $27K per month to do case management, job placement and pre-release counseling for kids coming out of probation camps—kids who, without help, tend to reoffend, because they go right back into the problem environment that helped create the situation in the first place. But with intervention, statistically juveniles coming out of probation do much, much better.
And we save money when we don’t lock kids up. (You might want to Google the cost of incarcerating a teenager. It’s impressive.) But why look at real costs, right? Once kids have screwed up. Throw ’em away. We’ve got plenty to spare. Screw the little bastards.
Oh, yeah, AND about those GRPs: the city—here’s the fun part—in all it’s infinite wisdom, is three months behind in its payments. So Homeboy—and presumably—-the other GRP contractors, all of whom we can bet are hurting for funds—are fronting the money for the city to do these programs. (This is something I’ll likely be blogging about tonight.) No one knows when or if that approximately $90 grand will ever get paid back. So, yeah, those Homeboy people, livin’ large on the city’s tab.
Get your facts straight.
Demonizing makes life so much easier. No tough questions to ask. Just a terrific feeling of unassailable, fact-free righteousness. (And our prisons get bigger and bigger and bigger.)
No Gava Joe I’ll have to disagree, the knucklehead “Another Victim” was giving a shout out to his racist tendency’s.
If one is to use sarcasm then it’s their duty to use it fairly and to the point. When numb-nuts resorts to the reactionary jargon we all know and despise like “another victim, whitey, gavacho, bogeymen out to get a homie,” then he is inviting the label “racist”.
If someone wants to call me out then be my guest but sarcasm should contain some humor and intelligence I would think.
PS And thanks for the compliment GJ, the scriptures do contain some current wisdom it seems.
DQ,
Yes, we do rejoice when we find the lost sheep, but with one fourth of our flock lost, we will have to decided which sheep to go after first, and second, and third.
Each sheep is just as important as the next, but just a doctor in an emergency room does triage, so must the Sheppard.
It’s such a terrible pity that Homeboy Industries would be considered by anyone to be in the least bit controversial. Father Boyle has done what no obscenely funded government agency has ever been able to do: effectively address the latino gang problem in L.A.—and with compassion, no less. He has afforded a great many young people from terrible circumstances a chance to find self-confidence, self-esteem—away from gang context. In the main, it has worked. The mayors, councilpersons, supervisors of the past 30 or 40 years should all be chagrined, if not ashamed, at their colossal failure in a cirumstance where a man of compassion and common sense has done something so constructive.
Don Quackers speaking about racism is sarcasm or is it cynicism at it’t finest, the old fool has a hate for people a few shades darker than himself and uses such terms as mayate and chanate to show his true color. Maybe Don Quackers can explain one of his favorite terms of endearment, mayate or “june bug”.
My fellow Homeboy Industries advocates and bandwagoners, why in the world do you continue to pose arguments as if one group of people is “right” and the other is “wrong?” Celeste, thank you for reminding us what a “normal” childhood should look like as well as a “dysfunctional” one. You MUST understand by now that pointing out “what people at the bottom have gone through” is really and old way of thinking. Given the prevailing circumstances the surround the homeboys, it is useless to remind them and the world outside “how bad they have it.” It is a concrete jungle and thus it is WILD! We must work from the inside out. How can you continue to tell someone in the jungle not to act as a person of the jungle? What we need to focus on is on how we can get the homeboys to assume some responsibility and clear choice making regardless of circumstance. Our shit is no longer our “burden,” it is our CLAY! Homeboys can build plenty with what they have. It takes someone to get in there show them all that is available to them, and not what is “unavailable” to them. There are plenty services out there. And yes the power of choice is in their hands. It is the NORM in the hood that you grow up fatherless, motherless, etc. It is not the “abnorm.” If we get this than we will stop measuring the homeboys through our own “NORM,” and will stop pretending that we know “what they need” and “what they are lacking and missing.” I urge all top get out of this old notion and begin realizing the service, “right” ideas, and truth no longer belong to one single individual or group of people but that it is shared through all. I think a lot of us are tired of the same old song…”poor them, poor them, poor them.” They are full of potential if they can simply make one clear choice.
Clever,
“Our shit is no longer our “burden,†it is our CLAY!”
Well said. I entirely agree.