Fr. Greg’s Lifetime Achievement: Alternative to Catastrophe
You could call it a passing of the torch, but in the world of Pando, where the connections run deep, it would probably better be described as a gesture of continuity.
At The Pando Sustainability Awards in April, Fr. Gregory Boyle was presented the Immortal Earthkeeper Award for Lifetime Achievement, honoring legendary efforts he has made through Homeboy Industries for helping young people at the margins of society with reentry. Homeboy has recently partnered with Pando in developing Camp Pando for young people from foster, detention, and drop-out backgrounds, in collaboration with Learning Works Charter School.
The honor was presented to the man known affectionately as Fr. Greg by Paul Koretz, LA City Council Member Emeritus and recipient of last year’s Immortal Earthkeeper Award. Recently, Fr. Greg was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Joe Biden, and the City of Los Angeles honored him with his own day.
Presenting the award at Pando’s season-ending ceremony in April, master of ceremonies Ed Bacon described him as “one of my personal heroes.” Adding, “He has changed the lives of tens of thousands of Angelenos and saved the lives of many of them and we’re so appreciative of his amazing ongoing work.”
At the Awards event, Fr. Greg spoke:
“This Lifetime Achievement Award sort of gets you nervous. I feel like a geezer, but the other day I got a text message from a homie I hadn’t heard from in a long time, a gang member. And he texted me and said, ‘I heard that you died, so I’m texting to see if it’s true.’ So I wrote him back: ‘I’m texting you from heaven. Cell service here is amazing.’
“We’re all invited to do the very same thing together. We’re trying to create a community of kinship. We want to create a place of cherished belonging where everybody feels included. And to that end, we want to imagine a circle of compassion and then imagine nobody standing outside that circle.
“So all of you, especially the young people here, are really designing something quite impactful. You want to dismantle the barriers that exclude, and good for you. You go out to the margins because that’s the only way they’ll ever get erased. You stand with the poor and the powerless and the voiceless and you stand with those whose dignity has been denied. And maybe you even get to stand with the easily despised and the readily left out.
“And at the margins you’ll be able to stand with the demonized so that the demonizing will stop and you will get to stand with the disposable so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away. And you have to brace yourself as you stand there because the world will accuse you of wasting your time.
“But the prophet Jeremiah writes, ‘For in this place of which you say it is a waste, there will be heard again the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness, the voices of those who sing.’ You don’t go to the margins to make a difference. You go to the margins so that the folks there make you different, so that they alter your heart. And you don’t go there to reach them, you go there to be reached.
“So I invite all of us together to keep the common cause of creating a community of cherished belonging. [Betty Yee] mentioned the great John Lewis. He used to say, ‘We all live in the same house.’ Some live on the first floor and some live in the basement, he said, but we all live in the same house. It was a declarative sentence. He didn’t say, ‘One day maybe we’ll all live in the same house.’ It’s not aspirational, it’s a fact. We all live in the same house. And so together we create this place of kinship and connection where there is no us or them, there’s just us. And soon enough, I suspect everyone in this room already could care less.
“If anybody accuses you of wasting your time at the margins or in this place of which they say it is a waste, there will be heard again the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness and the voices of those who sing. Thank you for allowing those voices to be heard.”
If one thought stood out above all others, it was perhaps when Fr, Greg confessed: “I love the alternative to catastrophe.”
See the video recording of his speech here:
A native Angeleno and Jesuit priest, Fr. Greg served as pastor of Dolores Mission in Boyle Heights – the poorest Catholic parish in L.A. – from 1986 to 1992. At that time, this neighborhood had the highest concentration of gang activity in the city. In 1988, he and his community started what would become Homeboy Industries, training gang members in a range of social enterprises as well as providing critical services for thousands of men and women who continue to this day to walk through its doors seeking a better life. Homeboy Industries has become the largest gang-intervention program in the world, transforming the lives of young people through compassion.
He’s the author of the 2010 New York Times bestseller Tattoos on the Heart, and his new book, Barking to the Choir: the Power of Radical Kinship, paints an unflinching but deeply empathic portrait of people living on the margins, offering real-life examples of how people can change lives (their own and others’) for the better.