‘Isn’t There Something We Can Do?’ Yes, Father Greg Says

Two letters arrived on my desk this week, and, in their own unintended way, the correspondents were talking to one another.

The first was from Cindi Hartman of Los Angeles, who was moved to write by a recent column I wrote about being the victim of an armed robbery. Her letter grippingly recounted what it was like to come home to find a burglar in her apartment. She talked about the emotional toll the crime had exacted from her and how--against her will--it had changed her attitude toward people she met on the street. “You state in your article,” she concluded, “that all we can do is put our fingers in the dike. I want to do more than that. I need to do more than that. . . . Isn’t there something we can do?”

The next letter was from my friend Father Greg Boyle, the Jesuit pastor of Dolores Mission, which serves the poorest parish in Los Angeles. Actually, it was a form letter, but that’s the price you pay for having friends with mailing lists.

“For the very first time in a very long time, our community is at peace,” he wrote. “The evening shootings which had been multiple and constant, have become rare events in our community. The fact that some 45 young gang youths are employed through our ‘Jobs For a Future’ program . . . accounts for this peace.”

Dolores Mission’s job program is unusual. The church serves a tiny Boyle Heights parish sandwiched between the Pico Gardens and Aliso Village public housing projects just east of the Los Angeles River. Every block of the two square miles to which Boyle ministers is claimed by one of eight gangs--seven Latino and one African-American--that operate in the area. Since coming to Dolores Mission five years ago, Boyle has buried 17 young men shot to death by rival gangsters.

Jobs For a Future is intended to break what Boyle calls “the senseless and violent spiral of gang involvement.” It makes jobs for young men willing to work. When it can, it finds private employers willing to hire the boys, providing the church pays their salaries. It has even found a tiny handful of businesses--notably the Daily Journal, a legal newspaper--willing to hire young men outright. The problem is that it takes $5,000 a week to run the program, and it’s out of money. Hence, Boyle’s letter, which was an appeal for funds: “Meeting our payroll for the next 10 weeks will be a great hardship, indeed,” he wrote. “To lay off my workers now--when we are succeeding to bring peace here--is not something I’m prepared to do.”

I thought about Cindi Hartman’s question and Greg Boyle’s appeal this week as I walked through projects and watched the young men of Dolores Mission at their work.

“Sometimes what we’re doing feels like the tiniest drop in the biggest bucket imaginable,” Boyle told me when I talked with him later. “I just took a walk through the projects, too, and if I had a dollar for every kid who came up and asked me for a job, I wouldn’t have to ask anyone else for money to run this place--not ever.”

“There are about 225 guys who have either worked here or been placed somewhere. I can tell you that the transformation that occurs in them when they go to work is not just palpable, it’s unmistakable. They’re gang members; they’ve all done stuff in their day. But that’s not them, that’s not what they want. This is what they want: work. It’s a small thing on one level, but it has an amazing ripple effect. It literally saves lives. I don’t know anything that can stop a bullet like a job.

“Even more than education, work confirms people in their dignity, in their sense of self. A lot of people will argue that education has to come first, and that sounds good on paper. For example, I get people calling up and offering us spots in job-training programs. I can’t ever get these kids to go to one, even if there’s the promise of a job when it’s over. You see, they’re so despondent they can’t imagine a future. They won’t stay in a training program because they don’t believe they’re going to live to see the end of it.

“If kids are convinced they’re not going to live to see 20--or even 18--then it’s virtually impossible for them to hold even a simple ambition in their heads--like some day this training will pay off, or some day I’ll have a job, or some day I won’t live in the projects. Even those basic human aspirations seem beyond their reach to them. They can’t conjure up an image of what ‘some day’ might even look like.

“But my experience here has been that if you just get a kid like that working, they start to say, ‘I feel bad that I didn’t stay in school. Where can I take a class to get my diploma?’ It was the job that did that for them. Or I’ve seen kids who black out on the weekend from drinking too many 40-ounce bottles of beer. Well, if they’ve got a job to take their headache to the next morning, they start saying, ‘Maybe I better go to AA, because this isn’t working for me any more.’ It was the job that got them to say that.

“I see that sort of stuff all the time, and if I had more jobs to hook these kids up with I’d see it more often, and this community would be as peaceful a place as any other in the city. Because, in the end, the job is dignifying and life-enhancing and fills these kids with a sense of pride and of purpose. It does all the right things--not only for them but also for the people around them.

“But the truth is, we don’t have a stable source of financing for these jobs. We get money for our homeless shelter and for our alternative school. Foundations are willing to kick in for that. But this is a hard one. Maybe unemployment is such a massive thing that people, even influential people, think the solution to it is beyond them.

“You know, within a 15-minute bus ride of this church, you’ve got all the businesses of downtown Los Angeles. Not too long ago, I wrote to 400 businesses in downtown. We even tracked down the names of the appropriate managers so we could make a personal request. We sent them a letter and asked them to take just one kid. We said, have them file, run documents, empty your trash cans, anything you need. We got zero response--none, not one person answered us.”

And somewhere in that silence is the answer to Cindi Hartman’s question: “Isn’t there something we can do?”