Archive for the ‘Domestic Poverty’ Category

Jesuit Father Greg Boyle’s Homeboy Industries, an outreach program for gang members in Los Angeles, recently partnered with Ralphs grocery store chain to sell Homeboy chips and salsa. The products were the hottest-selling snack item at the 256 Ralphs deli sections across Southern California in early February.

Fr. Boyle said he was inspired by the late actor Paul Newman, whose “Newman’s Own” products funded nonprofit organizations. The products launched at Ralphs last month as part of an effort to revive Homeboy’s hard-hit finances.

“The aim is to expand the brand so that Homeboy becomes a household name and then a household idea,” said Boyle.

Proceeds go to funding Homeboy services such as tattoo removal and counseling.

“If we can increase revenue, we could fundraise less,” Boyle said.

Last year, Homeboy laid off about 330 people and nearly shut its doors when it couldn’t raise the $5 million needed to operate. Because of donations, “things have stabilized. We’ve brought back senior staff, about 100 jobs,” he said.

Read the full story on Boyle’s latest Homeboy venture at the Los Angeles Times.

Jesuit Father Greg Boyle was a guest on The Dr. Phil show that aired in December on “Trouble Teens Turnaround.” Fr. Boyle, who is executive director of Homeboy Industries, a gang-intervention and rehab center, discussed strategies to help troubled kids.

“We get about 15,000 folks who walk through our doors every year, gang members trying to redirect their lives,” said Boyle, who is also author of “Tattoos on the Heart” (#12 on the Los Angeles Times bestseller list for December 26, 2010). “They might come for tattoo removal and discover that we can locate a job for them or maybe they need counseling.”

One former gang member talked about how Boyle helped him. “Upon release [from prison], I came and talked to Fr. Greg, and he just signed me up and told me, ‘My son, come back Tuesday.’ After that, I’ve been working here ever since. Without Homeboy Industries, I’d probably be back in jail right now.”

“Los Angeles is the gang capital of the world,” said Boyle. “In L.A. County, we have 1,100 gangs and 86,000 gang members. I buried my first young person in 1988. I buried my 170th this morning.”

Boyle said the kids need to have an alternative to gangs. “You want to be able to say ‘Leave that behind; come over here and we’ll help you. We’ll give you a job and make sure you stay in school.’”

For more on the episode, visit the Dr. Phil website.

Jesuit Father Chris Devron says he has always been interested in start-ups and has an entrepreneurial personality. So it’s fitting that he’s president of Christ the King Jesuit College Preparatory School, the first all-new Catholic high school on Chicago’s West Side in more than 80 years.

Fr. Devron has come full circle in many ways. In 1995 he was a Jesuit novice in Chicago when he witnessed the beginning of the country’s first Cristo Rey school, Cristo Rey Jesuit High School, while attending the press conference announcing that the Jesuits were starting the school.

He remembers being thrilled that the Society of Jesus would be open to something new. “My exposure to that point had been that we had schools that were long-established, and that we were struggling with diversification and becoming less and less affordable to lower-income families. To see there was this new model that would help kids and families [afford Jesuit education], that was really exciting to me,” he says.

Christ the King, which follows the Cristo Rey work-study model, opened at a temporary site with 120 students in 2008, and its brand new building opened in January 2010. An architecture critic at the Chicago Tribune said the new building’s “business-like image and its unrepentant sense of newness — a shock amid the tattered brick buildings around it — are both there by design, sending a message that the building marks a fresh start.”

Despite being in a low-income neighborhood, families can afford the private education Christ the King offers because of its work-study model in which students work five days a month at a corporation, helping them pay for their tuition. A few students share a full-time job at businesses such as U.S. Bank, Loyola Medical Center and even the Chicago Blackhawks.

Education had been Fr. Devron’s passion even before joining the Society, and it led him to his vocation. After attending Notre Dame as an undergrad, he taught in the Bronx. He thought he would teach for a year and then go to law school, but teaching put him in touch with his deeper desires.

“I began to wonder and pray and ask myself what it would be like if I were to continue teaching, but to do so as a priest ultimately,” he says. Read the rest of this entry »

On August 29, 2005, New Orleans experienced one of the worse natural disasters in U.S. history. While the city escaped a direct hit from Hurricane Katrina, the rising waters breached the levees that surround the city, leaving 80 percent of New Orleans under water. Five years later, New Orleans is a city rebuilding.

There has been a strong Jesuit presence in New Orleans from the days of the city’s founding over 300 years ago. The Jesuits have been in New Orleans in times of crisis like typhoid and yellow fever outbreaks at the turn of the 19th century and when the city flooded previously in the 1920s. Jesuit works like Good Shepherd Nativity School, which provides educational opportunities to disadvantaged children in the city, and Café Reconcile, a youth training program that provides on the job training in its restaurant, continue to help the city look toward a vibrant future. Schools like Loyola University and Jesuit High School continue to provide top notch education opportunities, while the Harry Thompson Center, a day shelter for the city’s homeless, reach out to the city’s most vulnerable. Today, the Jesuits continue to serve the spiritual needs of people of New Orleans and will continue be there for the city as it rebuilds and recovers.

National Jesuit News highlights the outreach and the dedication of the New Orleans Jesuits in the video piece below and provides a comprehensive overview of the Jesuit works in New Orleans five years after Katrina in the article following the video below.

Read the rest of this entry »

With gentrification morphing the once crime-ridden and drug-infested streets of the Lower East Side of Manhattan into storefronts filled with swanky merchandise and hip restaurants, the Nativity Mission Center, a Jesuit middle school that for nearly 40 years has been educating promising, but poor, boys in the neighborhood is starting to feel out of place. Knowing that the school must be located where the need is greatest, Jesuit Father Jack Podsiadlo is  following in the tradition of intrepid Jesuit missionaries and has embarked on an urban expedition: finding a needy neighborhood where he can relocate his school by 2012.

Fr. Podsiadlo’s quest to find the right location for his school and highlights of the work of the Nativity Mission Center are profiled in this piece in the New York Times. You can also view a slideshow of photos of the school and the Lower East Side neighborhood where it is currently located.