L.A. trauma program shows how to ‘stop a bullet’
Nothing stops a bullet like a job.
As a slogan, those seven words were potent enough to power the creation of Homeboy Industries, which began three decades ago in Los Angeles as a nonprofit jobs placement agency for former gang members and men and women transitioning out of prison.
Homeboy emblazoned the bullet-stopping aphorism onto posters and T-shirts as it expanded into one of the biggest urban job agencies of its kind.
From East L.A. to Wisconsin and across the nation, the jobs-stop-bullets adage became a political mantra. Policy makers preached with certainty:
stimulate job creation, and all manner of social ills will fade away.
There’s only one problem. These days, the man who coined the catchphrase disavows it. “I’m embarrassed by it,” said Father Gregory Boyle, 64, a Jesuit priest who founded Homeboy in the late 1980s and continues to run it and refine it.
Decades of job placement haven’t stopped the bullets, Boyle concedes. Whether in Milwaukee or elsewhere, the reasons that conventional jobs programs fail are the same, according to Boyle and public health researchers in Milwaukee who follow his work.
Standard job schemes don’t address the invisible scars of neurological trauma, which often act as the root cause of depression, mental illness, addiction, suicide and incarceration as well as an inability to find and hold a job, trauma researchers argue.
Data collected in recent years show that civilian trauma exists on such an epidemic scale in the urban center of Milwaukee that it undermines the workforce.
Newly employed might draw a few paychecks, but the gains are short-lived as soon as soon as sleep disorders, flashbacks, dissociation and many of the same debilitating post-traumatic stress symptoms that plague military veterans kick in.
“They are not healed. They are not resilient,” Boyle said in a phone interview. “They come to us carrying unspeakable trauma. But if you don’t transform your pain, you are going to keep transmitting it. Unless they are healing, it won’t matter how much training they have.”
These are people who grow up conditioned to “toxic chronic stress.” In hightrauma zones, Boyle said violence becomes a language of its own — “the language of the despondent, of the traumatized, of the mentally ill.”
Trauma-focused healing, in contrast, looks nothing like a one-size-fits-all jobs program. “Our approach is individualized,” said Mary Nalick, director of the large-scale Mental Health Services division at Homeboy. “Some trainees have long-term therapy and some have short-term therapy. We do whatever works.”
“Father G,” as he is called, has a different refrain these days: “Someone
Trainees in the Homeboy Industries’ trauma-focused job training programs in Los Angeles often ask for a blessing from Homeboy founder Father Gregory Boyle, a Jesuit priest. Trainees call him “Father G” or just Greg. HOMEBOY INDUSTRIES
who is healed will never go back to prison.” In 30 years, he’s seen lives turn around and documents those stories in his books, like “Tattoos on the Heart: the Power of Boundless Compassion” (2010).
The Journal Sentinel last year published a series called “A Time to Heal,” which explored entire neighborhoods within Milwaukee where exposure to traumatic violence and abuse is an everyday fact of urban life — along with gunfire, neglect, incarceration, homelessness, alcoholism and addictions.
Whether the underclass is rural or urban, the series showed that trauma and economic decline are interrelated and self-reinforcing, creating traumatized populations that are so concentrated that it drives a long-term downward spiral.
Trauma is passed from generation to generation, home to home to home. The syndrome is as commonplace in Milwaukee as it is elsewhere, said Terri Strodthoff, executive director of Milwaukee-based Alma Center Inc., a nonprofit that aims to break the cycle of domestic violence in Milwaukee families.
Boyle’s conversion from bullet-stopping jobs to trauma-focused healing “is so relevant to the Milwaukee debate,” said Strodthoff, whose agency works primarily with formerly incarcerated men.
“People will say all the time that there are plentiful jobs,” Strodthoff said. However, “we‘ve heard from employers that it’s difficult to find people to do the work, and not get into arguments, who show up for work, who can get along with people.”
The slogan of the Alma Center — “trauma that is not transformed is transferred” — echoes Boyle’s own social diagnosis almost verbatim.
Dimitri Topitzes, a trauma researcher and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, said Milwaukee needs to heed Boyle’s jobs revelation if the trauma-stricken city wants to break its 50-year cycle.
The trauma epidemic is so widespread in Milwaukee that Topitzes argues that mental health, alcohol and drug treatment should be as standard in job training programs as trade skills training.
It used to be, “here’s a job — good luck,” Boyle said.
In the last 10 years, Boyle has overhauled the Homeboy mission from top to bottom. In the process, he’s created one of the largest and most clinically based trauma-focused healing sanctuaries that can be found under one roof.
To be sure, jobs are still central at Homeboy. In fact, Homeboy has opened a raft of its own enterprises to create the openings that it intends to fill: a bakery; Homeboy Farmers Markets; a brisk tattoo-removal business; a silk-screening shop; landscaping crews; maintenance crews and even Homegirl Café & Catering, a farm-to-table spot “where homegirls serve tables instead of serving time.”
What’s more, members of rival gangs who once shot each other are placed by design into the same work teams, forcing them to learn to get along.
Employment runs for 18 months and is integrated with free mental health counseling, psychotherapy, substance abuse and support groups. “Most of our clients have an unbelievable trauma history,” Nalick said. “Some are in secondor third-generation gang families.”
Homeboy has five full-time Homeboy therapists and 47 volunteer therapists from around Los Angeles. Two psychiatrists prescribe medications as needed, Boyle said.
There are also anger-management programs, therapeutic dance and legal services. Volunteer physicians from the University of Southern California come in every week for a program called “Baby and Me.” In a twist on the 12-step programs used by Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous, Homeboy has Criminals and Gang Anonymous.
“No gang member would be caught dead talking to therapists, but now everyone is in therapy,” Boyle said. “Healing is never about a gang member becoming a good person. It’s their discovering that they always have been a good person.”
With an annual budget of $19 million — almost half of it covered by income from Homeboy’s own enterprises and the rest with foundations and donors — Boyle’s sanctuary trains some 350 L.A. youths at any time.
Boyle effectively began Homeboy as a young priest assigned to the Dolores Mission Church in East Los Angeles, which was the city’s poorest Catholic parish. In his frequent travels, Boyle noticed that most cities pretty much offer the same menu of social services, typically missing the focus on trauma.
“If adding the jobs doesn’t take care of the problems, folks will say it’s because of you are lazy, that somethings wrong with you. ‘We gave you a job and why don’t you stay in it?’” Strodthoff said.
Led by Marquette University and the Milwaukee-based SaintA social services agency, some civic leaders in Milwaukee are searching for trauma-responsive strategies to turn that around.
Boyle talks about the need to build a “therapeutic community of tenderness.”
Healing has a different timetable for everyone, he said. To those with heroin, meth or cocaine dependencies, Homeboy offers 90-day free rehab, Boyle said. Homeboy also drug tests. Those who backslide are asked to “take a time out.”
“We hold their place with us and their job. We say, ‘We love you and come back when you are ready.’ And they all come back, always. They’ve had a dose of this sanctuary, with loving, caring adults who pay attention. And everybody comes back. Almost my entire leadership at Homeboy Industries consists of folks who came back.”