Homeboy Industries

People can go there.

We're also doing it at Homeboy Industries.

Tell me how that's going.

Talk about a little bit how it started and how it's going and what some of the hopes are for the future.

And the objective is to bring different domain experts together so we can start figuring out, hey, how do we use technology to unlock local abundance? And the project has consisted of, a couple different phases, but the educational AI literacy piece, I came back specifically because I wanted to share with my community how this technology would potentially impact us, both the negative stuff and the positive stuff.

So one example of Positive impact could be, hey, this technology will augment our productivity or will allow us to do things that we weren't able to do before.

One example at Homeboy Industries is apart from just working on a resume, I'm showing people how we can use the technology to create a portfolio, basically a digital resume, a website.

So they can share more of their story.

And, you know, mental health is the craze right now.

Father Boyle out of Homeboy Industries in LA always used to say, if we don't help people heal from the core wound of their life— They're going to go get a job.

Their boss is going to say something that triggers them.

They're going to lose their job and get fired, not because they know the skills, but they have never healed.

We love being part of your morning.

We want to give a special shout out to Father Greg Boyle and Homeboy Industries in the mail this weekend.

I got my Homeboy holiday gift, guys.

Nice.

I love snail mail.

Yeah.

It says, Dear friend, Homeboy Industries is a place where people discover themselves and their goodness.

All of us share brokenness and great wounds.

The I mean, I know it can be hackneyed or whatever the idea of like, oh, they're hopeless or hopeless, you know, just in general about like kids who are maybe in trouble with the law or just so many people out in this world like they're without hope.

Do you know, Father, have you heard of Father Greg Boyle? Homeboy Industries out of LA and he's a Jesuit priest and he's put together like jobs programs and they have a restaurant they have a graffiti removal and they have all kinds of businesses he puts like former gang members to work And a lot of them become, you know, become part of the administration and become part of this.

And, and so he's, I mean, he got a medal of freedom or whatever it's called from like president Biden.

Like, I mean, he's very well decorated and he always says like, you know, he works with the gangs of like East LA and he's like, I've never, I've never, I've never seen a gang member with hope.

You

got a job at Homeboy Industries out of

prison.

You needed that.

And that love can be heavily obscured in the case of certain world leaders right now.

But even, you know, Father Gregory Boyle, who is the founder of Homeboy Industries and the largest gang rehabilitation project in the world and works with, you know, the people who have caused the most harm, the people who have been traumatized the most.

And this sense of, like, no one is excluded, like...

We all have cherished belonging in this field of humanity.

So let's start a little bit there.

So what was your first interaction with Father Greg and Homeboy Industries? Was it when you were at Community Coalition or was it before then?

It probably was when I was at Community Coalition.

And what was going on at the time? Father Boyle was in East L.A.

of Father Greg.

He has something called Homeboy Industries in LA and has over many, many years helped transform a lot of lives.

And it's been an integral part of particularly the LA community, but well beyond that, well beyond that.

So Greg, I was like, okay, how did this all begin? Not the stuff of creating the container for everything, but more, let's look back.