Ave Explores Series | Faith in Action | Week 4
Homeboy Industries and Fr. Greg Boyle, SJ
by Katie Prejean McGrady
For the past 30 years, a white-haired priest with a kind smile and soft-spoken nature has dedicated himself to working with men and women who most people would avoid—gang members in Los Angeles, California.
Fr. Greg Boyle, SJ, a Jesuit priest who served at Dolores Mission Church in Boyle Heights, a neighborhood in Los Angeles, saw the violence, gang warfare, and conflict so prevalent in the community that he decided to help the young men and women start a new life. He quickly learned, “Me wanting a gang member to have a different life would never be the same as that gang member wanting to have one. I discovered that you do not go to the margins to rescue anyone. But if we go there, everyone finds rescue,” he wrote in a 2017 column for America magazine.
Homeboy Industries focuses on gang intervention and rehab through an eighteen-month employment and reentry program that also offers tattoo removal, substance abuse therapy, anger management classes, and parenting classes. It’s a place where all who seek refuge and help find it. Even those who volunteer find healing and recovery as they give witness to the Gospel to those who look for help, healing, and a new home.
Boyle’s ministry has served more than 7,800 gang members in the past thirty years and has locations throughout the United States and abroad in twenty countries, including Guatemala, Scotland, and Tunisia. The goals of Homeboy Industries are to decrease recidivism, reduce substance abuse, enhance social connectedness, improve housing safety and stability, and reunite families.
Boyle believes that it’s not enough for the organization to want gang members to have a better life; they have to want one for themselves. “We cannot turn the light switch on for anyone. But we all own flashlights. With any luck, on any given day, we know where to aim them for each other,” he wrote in America.
The idea is that if individuals can leave gang life on their own with the help of Homeboy’s resources, training, and community, the changes will stick. Boyle wrote in America, “We do not rescue anyone at the margins. But go figure, if we stand at the margins, we are all rescued. No mistake about it.”
Katie Prejean McGrady is the project manager for Ave Explores and the host of the Ave Explores podcast. Homeboy Industries was founded in 1988 in Los Angeles, California.
