Jesuit Father Greg Boyle, known by his flock as “G Dog” or “G,” works the streets of East Los Angeles.

The priest’s mission — one he has been living for the past 30 years — is to tell tattoo-covered kids with serious gang affiliations that he cares about them, that they matter.

Father Boyle paid a visit to Sacramento April 27 to be the keynote speaker at “Campaign for Youth Success,” a fund-raiser sponsored by Sacramento Area Congregations Together, a community-organizing group.

He spoke about “the lethal absence of hope” among young people involved in gangs and violence.

“The common vision that brings us here together is to imagine in Sacramento a place different than it currently looks, where you don’t have to bury young people, where you don’t have to have fear,” Father Boyle said to 250 community organizers, youth program leaders and civic officials. “The goal should be to create a community of kinship where there is no us and them.”

Prior to the event during an interview with The Herald, Jim Keddy, executive director of Sacramento ACT, said the organization enlisted the support of Father Boyle to address “a growing concern for vulnerable youth in the Sacramento area.”

“It is part of our recent focus on helping young people graduate from high school, gain summer employment and access positive alternatives to gangs and delinquency,” Keddy said.

Sacramento Police Capt. Daniel Hahn, who heads a new youth unit to combat gang activities and violence, is working on building partnerships with community groups including Sacramento ACT.

He said a united effort will be required to change a city where police have confirmed the presence of more than 2,800 active and inactive gang members.

It’s the kind of transformation Father Boyle carries out at home in Boyle Heights, a neighborhood which has one of the highest concentrations of gang activity in Los Angeles.

His workplace is his nonprofit anti-gang Homeboy Industries, a program in which gang members work side by side learning cooking, landscaping, cleaning and tattoo-removing skills they can convert to jobs.

Father Boyle celebrates Mass at probation camps, juvenile halls and youth authority facilities, where he hands out his card to gang members as they leave, offering to hook them up with a job.

Father Boyle said in an interview there is no mystery about what draws youth into gangs.

“Gangs are the places kids go when they encounter their lives as a misery and misery loves company,” he said. “Hopeful kids don’t join gangs.”

He emphasized that cities need to address gang violence through prevention, intervention, enforcement and re-entry programs.

There is much, Father Boyle added, that church communities may do as well.

“The first step is not to demonize who these kids are,” he said. “If they live in the community then you respond to them as parishioners.”

“You ask what would help, and trust me they will say a job,” Father Boyle said. “Suddenly you are working on removing one person from an activity we can all agree is bad.”

Francisco Gutierrez, Sacramento ACT organizer, was among those listening to Father Boyle’s message.

A senior at Hiram Johnson High School in Sacramento, he told The Herald that until two years ago fights between “the reds and blues” at the school were a daily occurrence.

Then principal Lynne Tafoya arrived and everything changed.

“There was a whole process of intervention,” Gutierrez said. “(Tafoya) was meeting with parents and asking kids, ‘What can I do to help you change your action?’”

Gutierrez is a member of St. Peter Parish in Sacramento, where he serves as a religious education teacher. His students are middle school students preparing for first Communion.

“I try to give them little life lessons,” said Gutierrez, who has experienced the reality of gang violence in his own life, growing up in a neighborhood where at age 13 he lost a close friend who was killed by gang members.

“Kids try to get into gangs to feel they belong,” Gutierrez said, “but gangs are not there to be your family.”

ACT organizers such as Dennis Rhodes say it is their mission now to network with Sacramento-area business, civic and church leaders to create job opportunities for at-risk youth. Some 28 churches, including several Catholic parishes, and school-parent organizations comprise Sacramento ACT.

Rhodes said that job programs exist, but it’s primarily a matter of coordinating job resources and then marketing them to youth.

“There needs to be kinship in building community,” he said. “That means the community must be involved in how it looks.”

Copyright © 2006 Diocese of Sacramento - All Rights Reserved