Dedicated to the elimination of sexual violence, domestic violence and all forms of interpersonal violence

Listen to an audio clip from Patti’s story:

I consider myself a recovering Catholic. I’ve studied Judaism, and I’m a practicing Buddhist. But once a Catholic, always a Catholic. The Catholics grab you. They train you and they know how to scare you!

We were an Italian immigrant family, and we all lived in the same house. My parents were in the restaurant business, and they’d work till three in the morning, so my brother and I would go downstairs to sleep in my grandmother’s apartment sometimes. She had a crucifix in every room! I remember looking up at the nails in a human being and how scary that was. I think that put me on a path to figure out how not to be scared. It was a powerful mission! It led me into martial arts, and wanting to help other people feel safer.

Growing up in an Italian restaurant, I started working when I was eight. I don’t mean child labor; it was a family thing. I was a salad girl, and I wound up working in the restaurant through college. I grew up on Long Island with a lot of immigrant influences. The Italians lived in one neighborhood. The Blacks lived in another, the Jews lived in what were called the Five Towns. And then you had the Protestants, and the Catholics. Talk about hardworking! People were trying to make ends meet and you worked hard for the money that you made. I like to think that I had a multicultural experience growing up, but it was segregated.

My mother made a decision to move across the railroad tracks (literally!) to get out of the Italian neighborhood and the Black neighborhood so I could go to the elementary school that the Jewish kids went to, and get a better education. So I had a lot of Jewish friends, and we all had to figure out how to live with each other.

One Easter Sunday at church, when I was in seventh or eighth grade, the priest said, don’t ever forget that the Jews killed Christ and that they are your enemy. I walked out of that church and never went back. That set me to wondering. I’ve always been a seeker of sorts.

I went to college, the first in my family to do so, and my values were deeply influenced by the civil rights movement of the ‘60s. I became an adult, married a Black man, and experienced all the things that went with that. We’re talking the ‘60s. My ex, Jim, was Baptist, I was ex-Catholic. He said let’s get married in an Episcopal church because he loved pomp and circumstance. So he called an Episcopal church in New York City and made an appointment.

I walked in and the head priest was greeting me. Then he sees Jim behind me, who’s Black, and his face falls on the floor. He proceeds to bumble around about how he really can’t marry us because we’re of different religions. This is 1966, a lot of things like this were happening. I kept getting rejected. It made me ask, where do I belong?

I was so fortunate to have had a life with Jim. He was a foreign news correspondent, and we traveled all over the world. We traveled to Brazil, and we adopted our son from there. We lived in Vietnam for two and a half years when the war was winding down, and that’s where we adopted our daughter, who’s Vietnamese and Black. That’s also where I started practicing Taekwondo. Then we moved to Paris, and I started training in the Japanese style. I was the only woman in the class at the Dojo. I had a hard time with some of the guys in the class, but never with the sensei. He asked me, why are you the only woman here? Women stay one or two classes, and they leave. Why do you stay? I said, well, it’s not easy, but I stay because I see the benefit, and I think I have a hard head. He said, why don’t you start a class on Saturday mornings just for women?

I started the class for women, during the early days of the feminist movement. I could see blockages in their bodies. After class, I would go to a café with them and listen to them talk about their lives. It was illuminating to me. I wanted to teach women how to feel safer, and I wanted to provide an atmosphere for them to grow and learn about themselves.

When I came back to the states, I thought, I’m going to create a place where I can belong and invite others to belong with me. So I started Karate Women. My husband and I had separated, and we were going through divorce. Right around that time, the Los Angeles Commission on Assaults Against Women (LACAAW) came to me and asked if I would volunteer to help teach self-defense to women. So that’s how I got involved with the agency, and the movement. It’s also where I met Ellen, with whom I’ve been with now for more than 40 years, and with whom I adopted a third child, our daughter Ruby.

One of the things that I’ve learned is to think your own thoughts. Sometimes in movements, you’re supposed to think a certain way. Don’t say this, don’t do that. I’ve learned the power of not going along with the crowd. Be open to thinking out of the box. Don’t put yourself in a box, don’t put others in a box, don’t put your brain in a box. Read, talk to people, learn, study, grow and make room.

We’re afraid of being ostracized, of not being invited to the next meeting, that somebody’s not going to like what you said, and that means you don’t fit in. I come back to the practice of martial arts, staying connected to your body, and the awareness of your impact on other people. You have to be able to notice, what’s that look in a person’s eye? When we’re being reactive, we’re in our own adrenaline and cortisol, and we’re not necessarily paying attention to the other. That’s a big problem.

I’ve had good karate masters as my teachers. In my certification class, there were 99 men and me. I’m small, short. I learned to think, okay, I have to be brave now. It’s when we’re scared that we’re called upon to be brave.

The Buddha said, life is about suffering, but there’s a remedy. You can alleviate suffering. You have to practice being brave. You can think differently from other people. You can live a life that is not a carbon copy of what you’re supposed to be, and you can be okay.

What’s sustaining me now is my instruction to myself to stay steady. Our country has been through all kinds of things, but we’ve never been where we are now, with the entire structure of government being dismantled from within. It’s terrifying, so I’m trying to deal with that terror. I have conversations with myself so that I don’t go to doomsday. This is where meditation, long walks and poetry come in. I remind myself that life is about suffering, but our job is to relieve that suffering. So that’s what I am practicing now, trying to stay steady, but to stay alert and informed.

We have to have faith in the human spirit. I’ve had my life, my journey. I like what Gloria Steinem said when she was asked if she was going to retire. She said, I’m never going to pass the torch, I’m lighting torches. My granddaughter is so ripe and full of life. I don’t know if we can map it out for the kids coming up. I have to believe that they’re going to figure it out, as long as they can keep their joy. We have to have faith that they are going to find their bravery. There are so many paths.

I tell young people to travel as much as you can, experience another place, another culture, and read. Read literature, read biography, read the news. Become a lifelong learner. Find the things that make you happy and do those things. Balance the duties of life with the sublimity of life. I like Mary Oliver’s instructions for living: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. And life is not meant to be a crumb!

Getting back to the beginning of our conversation, Catholicism put me on the path of wanting to be a good person. I’m grateful to the church for those teachings. In Judaism, the teaching about Tikun Olam, repair the world, what’s your contribution to make things better? And then with Buddhism, the practice of seeking understanding of yourself so you can get over yourself.

I don’t know where I would be without a sense of humor. I like to poke fun at everything. I enjoy seeing the spirit, joy, humor, fun, creativity in others, and cheering each other on. I enjoy making people laugh, and laughing with people. When someone has something important to say, celebrate it!!

Patti Giggans has been the Executive Director of Peace Over Violence (POV) for more than forty years. POV is a community based and volunteer centered organization that provides crisis intervention services, violence prevention education and public policy advocacy.

A black belt in karate, Patti founded Karate Women, the first martial arts school in Southern California, in 1976. She serves as a board member and past president of the Zen Center of Los Angeles, and sits on multiple boards and commissions, including the Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission for the County of Los Angeles.

Patti is known informally among colleagues as our poet in residence. You can count her to open a gathering with the reading of a perfectly chosen poem. Patti can also make people laugh. One of the first bits of advice I learned from her is “When you tell people the truth, make them laugh or they will kill you.” I’ve learned so many things from her — about being brave, about the importance of showing up, about embracing joy even in the darkest times. But her ability to make people laugh is a superpower. It opens a door to belonging, and makes honest conversations possible. It’s the torch she passes along.

Patti lives in Los Angeles with her wife Ellen, her partner of 40 years, and their daughter and granddaughter. Patti and Ellen were married at San Francisco City Hall in February of 2004, one of 4,036 couples married during the first wave of gay marriage becoming legal.

Listening is an act of love. Courage is contagious.

This story is part of Whole Lotta Love, an independent project by Claire Peeps born of curiosity about people who dedicate themselves to making life better for the rest of us. It consists of 21 conversations with community leaders on purpose, perseverance and joy. By sharing their stories, the project invites readers to ask, listen, and connect with extraordinary people in their own communities. Read more about the project here.

Thank you for reading! If you enjoy these stories, please subscribe to the weekly series, and share with a friend or colleague.

Subscribe now

Share

Shifting to an eco-centered economy

Listen to an audio clip from Denise’s story:

It’s been an amazing journey over 50 years. It’s been like poetry, how everything has been by design in ways that I don’t even understand.

My work in community economic development, sustainable development, organizing and real estate started with my college education at Fisk University, an historically black university in Nashville, Tennessee. I was coming from New York City in 1968, so it was a huge culture shock going to the south at that time, which was at the end of the civil rights era. If you know anything about Fisk itself, it is the training ground for folks like WEB Du Bois and Ida B. Wells, Nikki Giovanni and John Lewis.

Rev. James Lawson’s training in nonviolent direct action was started at Fisk. We were trained to be activists – educated, competent contributors to a larger mission beyond ourselves. It wasn’t about getting educated to make a lot of money. It was what are you doing for your community, for your race? I started as a pre-med major, but I don’t care what course we took, chemistry or history, it was, what is the justice component of this?

I remember being on the yard in my junior year, and a professor came up to me and said, you’re going to be in my new program. They’re very personal and upfront at these HBCUs, they know you and they do their best to pull the best out of you. He had a grant from the Ford Foundation to start an urban planning program. And I’m saying, okay, well, who knows what urban planning is, right? It’s 1970. But it was out of that that I found my professional pathway.

My pathway around justice had started in my freshman year. Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee in 1968. In May of ‘69 Fisk students got on the bus, and we went to Memphis to be in this march commemorating his death. We got off and marched to the central square. In a matter of minutes, glass was shattered. Helicopters came out of nowhere, police pointing guns down from tall office buildings onto the marchers in the square, and then there was smoke billowing. We had folks like Robert Kennedy, Ralph Abernathy and all these who’s-who politicos telling us to get down, it’s just a smoke bomb. Well, it wasn’t a smoke bomb, it was tear gas. Everybody’s rubbing their burning eyes and getting headaches. After all the mayhem stopped, they went on with the program and then we walked back to the bus in torrential rain. I mean, we were just soaked. I thought, I’m not doing this anymore!

I was so disillusioned with our leaders at that time. I felt that if this is nonviolent direct action, then I’m going in another direction. It was also a time of growth for the Black Power Movement, and I became more radical about how I saw the world and what I thought justice was all about. I grew up in the movement generation, and that’s where the heart and soul of me sits. It was civil rights, and the beginning of the environmental, abortion rights and anti-war movements. It was everything that you could imagine, and it was ingrained in me as an 18, 19, 20-year-old. That’s where I got my vision, my passion about what matters.

My first internship was in organizing with the Newark Welfare Rights Organization. I was helping them develop a food cooperative. I also worked with a Bronx organization developing housing cooperatives. As a 20-year-old, that really meant I was just a gofer -- go get this, go get that, go sweep the streets. That’s what “planning” was at that point for me. I was learning that community planning was organizing and building trust by working on things that the community wanted.

I’ve been on an interesting trajectory ever since. There was a time when I had a sign on my desk that said, “I don’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up, but I knew it wasn’t this.” Who knows at the beginning of life what our career will be as a young adult, and the ending?

After Fisk, I went to the University of Pennsylvania. I consider myself an “affirmative action Negro,” and I am proud of it! I didn’t know that Penn was an Ivy League school, but I pursued a graduate degree in urban planning. At that time, in the early 1970s, environmental laws were being created in the United States under the Nixon administration -- air quality and water quality laws. Environmental planning was becoming an important part of the planning profession. I rejected it. I hated it. I was concerned that the focus on trees and dolphins and birds was taking money, people and attention away from the economic and social justice struggles that we had been pursuing.

There were just of handful of black folks in urban planning at Penn, about six of us in a program of 200 graduate students. We would have these projects, like one where we were given a topographical map. The only thing on it were mountains, a river and a railroad track. We were told to design our ideal community through a group process. So I’m putting affordable housing in the mountains and one of my group mates said, you can’t do that. I’m like, well, why not? Because poor people can’t live in the mountains. Real estate is expensive. And you can’t live by the rivers. So I’m saying, but this is our ideal community, why can’t people live in places that are embedded in nature? You had this environmental thing going on, but issues of social justice were not being attended to, and economic justice was not part of the curriculum. That just fired me up about the work I needed to do.

I graduated from Penn in ‘74, and there were no jobs. There was a gutting of government and social programs in that era, like we’re going through now. The best job I could get was $8,000 a year. I didn’t go to college for that! A friend convinced me to enroll in a graduate program at the University of Michigan. I hated that as well. Instead of a PhD, I got my Mrs. Degree. In other words, I met my (now) ex-husband, who was from Los Angeles. When he graduated in ’77, we went to LA. It was the time when Jimmy Carter became president, and I knew the world was going to open up again. I’ve been here since.

My first job in LA was with Drew Medical Center. I went there as a manager for the community medicine department. I left after about six months because, if you’ve ever worked with physicians, you know they don’t plan to be managed. But before I left, I worked with an amazing physician, Dr. J. Alfred Cannon, who became an important mentor in my life. After the Watts riots of ‘65 he was instrumental in building King Drew Medical Center, Ujima Village and many other community institutions. He was an institution builder, influential and powerful. He asked me not to leave because he was starting an international development program, and he wanted me to work with him on it. He had received money from USAID to develop institutional relationships with the ministries of health throughout Africa, partnering with Drew, Meharry Medical College, Tuskegee and Howard Universities. Our work at Drew focused on integrated rural and community development, and health policy and planning.

Dr. Cannon wanted me to be the deputy director of this program. I kept saying, I’m an urban planner, I’m not a health person. He said, health in Africa is about planning. It’s about sewer and water infrastructure and access to health facilities. It’s the rawest things that you can think of in terms of what it takes to get health into these communities. So I changed my mind to run the program with him. We were influenced by a book by Walter Rodney called How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. It became a framework for figuring out how Europe and America had underdeveloped Watts. We had amazing convenings with African and American counterparts about a liberatory strategy for Africa and African descendants throughout the diaspora. Dr. Cannon said that the mental health and the economic wellbeing of Black people, of African descendants, will never be sorted through unless we are able to claim our African identity. In some ways, that’s the orientation to my work right now…working at the intersection of environment, economy, and equity rooted in African values and traditions.

Environmental issues have followed me all my life. At Fisk, I was doing a trend analysis of air pollution in Davidson County. Who cares? Then it was Penn, and it was a question of the environmental laws and what that meant. Then I get to LA during the era of Mayor Tom Bradley. He was in his last term, and he was trying to get younger people onto the commissions. He selected me to be on the Environmental Quality Board. Oh my God, who cares? But okay, I am going to be in the city family.

I took the position, but I can tell you those environmental meetings where the West side folks would come to talk about not expanding the street because there’s a bird in the tree - I mean, it just drove me crazy. I hated it. But one day in 1985 several women from South LA (who later organized Concerned Citizens of South L.A.) came to me and asked me about this thing called the LANCER Project. I said, I don’t know anything about that, but I’ll tell you what, I’ll have a public hearing, and I’ll ask the Public Works department to tell me what this thing is. The Mayor muzzled me and told me that I couldn’t have this hearing. It turns out it was a municipal incinerator that was being planned for the Central Avenue community, spitting distance from homes and Jefferson High. This was at a time when we were not even recycling. So the idea of people throwing in plastics and paint cans and everything that’s carcinogenic and that would be spewed into our community was just, well, we didn’t even understand what it meant at the time.

I ended up going to LA’s west side, to an organization called Not Yet New York. They were focused on no growth/slow growth. I went to a meeting and told them that this municipal incinerator was coming to South LA, but I said you guys are next. This sparked a city-wide environmental justice campaign. The campaign to defeat the LANCER Incinerator brought together a partnership between UCLA planning school, environmental organizations, lawyers, scientists and engineers and the South LA community. South LA had the organizing base.

I quit the Environmental Quality Board because they were siting LANCER as a noxious land use in our community without having community input and perspective. They were trying to sell it to us -- we’ll create jobs for you, we’ll give you a park or whatever, it’s not going to be that bad. My whole orientation from Fisk was about community engagement and community involvement, and there was none of that.

It turned into a big fight and was the subject of the LA Times and numerous other news stories. At the end of the day, we defeated the project and got recycling. It was one of the first environmental justice campaigns in the country, along with Cancer Alley in the south. And it spawned other grassroots organizing efforts. Concerned Citizens of South LA joined the fight by the Mothers of East LA to defeat a prison project that had been proposed in East LA. It was this fight that ultimately led me to LISC.

At LISC I said, fighting is important, but what are we building? Let’s become our own community builders. Let’s train grassroots organizations, churches, and residents about land acquisition, tax increment financing, and affordable housing tax credits. We started building low-income, community-owned housing. And then it got to the point where I said, okay, we can build housing, but communities also need both social and physical infrastructure. We began giving grants and real estate financing to churches to become developers. It was the first time. I remember LISC folks asking, why are you giving money to churches? I said, well, they have good balance sheets. And these are institutions that have been in our communities for decades. They’re not going to go away.

The idea of LISC funding organizing was new then. After the ‘92 civil unrest, I developed a coalition of developers to rebuild impacted neighborhoods, including street vendors, shopkeepers, and community groups. But it got to the point for me where I just knew that housing was good, but not enough, and that we had to focus on economic development. So I left LISC to figure out how to bring in more people into the field. I started the first Community Development associate degree program in the country at Los Angeles Trade-Technical College, and CD Tech, the nonprofit community development practicing arm. I figured that nobody needs to go through graduate school to learn to do what they’re already doing. They were already organizing. They were already trying to figure out how to get rid of crack houses. They were already trying to bring in housing and start businesses. So how do we give them the skills and connect them to networks so that they can get these projects done together? We taught folks to apply their learning in communities. I did that for 15 years. And then, almost at the end of this story, I just wanted to figure out what’s next for me.

Every New Year’s Eve, I go to a meditation place, and I just sort of meditated on that issue. The next day I went to a friend’s house for a get-together, and we had Chinese food. I opened up a fortune cookie, and it said, invest in your wildest dream. The day after that, I got a phone call to ask if I wanted to help launch a new national program, the Emerald Cities Collaborative in Washington DC.

So that got me back to the East Coast, which I love. Emerald Cities was everything that I had learned to do. It was equal parts organizing, real estate development, environmental justice, economic development and sustainable development. It was, how do we green our cities in a process that develops good jobs and business opportunities and equity? And how do we make sure low-income communities of color get to be a part of this new green economy? That’s what I did for the next 12, 13 years.

I had intended to retire from that. But then I get a knock on this door from a representative of a philanthropic collective who asked me if I would be open to being nominated as a Climate Breakthrough awardee. I was like, no, thank you, I want to retire. I mentioned this to my youngest son, and he said to me, Mom! If somebody wants to give you $3 million to invest in your wildest dream, why wouldn’t you take it? I said, because I want to retire. He said, you just need a gap year! I’m like, okay, yeah, that’s how you young people think.

I did not take a gap year, but I took the Climate Breakthrough challenge, part of which was to figure out what my wildest dream is. And that’s where I am right now. What I’ve realized is that while the work I was doing was good, it was still transactional. It was not getting at the root cause of our problems, which are anchored in the Western, Cartesian idea that humans are the head of the food chain, and we have the right to dominate everything and everybody else. That is the basis of environmental degradation, of labor extraction, the social divisions of individualism, and competition.

Materialism is undermining our quality of life, our humanity, and our eco-system. Maybe what we’re seeing is last stage capitalism, the dismantling of the myth of the American dream. Our young people can’t buy a house; they’re paying off $200,000 student loans. I’m recognizing how colonized we are, and how we have become good at being colonizers ourselves. We have become so enamored with and addicted and enslaved to stuff, being consumers. I’m not sure this path makes sense for anybody now.

For thousands of years, we found a way to be in harmony by sharing the gifts that have been given to us for free -- water, sun, our earth. But these resources have been commodified, monetized, privatized, and have created class distinctions.

The stuff of food, the stuff of housing, those are essentials. But I’m very clear that it is the environment now. It took me a long time to learn this. Having rejected environmental movement for decades, it wouldn’t let me go. And now I see my work as grounded in traditional African and indigenous approaches to the environment. If we figure out how to treat Mother Earth better, it is the meta solution to our economic and our social justice issues. Maybe we don’t leapfrog to Mars, right? My God, why so nihilistic? Let’s not give up on Earth. Let’s fix this place.

I don’t care who you are, black, brown, white, wherever you’re from, you come from a culture that honors the land. The notion of interdependence and reciprocity with the land is indigenous to all of us. How do we reclaim that? It was taken from us for a notion of accumulation of wealth and commodification and privatization. We have been colonized into modernity. So how do we deconstruct that?

It has taken me back to the unfinished business of King Drew and my work with Dr. Cannon. It has taken me back to who I am as an African woman or a woman of African descent. It has made me recognize that my work today is to figure out how to bring traditional pan-indigenous cultures and values to the forefront – a notion of oneness and interdependence, not just with each other as humans, but with the entire ecosystem.

How do you make a shift from an ego-centered to an eco-centered economy? It seems impossible, but a portal has opened. Dark times are an opportunity to shift. I think about it in terms of my ancestors’ journeys. How did they make it out of slavery? How did they make it out of Jim Crow? The answer that I’m suggesting now is they got out of it through what I call commoning or communal practices of banding together and protecting each other. It is the only way to deal with institutions and systems that were never intended or designed to be caring.

You cannot sell the apocalypse, but you can sell joy. How do we return to the songs, the rhythm, the dance, the notion of who we are as a people? And then ultimately, what are the policy shifts that can be and should be made around land use?

That’s the work that I’m doing now, setting up this intergenerational, cultural shift. It’s not impossible. A portal has been opened. Everywhere I go, in all the conversations I have, young people are there. It has taken me 70 some years to get to where they already are. I think we just need to spotlight them, celebrate them, and accelerate them. My role is just to create the space for them to talk to each other and to break through the silos. I’m listening to the collective intelligence. It amazes me what comes out of people putting their ideas in one bucket!

Denise Fairchild has launched the Ubuntu Climate Initiative as an awardee of the $3 million Climate Breakthrough Award, the largest climate award for individuals in the world. She is President Emeritus of Emerald Cities Collaborative, a national organization based in Washington DC that builds community partnerships with labor, environmental and business organizations to increase energy efficiency, clean energy, sustainable foods and clean water with a focus on low-income and communities of color. She is also the Founder and former Chair of CD Tech at Los Angeles Trade-Technical College, and the former Director of LISC, Los Angeles.

Denise is currently working on LA Rising, community initiatives that work at the intersection of climate, arts, play and economic opportunity accelerated by investments in LA28 Olympics and other world games.

Listening is an act of love. Courage is contagious.

This story is part of Whole Lotta Love, an independent project by Claire Peeps born of curiosity about people who dedicate themselves to making life better for the rest of us. It consists of 21 conversations with community leaders on purpose, perseverance and joy. By sharing their stories, the project invites readers to ask, listen, and connect with extraordinary people in their own communities. Read more about the project here.

Thank you for reading! If you enjoy these stories, please subscribe to the weekly series, and share with a friend or colleague.

Subscribe now

Share

Building an economy that works for everyone by improving access to transformative capital

Listen to an audio clip from Rudy’s story:

My mom came to this country when she was 18. I think she wanted to escape her family, maybe like a lot of 18 year-olds do. She was staying with some cousins in Los Angeles and was only going to be here for the summer, but she ended up staying much longer. She met my father in an English class.

My mom has a third-grade education, my father has second-grade, they’re working-class people. My mom was a babysitter when they met. I don’t know what my dad was doing at that time, but they both ended up working in the restaurant industry. My mom became a server, and my father was a line cook. The story is that our cousins didn’t want my mom dating my father because he was just this macho rule breaker. If you look at old photos, he drove a motorcycle, never wore a shirt and he loved to show off his muscles. He was, like, the bad boy. But my mom fell in love with this guy and she didn’t listen to her family. She ended up marrying him. She had me, and then she had my little brother. But the truth of it is that the cousins were right. He wasn’t a good person.

I don’t have a lot of memories of my childhood or my dad, but the memories that I do have are bad. My father was an alcoholic. I remember him not being around. I remember my mom crying, wondering where he was. He was out partying, drinking, with other women. The worst part of it was that he was violent. So my story begins there, but it also begins when my mom decided to leave.

Imagine my mother -- she’s in a new country, she doesn’t speak English that well, she has two kids, and she’s in an abusive relationship. She’s working in a restaurant, as a hostess at the time, just taking people to their tables. The manager was concerned about her. He said, Carmen, you have to leave. You’re not safe.

She feared that she wasn’t going to be able to do it alone, but she drummed up the courage to leave. And that decision resulted in me being here today.

I was raised in a household by this woman who was trying to make it work, trying to survive, trying to be both parents. The only thing that she could do was to will us to go to school. She would often say, if you don’t want to do the work I do, you have to go to school. You have to go to college and get a good job. There were many moments where she would look at me with my homework and just say, I don’t understand it, but I know you can figure it out.

She was just really tough. She was always trying to push us to be better. If I came home with an A+ on my test, she would be like, how come you didn’t get an A ++? And I’d say, well, mom, it’s impossible. And she’d say, I’m sure there’s a way. So those were the conditions in which I operated.

Looking back, I appreciate it. She didn’t know any other way and I think she was just trying to make sure that her kids were going to be safe. I ended up being the first in my family to go through school and on to college. So she was successful in that.

When I entered UC Riverside, my goal was to get rich, because I came from a place where every single day, every single week, there was concern about money. I grew up in an environment where we were desperate to make sure that we could go to work every day. I had perfect attendance at school because we didn’t have any childcare. My mom would work sick all the time because she’s like, I can’t lose a day, I need to pay the rent. So my goal was to get rich, that was it. I wanted to take care of my family.

I began as a business major. I was going through all the motions, but getting rich just wasn’t in my heart. I took an ethnic studies class as an elective, and that changed my life. The class was about civil rights movements in the United States –the Black struggle, the Asian struggle, the Chicano movement. I had never seen people who look like me advocate for others.

I realized it wasn’t about just my family getting rich, it was about all of us getting resources. I started to inquire, why is it that a few people have so much and the rest of us don’t have enough? Why is it that there are some families that struggle every single day, and others who have more than they need? That is why I do the work that I do. I’m interested in solving that. I’m interested in figuring out how we can all have enough.

Capitalism is a framework for growth, consumption and extracting. As a young 16-year-old trying to figure out what to do with my life, I wanted to get rich to take care of my family. That is very individualistic, and it’s capitalism. I was blessed to learn that there’s more power in working together, and that maybe there is enough for all of us to be okay. And that isn’t capitalism, that’s something different. The reason I wanted to get money when I was a young boy is because I was suffering. I was trying to survive. I was desperate. My mom was certainly desperate. You’re not whole when you’re hurting, you’re looking to take things for yourself.

I think that the work in front of us now is to think about how to soothe those parts of us that just want to take, because we think that that’s going to solve whatever issues we have. How do we move beyond that? How do we build something for all of us to be okay? We need to dismantle capitalism to get to the root of why some people want to extract at any cost. It doesn’t make any sense. There’s no reason for anyone to have more and more money. It’s an addiction. It becomes psychotic.

The seeds of Inclusive Action, which started as LURN (Leadership for Urban Renewal Now), were in the friendship I developed with attorney Alfred Fraijo in 2008, after I finished college. He said, I want to convene people to talk about the city, I have friends who are doing interesting work. We did, and it was a space for us to imagine something different. It was really that simple. We met monthly and became a volunteer nonprofit organization.

In 2010, I realized that it was my favorite meeting of the month. I thought there was something special in the ideas we were developing, but we needed some dedicated time to execute on them. I called Alfred and I said, hey, what would it take to hire somebody? I want to leave my job and do this. What do you think? We met the next day, on a Friday, and then he convened the board on Monday. It was very fast, and that was the beginning.

We had two months of money to hold me down. I thought, how can I reduce my personal costs? A board member said, I have an extra room in my house in Boyle Heights. Do you want to come? I said, yes, I’ll go there for a few months and see if this works. It was such a roll of the dice. I refinanced my car loan to bring the payments down. I was trying to make the two months of money stretch longer.

Looking back, I had no fear. I felt invigorated by everything. I felt like, I’m getting on this train. I don’t know where it’s going, but I am happy to be on the train. I had no Sunday scaries. Every day I woke up with purpose.

The Street Vendor Campaign was our first real initiative. We began talking about how street vendors were trying to make it in the face of a global recession. And then we just started to go down a rabbit hole, asking questions. Talking to the vendors, we heard stories of how they were being criminalized. We found partners who were also interested in the issue. Together, we ended up legalizing street vending in the city, and we passed two state policies that created a system for legalization across California.

The campaign, and the proximity it brought us to impacted communities, opened the door to other things. The street vendors said, if we win, Rudy, how are we going to be able to afford the equipment that they’re asking us to have? How are we going to be able to afford the public health permits? That prompted us to create our own loan fund. These entrepreneurs, some of them undocumented, had been in the informal economy and had no credit or collateral with banks.

We’ve deployed almost five million dollars, and the payback rate has been great. Now we have a business coaching team. We have become a licensed lender in the state of California and recognized by the US Treasury as a certified community development financial institution.

In 2019, we changed our name to Inclusive Action to center who we are as an organization that works to bring people in. We continue to grow. Now we’re a team of 30, and we’re working with community members on real estate acquisition. We think that if they have stability, they’ll able to be able to make decisions and be more involved in our democracy in a way that’s not extractive. We lend people the capital they need so they can invest, pay their workers well, grow their business, and take care of their families. We want people to have stability in their homes and places of business, too. We want them to be able to stay if they choose. And one tool to accomplish that is for us to have a little bit of agency about who owns those properties.

I am constantly searching for whispers in the universe, that this is the path. Every single day I’m searching for moments of light. They come from the most surprising places. It could just be a text message from someone in the community who says, hey, I just wanted to check in on you. I’m proud of what you guys are doing.

I think the one thing that this chapter of my life has taught me is that sometimes you have to have the courage to start something if it doesn’t exist. I want to stand with people who are unafraid to experiment.

Rudy Espinoza is the President and CEO of Inclusive Action for the City, an organization whose mission is to serve underinvested communities and build thriving local economies by improving access to transformative capital, and advancing policy through collaborative research and community-driven advocacy. Inclusive Action is both a nonprofit and a community development financial institution (CDFI) based in Boyle Heights and serving communities through Los Angeles County. Rudy was a principal organizer behind the successful campaign to legalize street vending in LA.

When he’s not working, Rudy enjoys spending time with his wife, chef Jocelyn Ramirez, and their dog Chuki at home and in their backyard, a magical spot abundant with citrus and passion fruit.

Listening is an act of love. Courage is contagious.

This story is part of Whole Lotta Love, an independent project by Claire Peeps born of curiosity about people who dedicate themselves to making life better for the rest of us. It consists of 21 conversations with community leaders on purpose, perseverance and joy. By sharing their stories, the project invites readers to ask, listen, and connect with extraordinary people in their own communities. Read more about the project here.

Thank you for reading! If you enjoy these stories, please subscribe to the weekly series, and share with a friend or colleague.

Subscribe now

Share

Building neighborhood stability through community organizing and real estate development

Listen to an audio clip from Maria’s story:

I had serious angst about my future from the time I was little. I couldn’t imagine what it would be. In the neighborhood where I grew up in East LA, we didn’t really have role models. When I was teaching poetry at Dolores Mission Alternative School and I asked kids what they wanted to be, they frequently said, a probation officer. That’s who they saw.

I was in junior high when my brother graduated from high school. He was applying to colleges, and I was fascinated by the process. He applied to an urban planning program in Indiana. I was like, oh my god, what’s that? I’ve never heard of an urban planner! In that moment, it’s like the sun came out. All these things clicked in my 13-year-old brain. The freeways that are everywhere on the east side, with only a chain-link fence separating the community and the speeding cars. No parks nearby. Suddenly everything flashed in front of me -- all of this is planned! Hope clicked, too -- well, you could just plan it different.

They talk about how immigrants are more hopeful than American-born folks, right? I don’t know if that’s an immigrant story, but maybe it was my father’s hope. He was determined that we would all go to college. My brother set me on a course of interest in urban planning -- of wanting to influence the built environment so that it was welcoming, safe, had green space, and beautiful buildings that were not run down and deteriorated. But I think it goes back to my father. He was a community board member at the free clinic, and I saw him volunteer there. He also was famously the President of El Club de Madres, which is the mothers’ club at my elementary school. A man was the president of the mother’s club?!? And he was a tailor.

I thought, how does he find time? But he did, so giving back to the community was normalized in my life. I remember one year I accompanied him as he delivered toys for Christmas all through the neighborhood. We didn’t have any toys, but we were delivering toys. So I learned, even if you have very little, you find ways to give back.

My father was incredibly proud of being a master tailor in Beverly Hills. And he was incredibly proud of his family, maybe because my mom was 17 years younger than him and she was beautiful. He loved for us to meet him where he worked. That meant a very long bus ride from what was then Brooklyn Avenue and Rowan in East LA, where we lived, to Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills. My mom couldn’t speak English, so my brother was always translating -- are we close to Beverly Hills? Are we close? I got to experience the city and the transition from the east side of Los Angeles.

I grew up right next to Boyle Heights, literally 15 houses away from where I began my career. Boyle Heights became my love. I remember that beautiful long ride, all those old brick buildings, and switching to a bus downtown that would take you up Wilshire. Bullocks Wilshire was in its glory then, and I Magnin, and the Ambassador. I saw the contrast between complete neglect and disinvestment in East LA to something different as you headed west. I wondered, why do these places feel safer? Why are there so many trees? Why is everything kept up so well? It had a big impact on me. That’s how my interest in cities, inequality and disinvestment came about, and seeing housing as a solution.

My dad bought our house at a time when it was hard for people of color to buy. He had a predatory loan, so he worked two jobs. He had his full-time job at Saks Fifth Avenue and also worked with a tailor named Harry Cherry in Beverly Hills. He made clothing for movie stars. He used to tell a story about borrowing his boss’s little convertible to deliver suits to Walter Mattau and Yul Brenner. One of my prized possessions was a signed picture of David Cassidy from the Partridge Family. So he lived this whole other, golden era of the United States.

Around the time my brother was applying for college, all the kids from the gifted program at my junior high school were brought into the library. They told us about this place called Exeter, and that we could apply. My brother said oh, you have to apply, Marie! You have to go! He was the one who sold my dad on it. My mom is still angry about it, but that’s how it happened.

My dad had aspirations for his children, so he forced me to take judo. He thought, alright, she’s going. If anything happens, she knows how to defend herself. I haven’t practiced judo since I was 13, but I earned a brown belt.

So I went to Exeter, and talk about contrast! It was really hard, but it changed my life. I went from a world that was bordered by freeways to a whole new place. I was able to wander around and explore Boston a 14-year-old kid by myself, something I would never have done in LA.

I went from there to Columbia, and then straight on to MIT for grad school. That was the year that Nelson Mandela was freed, and the Berlin Wall came down. I could see how social movements were shaping policy and cities, and I felt that MIT’s approach to planning was too top-down; it didn’t incorporate the voices of community. So I left and came back to Los Angeles and enrolled at UCLA. I was feeling a love/hate relationship with LA, because I felt trapped in East LA.

Between my first and second year at UCLA, my friend Lakshmi invited me to visit her family in India, in Madras, which is now Chennai. My father asked, can you go to Calcutta and get me a medal from Mother Teresa? Just a little medal, like the ones you get of saints at churches in Mexico? I was like, Dad, do you realize how far Madras is from Calcutta? But it was his request if I was going to India.

So I go to Madras, and I love how different it is. It smells different. There are hardly any cars, and they all look like those taxis in London. It’s a long story, but after three months, a trip to Calcutta becomes possible. My friend and I go to Calcutta, and we look for some place that’ll sell a Mother Teresa medal. Finally we go to Mother Teresa’s ashram and we wait for Mother Teresa to arrive. She finally shows up, and we’re just in awe of this tiny lady. She shakes our hands and I’m struck by how soft they are. I thought, oh my God, she’s out there working with lepers. Why are her hands so soft? I was just awed by her presence. She said, you must come and work here. I said, okay. And then while I’m taking that in, she walks away. Suddenly I remember the medal and I run after her -- Mother Teresa, I’m sorry, but I need a medal for my father! She says something to her attendants and they give me a medal. When I bring it back to my dad, he looks at it and says, oh, that’s not what I wanted. Oh my god, dad, really?! If you knew what I went through!

During that time in India, I was really looking for answers. I visited many spiritual sites, waiting for clarity. What is my future? It was when I met Mother Teresa and she told me that I must come and work with her that I found clarity, that my place is in East LA. There is so much pain and hurting where I come from. That’s my place, and that’s how I came back to plan housing here.

My dad was so understanding. He was like, oh, you’re coming home! He never pressured me to go work in the supermarket to contribute financially to the household. He gave me the space to find something that aligned with what I was learning. So I started working with a group of friends on what would become the East LA Community Corporation. We wanted to create an organization that was deeply connected to community residents and used real estate development and community organizing as its tools for community stability and investment, based on the East side and Boyle Heights.

ELACC turned 30 this year, and you can see our success today. If you ride the gold line to Boyle Heights, you’re going to see a project by East LA Community Corporation at almost every stop, from Mariachi Plaza to Soto.

When I look back at my career, I think I could have been effective without being so tough. I was in full armor, fighting for the east side. We had to go through a lot of NIMBY fights, and we got a lot of hate mail. I didn’t think about the consequences of bridge burning. But eventually I realized that carrying all that armor wears on you, and it hurts to always be that intense. I learned to help people tap into their own power. I became less scattershot, and more focused.

I also learned how to deal with imposter syndrome, which is especially real for leaders of color and women. I spent a lot of my life saying, I’m so lucky. I got to go to Exeter, I got to go to an Ivy League school, I got to get ELACC off the ground. But in my forties, I realized it wasn’t luck. It was hard work. I worked really hard, and I did okay. Maybe luck was recognizing an opportunity and pursuing it. But everything else was work.

When I began my career, we thought we could end homelessness with housing. But these are multi-generational problems, and our job is just to take it as far as we can. We’re like cathedral builders; we may not live long enough to see the finished product. What I am doing now is helping build up the folks who are going to pick it up after us.

It’s not my journey anymore, and that’s okay. I feel blessed that I’m sought out by young leaders. They’re so smart and committed. I’ve got a lot to learn from them. I tell them, go change the world! But don’t lose the connection with your kids, with your family. There’s only one first day of kindergarten. Take that time. Take vacations. You can leave work, and things aren’t going to fall apart. And if they do, you’ll learn a valuable lesson about how to shore things up.

It’s dark right now, but I’m hardwired for hope. Things can change, everything’s possible. I think it’s my dad.

Maria Cabildo is a lifelong Angelena. Born and raised in East Los Angeles, she has a long career of public service. She has held positions in the philanthropic, nonprofit, private and government sectors. She is the co-founder of the East LA Angeles Community Corporation, and served as its President and CEO for 15 years, from 1999-2015. She was a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard School Graduate School of Design in 2019. She is currently the CEO of the Durfee Foundation.

I photographed Maria, for the top of this story, at the Boyle Heights Metro station. We met that morning at La Monarca, a coffeeshop located on the ground floor of the Boyle Hotel, across the street from Mariachi Plaza. Maria led the successful campaign to transform the historic hotel, which had fallen into disrepair. It was adapted to include 51 units of affordable housing units for the local community. The hotel also houses the Mariachi Cultural Center and rehearsal rooms for musicians. It is a crown jewel in the neighborhood, and an exemplar of Maria’s contributions to East Los Angeles.

One of the things I love best about Maria is her love of exploring, often with her kids, Lulu and Joaquin. She has hiked the Milford Track in New Zealand and the Camino de Santiago in Spain, Machu Picchu in Peru and the Great Wall of China. Her travels have taken her to Japan, Rwanda and many other countries around the globe. Next up: Uluru, a sacred site for the aboriginal people of Australia.

Listening is an act of love. Courage is contagious.

This story is part of Whole Lotta Love, an independent project by Claire Peeps born of curiosity about people who dedicate themselves to making life better for the rest of us. It consists of 21 conversations with community leaders on purpose, perseverance and joy. By sharing their stories, the project invites readers to ask, listen, and connect with extraordinary people in their own communities. Read more about the project here.

Thank you for reading! If you enjoy these stories, please subscribe to the weekly series, and share with a friend or colleague.

Subscribe now

Share

Revolutionizing reentry for justice-impacted women

Listen to an audio clip from Susan’s story:

It was my sixth release from prison. I found help at the Clare Foundation in Santa Monica. In that community, I recognized the difference between the way people were treated in Santa Monica versus South LA. I began to reflect on it, and to examine it, and then understand that we needed what happened for me in Santa Monica to happen in South LA.

So I came back to South LA. I worked and maintained my sobriety, because it was an addiction that kept me going in and out of prison. It was a failure of the system to never offer me help. In Santa Monica, people got help. I thought maybe if I could create in South LA what I experienced in Santa Monica, it would help my community, especially Black women. So I worked and I saved money, and I got a home. And I called that home a New Way of Life. That’s what I had found in Santa Monica – a new way of life, a life of sobriety, a life of meaning, purpose, principle, and dignity.

I would leave that house in the morning, ride down to the Greyhound bus station and meet my friends who were getting off the bus -- women just like me, who had been caught in a manufactured war on drugs. They had been caught and trapped in a system of addiction and incarceration. I’d see them and I’d offer them a place to live in my home. And before long, it was a house of women helping women, and we were all recovering, and we weren’t going back to prison.

Today it is a full-fledged service organization. We have 12 homes across LA County. We have two legal departments, post-conviction relief and family reunification, workforce development, leadership development, communications, policy advocacy, organizing, accounting and development departments. We offer a lot of help to California citizens to get their records expunged, to help them get their children back, to help them understand what leadership means and to go to work or school.

I have built an alternative approach to community problems and societal problems, and I built it by just surveying and watching my community and responding to its needs. I built it by an openness and willingness to address the problems that I see -- the problems around community safety, the problems that women have. My focus has been primarily understanding the needs of women, because I am a woman. I left prison many times, hoping not to go back, but inevitably going back until someone helped me.

I went back to school, but at some point I realized I didn’t have to get a degree. I could hire someone with a degree. There’s a lot of time and effort that goes into getting a degree, but I’m a quick learner. So I learned pretty much by doing and watching and staying true to my voice and my observations and being undeterred and unafraid to call something out when I see it.

I find courage in the desire to be free and to see others be free. It has been 27 years since I opened that first house. The most powerful and freeing thing that I’ve learned is to be honorable to myself. I think I’ve learned to allow people to be who they are and not be mad about it, not try to change them, but to be okay with it. That doesn’t mean I have to engage everybody, but it means that I’m free to honor myself and to respect who others are.

Through challenging times, what keeps me going is keeping focused on being the best person I can be and supporting others to be the best person that they can be, if they want to be the best, and having faith that my higher power is going to make it all right and that I don’t have to do it all. I can just be Susan Burton and keep getting up and doing the things that I can do to make the world a better place. I don’t have to put all my energy into trying to change what someone else is doing. I think I lend them my power. I just keep focused on what I’m doing, and the things that I see and do will make my community better, safer, and stronger.

The practice of honoring myself means doing things that I enjoy, being nice to me and being nice to others. And it might mean going to get a massage! It might be getting up early and going to a 12-step meeting. It is not any one thing, but it’s a lot of things that make up my day and my philosophy on life.

Sometimes there’s a lot of demand for my presence or for my words. I can’t be everywhere and everything to everybody, and I make peace with that. I do what I can and I try to evaluate where it aligns with what I want to accomplish and do. And that’s where I put my energy, my time, my voice now.

At the end of the day, I have to be all right when I go to bed that I’ve done the best that I could for that day. And hopefully there’s a tomorrow, and I’ll get up and I’ll do more.

Passing leadership to new directors was a long process for me, six or seven years. In 2017, I woke up and I said, there is no Susan Burton, there’s just a New Way of Life. There has to be a me. That’s when I wrote Becoming Ms. Burton. Now a New Way of Life has a life on its own, and I became a Ms. Burton who is apart from a New Way of Life.

I have trust in passing leadership on to those I trust. I believe in their capabilities, their ethics and their intellect to take the organization to the next level and to keep it alive. And I want it to be alive! I want to continue to serve and make our communities better. So I have to be willing to get out of the way and offer support in a way that empowers and allows other people to develop a broader, brighter, wider vision for the organization.

Running the organization is the responsibility of two new co-directors now. Decisions lie with them, and results lie with them. As a founder, I have to understand that, and be willing to not run it quasi. There’s only one Susan Burton and I show up when I think I should, not necessarily when everybody calls. In this phase of my life, there’s other things to do, and I can be free to enjoy life. I couldn’t do that while running the organization, and I couldn’t do it comfortably quasi-running the organization now either.

It has been a journey to get where I am now. I had fear that I would have no place or standing or nothing to do, but there’s lots to do.

I’m in recovery. I’ll be 28 years sober in a couple of months. So every morning that I’m in town at 7:00 AM I’m in a 12-step meeting and I’m hearing people’s experience, strength and hope and I’m sharing my experience, strength and hope, and I’m finding great joy in that. Starting my morning with a 7:00 AM meeting is just grounding.

I suggest to young people just to be still and to find out through their day what brings them joy, what they are doing at a moment where they feel most connected, happy, and peaceful. And that’s where they should focus their attention. The world is so fast now. It’s hard to stop. It’s hard to be still. But I tell them to find what brings them joy. I can’t tell them what direction to go, but if they listen to their heart and listen to their body, they’ll find the place that they’re most connected to, and most likely that’s where their purpose is.

I would like to say to our baby boomers, our seniors, and especially founders, don’t be afraid to move on. It doesn’t mean that you are letting go of your dream. You’re just dreaming further than that dream. I’m dreaming further than the dream of a New Way of Life. Don’t be stopped by your fear of exploring other areas, other ideas, other parts of your life.

I want to spend more “me” time, but I have to learn how to do that. And then I’m going to help my great granddaughter have a good start in life.

Susan Burton founded A New Way of Life Reentry Project in 1998 to promote healing, power, and opportunity for formerly incarcerated women. The organization takes a multifaceted approach to mitigating the effects of, and ultimately eliminating, mass incarceration. Susan the recipient of many awards, and the author of the best-selling book, Becoming Ms. Burton. To understand the full scope of the work of A New Way of Life, please watch this powerful video.

I photographed Susan in her backyard garden in Compton, where she grows greens and other other vegetables.

Listening is an act of love. Courage is contagious.

This story is part of Whole Lotta Love, an independent project by Claire Peeps born of curiosity about people who dedicate themselves to making life better for the rest of us. It consists of 21 conversations with community leaders on purpose, perseverance and joy. By sharing their stories, the project invites readers to ask, listen, and connect with extraordinary people in their own communities. Read more about the project here.

Thank you for reading! If you enjoy these stories, please subscribe to the weekly series, and share with a friend or colleague.

Subscribe now

Share

Opportunities for Youth

Listen to an audio clip from Tony’s story:

I’ve been with Heart of LA for 25 years, over two tours of duty. I find happiness in the work that I do.

When I was a child, I wanted to be a pediatrician or a fireman. My dad was an LA County public health officer, a doctor of preventative medicine. My mother was a teacher for a period of time, so I was always around folks who were serving others. That must have rubbed off on me. But first I tried a different route. I went into the sports business world. I loved creating products and services that could help my clients achieve their goals. But at the end of the day, it wasn’t fulfilling and I would have the Sunday blues.

I came back to Heart of Los Angeles when it had moved to its current location, right across the street from Lafayette Park in Central Los Angeles. I thought this is where I want to work. I could see into a bigger and brighter future. I believed in the work, and I believed in myself to be able to make it all work out.

When I was younger, I thought I could be like Moses, parting the sea to lead everyone through rough times. But ultimately, I realized that we’re not going anywhere happily if we don’t do it together. I wish I could tell my younger self: you’d be surprised at what you can do when you don’t do it alone. Surrounding myself with good folks has made all the difference in my ability to stay in this work of service longer.

When I first came to this part of LA, there was so much need that was in your face. You would literally go to the corner of this neighborhood and see gang members mad-dogging you, giving you the eye to remind you that you were in their territory. For many of the kids growing up in this neighborhood, it was unsafe for them to make it from home to school. We’ve built a security blanket around those kids by creating an organization and a community here. We’re working together on how we can involve all members of our community to make it safe, with hope for everyone.

It has been incredible work, especially around the arts. We have found such great reward with just a little bit of intervention. A lot of the kids in the neighborhood have immigrated to this country, not by their choice, but with their parents. So here they are, living in the heart of Los Angeles, trying to find their way. They’re angry at their parents for putting them in an unfamiliar place where they don’t fit in. And as they get into their teen years, they’re trying to separate themselves from their own history and wanting to assimilate so badly that there’s just a lot of disappointment.

I remember one student in particular who came to us during his middle school years. He didn’t speak English. The only thing that brought him joy was skateboarding. He started to sketch scenes of himself holding his skateboard and looking at a new part of Los Angeles. We helped him with the language, and academic support. We brought him into our visual arts classes. We made sure he had arts mentors around him. And what do you know, he graduates high school and goes to community college, and he is an artist. The next thing you know, there’s a big push for him to go to some sort of post-secondary opportunity. We stayed with him. He went on to get his master’s degree in art at UCLA, and now his work is at the Cheech Museum and in galleries all over. He teaches here regularly now.

Our faculty are trained to be listeners, almost wellness coaches, and I think that has made a huge difference in supporting the mental health of the young people who walk through these doors. I think every college student should have a semester of how to take care of a neighbor, how to be a good listener. It shows up here when our team asks each student, how’s your day going? How are you feeling? If you walk into a classroom, even at the elementary level, you will see the kids pick a card and put it by their name -- I’m not feeling so good today, I’ve got the blues, or sunshine is all around me – so you know how each student is entering the space and then you can adjust the way you interact with them with a little more empathy, more heart, a little extra listening ear.

I have a funny story. We started a healthy cooking class so the youth could learn to prepare healthy meals that were local to where they have immigrated from. It was taught by our operations director, Alex, who happens also to be a chef. Next thing you know, the parents were clamoring. They said, we do not appreciate that our children know how to cook these meals and are telling us how to prepare them. I mean, dial us in. So now we offer healthy cooking classes for the parents and the children, sometimes together, and sometimes apart, so we don’t upset the power dynamic within the household.

It’s the best sort of mentoring, not saying I know more than you because I’m older or you don’t know so much because you’re younger, but joining hands to say, hey, we’re going to get through this together. It helps the youth feel empowered and gives them an incredible sense of confidence and self-worth. And for the parents, it helps them feel like they’re not failing if their children are helping them to get through life, but that the family can get through life together.

This also showed up when we were doing vaccinations. The kids were learning at school and at Heart of LA about what happens if one of the children in this neighborhood gets Covid and they’re living in a multi-generational household, which so many of our families do, in small tight spaces. Inevitably the eldest is going to get Covid. We had the highest amount of Covid deaths in our district, so we needed to get people vaccinated. We were trying to help drive that message home, because there was a lot of misinformation out there. We partnered with Kedren Health to open some large vaccination clinics, and we vaccinated nearly 2000 families. It was our youth who were bringing their brothers and sisters in, they were doing everything in their power to contain the crisis. Ultimately, we saw the parents show up, too, with aunties and grandmothers.

There needs to be a Heart of Los Angeles in every town. There are not enough opportunities for young people to explore their hobbies and interests anymore, in large part because of club sports or other programs that cost a lot of money. It should not be only for the elite. I find that so sad. I wish my son, for example, could have come to our scientific or arts classes here at Heart of LA. I think that would have helped him learn how to use technology in a responsible way, and to explore the world of engineering.

I’ve learned that being a listener is really important in my own household, too. Oh boy, as a parent, I have all the empathy in the world for our parents here at Heart of LA! It has brought me closer to them. We’re struggling through some of these things together. I’m insistent that my children have additional activities either at their school or outside of school, beyond just coming home and getting sucked into doom-scrolling on the internet and social media.

Heart of LA has evolved on that front. We have two makerspace laboratories. We want kids to understand the process it takes to get to the end result of the technology that they’re absorbing, so that their mental health doesn’t become manipulated. We want them to understand that there’s engineering behind the technology, and that marketing decisions have been put in play. We want them to understand that they are creators and builders. Whether you’re coming through our visual arts or science classes, you’re going to get that message, of how to be responsible consumers of technology. I’m proud of the convergence of our science and arts departments to create scientific arts. You go into a room packed with children, but you can hear a pin drop. They are so focused. So I see hope for future generations on being able to utilize technology more responsibly, more ethically, for the good of society and humanity.

We’re seeing a lot of assault on the communities that we work in again, as we did a couple of administrations ago. There has been shock, disbelief, lots of tears from the families, staff and the kids. One young person stood up in a town hall and said, why do they hate us? It’s heartbreaking. I’m still seeing anxiety and fear, but this time, I’m seeing a little more strength. We got through this before as a community because we found light in the hopeful spaces. When I see kids coming through our buildings now, they are smiling. They’re joyful. This is the place where they can feel normal for a period of time. Having said that, you hear teens telling their parents, don’t pick me up at night, stay in the house, I will get to you. But this is a place where they can come that has thus far felt very safe. At Heart of Los Angeles, there are people who are looking out for you, are glad to see you and know that you have a lot to give. And I’m one of those people.

Tony Brown is the CEO of Heart of Los Angeles, an organization that is closing the opportunity gap by providing robust academic and enrichment opportunities for youth in Los Angeles. They operate two campuses, in MacArthur Park and South Los Angeles, and offer more than 330 weekly classes at sites across the city in partnership with a host of organizations. HOLA is committed to cultivating engaged leaders and change makers equipped to seed transformative, community-driven change.

When I first visited HOLA’s new Arts and Recreation Center in Lafayette Park, Tony toured me through the facility’s many beautiful classrooms, rehearsal spaces and performance hall. Students of all ages, family members and teachers called out to him enthusiastically in passing. He, in turn, greeted each of them by name. When I was preparing to leave, Tony surprised me by picking up his clarinet and dashing off to orchestra rehearsal. Now he’s in the choir, He is also an avid surfer and water polo coach. One can’t help but wonder if there is anything that Tony Brown can’t do.

Listening is an act of love. Courage is contagious.

This story is part of Whole Lotta Love, an independent project by Claire Peeps born of curiosity about people who dedicate themselves to making life better for the rest of us. It consists of 21 conversations with community leaders on purpose, perseverance and joy. By sharing their stories, the project invites readers to ask, listen, and connect with extraordinary people in their own communities. Read more about the project here.

Thank you for reading! If you enjoy these stories, please subscribe to the weekly series, and share with a friend or colleague.

Subscribe now

Share

Multi-racial, intergenerational grassroots organizing to build power

Listen to an audio clip from María’s story:

In these challenging times, it’s important to reground ourselves in why we do what we do. I point to my family roots. My father was the most prominent force in how I came to view myself and the world. He was from Mexico, born in a village in the state of Puebla, at the foothills of one of the largest volcanoes in North America. He was orphaned at 13. His mother had abandoned him at a young age, and his father, who was involved in politics, was later assassinated. It was a difficult, tumultuous time.

At the age of 13, my father and two of his friends made the trek to Mexico City. It’s a historical migration pattern in Mexico, young indigenous people migrating to the capital city in hopes for a better life. They were homeless and alone, just young boys trying to survive. They got settled, found ways to make income, and my dad became a young father to my three half-siblings. He had intellectual curiosity and a desire to be educated, but things did not get easier economically.

When he was in his twenties, the same group of boys, now men, decided to make the trek to the United States together. They went on their own with the idea of earning resources to send back to their families. One of my dad’s former teachers in Mexico City, an African-American expat, warned my dad not to go. He said, “you will face racism in the United States.” But they did, and they were among the first people from my dad’s village to come to Los Angeles.

They found their way into gardening and were trained by Japanese American gardeners. They worked mostly for the affluent on LA’s westside. And in that economy of the 1960’s, they experienced US racism, just as my dad’s teacher had predicted.

During his time in Mexico City, my dad was surrounded by revolutionary culture and politics and internalized a strong sense of pride in who he was as an indigenous Mexican person. He also developed a critique of US imperialism. Given the history of the US declaring war on Mexico, the dominant US society did not have respect for the country or the people. In LA, my dad experienced this historical discrimination and shielded himself with a deep sense of self-worth. As a lower-wage, sometimes unpaid laborer for affluent people on the westside of Los Angeles, he carried that shield as he navigated many challenges.

He had many interesting experiences as a gardener in Bel Air and Beverly Hills. He met my mom through that westside economy. She was the nanny to an affluent family in Bel Air who lived next door to a household where my dad was the gardener. She was from Guadalajara, Mexico, and had also made the trek for better opportunities, with her sister and her mom. My dad was immediately enthralled by her hazel eyes and witty charm.

He had previously separated from the mother of his children in Mexico, while continuing to support his family there. In our upbringing, my dad gifted my siblings and I his shield of pride, resilience and worth. He raged against injustice and taught us that, when something’s wrong, it’s about structural and historical context and not about our deficits as those in power want us to believe.

He earned his GED in LA and instilled in all of us that education was the goal, that we were going to college. There was no difference in how he treated me and my brothers. He had high expectations for all of us. With his support, my half-siblings in Mexico also attended college.

I grew up in LA until I was nine, and then due to economic hardships, we moved to Mexico, living right along the US-Mexico border. I crossed the border every day to go to school in East San Diego County, and that’s when the shield my dad had cultivated in me was activated. Growing up on the border in the late-‘80s to mid-‘90s was challenging. I experienced San Diego County as a much more blatantly racist environment and we witnessed militarization and violence targeting migrants. We also felt it in how students of color were often mistreated in the local schools. I was able to navigate through that to get to college primarily due to the skills that my dad had cultivated in us. He told us, “hold your head up high, be proud of who you are, you come from a great people and a strong family.” We didn’t inherit wealth, but we inherited something else of immeasurable value. As an adolescent, it ignited in me what I had been prepared for: not only to know something is wrong, but to do something about it.

In high school, I applied and was accepted to the annual week-long Chicano Latino Youth Leadership conference in Sacramento. It is for Latino, Chicano, and Mexican-American high school students and takes place on the campus of Sacramento State University. I was so excited. The goal of the conference was educational and political empowerment. It changed my life. I knew about my lineage, but I didn’t know there was also a history in the US of Latino people advancing justice. I met youth mentors who were students at top universities and colleges who looked like me, and whose parents were immigrants. They told me, “You’re Chicana. We have a lineage in the US to be proud of. We have contributed to this country and we recognize our indigenous roots. It is our responsibility to fight for opportunity and justice.”

It was a transformative experience. I returned home and told my dad, I’m Chicana. He said no, no, no. He thought being Chicana meant rejecting your Mexican indigenous side. I said, “but this is what you care about, it is embracing the struggle of all of our peoples.” So he said “Ok, alright, I agree you’re Chicana. It’s a new generation and I’ll support this because it’s giving you a renewed sense of who you are and where you want to go.” I was very proud of him.

In 1993, just after the conference, I was propelled into organizing in response to California’s xenophobic Proposition 187 targeting immigrants, and the racist “Three Strikes” Proposition 184 initiative aiming to further criminalize people of color. As an adolescent, I saw firsthand right-wing propaganda against everyday working people, and the message that immigrants don’t belong here. Everything I knew told me the opposite, because my dad had guided me to see truth and justice. This was my catalyst into the work of movement building. I continue to fight for the world that we want to see for ourselves and our children.

I have learned so much over 30 years about the importance of movement building as a force for change. Now I’m taking the lessons from the work I did at a regional level to a statewide scale. I’ve learned that the challenges of communities on the Eastside of Los Angeles mirror those of others across the state who also face economic, health and environmental inequities. Historically, these communities are seen as having deficits, but they have so many assets. One of their strengths is in the networks of families that have come together to make the community what it is -- rich in culture, strong and fierce. When provided the opportunity and the tools to engage in change, that strength is unstoppable.

Residents know that the inequitable conditions they face are unfair, but they just don’t always know how to go about changing them. Organizers work with residents to interrogate: “Who has the power? Who else’s child is not getting what they need in school? “ In organizing, we work alongside residents to help contextualize their experiences. These issues have structural roots that have been perpetuated over generations. In power building work, we take it to the next level. We believe that the people closest to an issue have the best solutions and can create power by coming together. And that has been proven.

When InnerCity Struggle was still an emerging organization, young people pointed to what they saw as their largest obstacle: overcrowding in their schools. At that time, the Eastside had the most overcrowded schools in the country. Schools originally built for 1,000 students were enrolling nearly 5,000 students or more. To address the issue, the LA Unified School District had created year-round schedules with students on 3 different tracks, which led to less days of school and was very disruptive for families. Each track had their own distinct summer break schedule. Students shared that when they were in school, they didn’t have enough desks in many of their classrooms. That they were not able to access some college-prep courses because they were not offered in their track. Others couldn’t get their school lunch because the lines were so long there was not enough time to obtain a meal. If they were late to class, they were overly punished.

We were the first organization to call out the depth of the crisis on the Eastside. We exposed that 60% of entering freshmen disappeared, never reaching their senior year and very few of those who graduated were prepared for college. The suspension rates were disproportionately high. It was a crisis that had become normalized. Families knew their child’s chances of success were lowered attending an Eastside traditional public high school, but they had no other option. We knew the potential of our youth because when we asked thousands of them, “what is your goal?” The majority responded higher education, and shared they wanted to do something positive.

We knew that the long-standing racist perceptions about Latinx youth and their families not valuing education were false. We knew that families came to this country for better opportunities for their children. We decided to take on the school-to-jail pipeline to shift resources and the narrative toward justice.

Joining forces with youth and families we fought for new traditional public schools. We uncovered that voter approved bond funds to build new schools were not being prioritized for the Eastside. We confronted LAUSD head-on, and held the County accountable over land use issues.

The most powerful vehicle that shifted the narrative was the young people themselves. They went to the school board and told their stories: I want you to hear my hopes and dreams; I want quality education; I want to go to a school that sees my worth. They neutralized the oppositional forces that initially equated new schools with crime. As we escalated our mobilizations, we marched with hundreds of residents and collected thousands of petition signatures. The demand for new schools resonated. In 2004, the district finally approved the first new schools for the Eastside of LA in over 80 years. Today, we have five new schools – three high schools with stronger college preparation, an elementary school and an adult school.

Young people in high school alongside Eastside families won significant public investment for their community. For them, it was just the beginning, what’s next? There was no limit. We continued to fight for equitable school funding and the elimination of punitive discipline. We went on to also focus on housing justice, and getting people of all ages to vote. Young people were a powerful catalyst for community change.

When we won the new schools fight, I thought, “I’ve got to do what I can and grow this organization so the next generation can go bolder and bigger.” And that’s exactly what they are continuing to do. Bolder and bigger!

My dear mother Olga Maria Brenes recently passed away after a year-long battle with cancer. It is a devastating loss that has left our family heartbroken. While my father was instrumental to my political development, my mother was the enduring vessel of love and care that carried our family through hardships and triumphs. When I started my own family, my Mom committed to supporting me in child-rearing. Her love extended to my two children from birth, allowing me to continue my impactful work in the community. Her unconditional love and reassuring spirit will live on in our hearts. The deep loss of her physical presence reminds me of our ancestors’ power as they guide us forward to uphold love, truth and justice.

I’m a mom of teenagers now. And, what a privilege, to be their caretaker, their guide, their protector. I tell them, I’m your chief of staff! Especially at this age, I’m very aware of what they’ve inherited from my father – his shield of pride and self-worth. From my mom - her joyous spirit and commitment to family. There was a window in time when my dad was able to play with them before he passed. He was their Tata, and they know his history. My mom was their Nana and she lives on in their hearts.

In 2023, I took my children to Mexico City for the first time, when my son was 13. We went to the bustling neighborhood my dad lived in joined by one of my older half-brothers. I shared, “Can you believe that Tata came here on his own at the same age you are now? The strength that he had to survive and fight for his family and come to the United States -- you come from that. Don’t forget that, Mijo. Appreciate it, and remember to give back. The life we’ve been able to have is because of your grandparents.”

My dad’s spirit was there with us. And now, seeing my daughter growing up to be a powerful, confident young woman, shows we’re determined to continue the legacy.

María Brenes lives in the Eastside of LA with her wonderful spouse and children. She is the Co-Executive Director for the Movement Innovation Collaborative, a California focused movement support organization strengthening power building infrastructure, and the former Executive Director of InnerCity Struggle.

I first met Maria in the early 2000s on an informational bus tour for donors about school overcrowding on LA’s eastside. She made a powerful and lasting first impression - formidable in her knowledge, passion and her ability to make a persuasive case for change. Since then, she has led countless successful campaigns for Eastside communities.

When she’s not working, Maria practices yoga.

Listening is an act of love. Courage is contagious.

This story is part of Whole Lotta Love, an independent project by Claire Peeps born of curiosity about people who dedicate themselves to making life better for the rest of us. It consists of 21 conversations with community leaders on purpose, perseverance and joy. By sharing their stories, the project invites readers to ask, listen, and connect with extraordinary people in their own communities. Read more about the project here.

Thank you for reading! If you enjoy these stories, please subscribe to the weekly series, and share with a friend or colleague.

Subscribe now

Share

Hope, training and support for formerly gang-involved people

Listen to an audio clip from Fr. Greg’s story:

I’ve been a Jesuit for 53 years. I love the Jesuits. They are hysterical, and prophetic, and they taught me.

In the Vietnam War days, they said, hey, we’re getting in a van, we’re driving to San Francisco. It’s going to be the largest anti-war protest in the history of the country, you want to go? There were no permission slips it. We were just on a payphone -- hey, we’re in Oakland, a whole bunch of us went with the Jesuits, we’ll be back later tonight. I’ll never forget it. We drove all the way to San Francisco, protested and marched and drove all the way back. It was extraordinary, but that was kind of the air you breathed. Later, I framed it differently as joy and fearlessness, which is what we all need. I wanted to be anchored in that.

I come from a big family. I’m number four out of eight kids. I was the only one of the siblings who went to seminary. When I was ordained, I thought, what am I going to do with my life? I said, can I go to Bolivia? There was a great language school there that was geared to missionaries. Not that I was going to become one, but they kind of taught you how to be humble in another culture. It was wonderful. I spent a year there, and it changed my life.

When I came home, I was supposed to go to Santa Clara to be a campus minister. I asked my provincial, please don’t send me there. It’s not enough for me. So he said, I need a pastor at Dolores Mission, nobody wants to go there. I said, beautiful. I became the youngest pastor in the history of the diocese, at 30. I just loved it. It was very poor, all Spanish speaking, wonderful people. I wasn’t great at Spanish then so I’d stand in the back of the room and ask these noble, erudite and wise Mexican Jesuit guys to get up and speak. They weren’t used to that.

For the first two years as pastor, it was mainly immigration issues, family separation and amnesty. Sanctuary was born from that. We were the first church to declare itself a sanctuary that included economic refugees as well Central Americans, people who were just trying to eke out an existence. We became kind of a focal point. We allowed in homeless, undocumented men, first, and then we had women and children across the street.

We started to have gang shootings and suddenly these eight gangs emerged and were at war. This was before cell phones. I’d be in Aliso Village, and a woman would come out and say, there’s a shooting in Pico Gardens. I’d see a bike and say, hey, give me that bike, I’ll be right back. So I’d borrow a little kid’s bike and I’d go see what was going on and try to calm things down, then I’d bring the bike back. So the guys got me a beach cruiser with a big bow on it. I rode the bike forever.

Our first office was at 1848 First Street. It was tiny. We started with a school, because there were so many middle-school gang members who got kicked out of their home school, nobody would take them. They were literally wreaking havoc in the middle of the day, selling drugs, writing on walls and being violent. I went to them and asked, what if I found a school that would take you? Would you go? They all said yes. I couldn’t find one, so we started one. And then they said, if only we had jobs….so we started Jobs for a Future. That was the beginning.

We created a landscaping crew, a maintenance crew, and a crew to build a childcare center on the church property, all made up of members of the eight rival gangs. That was a core principle right at the start. And then the ‘92 unrest happened, and Dolores mission and the projects didn’t ignite. The LA Times came to us and said, why was that? I said, I’m not really sure, except I think it’s helped that we had 60 strategically hired gang members who had a reason to get up in the morning and not to torch their own community. The next day, a movie producer read the article, summoned me and asked, how should I spend my money? I said, buy this abandoned bakery across the street from the school. He did, and we started Homeboy Bakery. That was our first enterprise. A month later, Homeboy Tortillas were selling in Grand Central Market. Once we had two enterprises, we said, let’s change our name from Jobs for a Future to Homeboy Industries. That was 37 years ago.

We’ve come kind of full circle in terms of what’s happening currently in the country now, with “let’s deport monsters.” I mean, they actually say that. And that’s what the first 10 years of Homeboy was, being demonized. Homeboy was helping the demonized, so it was short hop to demonize Homeboy. The friend of your enemy is your enemy. We had 10 solid years of death threats, bomb threats and hate mail. It’s hard to remember now, because LA kind of hoisted Homeboy up on its shoulders when the bakery burned down from an electrical fire in October of ‘99. That was a tipping point, when things just turned. The LA Times said, Homebody belongs to us. It galvanized the city. We were able to buy the property that has become our headquarters in Chinatown. That building happened because people said, well, maybe tough on crime means we’re not serious about reducing it. How about smart on crime? Suddenly we were in the category of smart, and people rallied.

For the first 10 years, I was always on the edge of burnout. I would be on my beach cruiser in the middle of the night saying, put that Uzi down! Are you sure you want to shoot that guy? It was crazy making.

I wrote a story about a homie named Lulu, whose brother killed himself, both of them were gang members. Lulu was in rehab when it happened. I called him, told him, and he was devastated. I said, I’m going to pick you up for the funeral, but I’m going to drive you right back. And he goes, I want you to, because I like how recovery feels. He was addicted to crack. So I go up and pick him up, and we’re in the car and he tells me this dream. In the dream, we’re in a room with no lights, no illuminated exit signs, no light creeping under the door, pitch black. And he says, I know you’re in the room with me, but we’re not speaking. Then all of a sudden in the silence and in the darkness, I pull out a flashlight, I turn it on and aim it steadily on the light switch. And he says, I know I’m the only one who can turn that light switch on. I’m grateful that you have a flashlight. So he follows the beam of light. He flips the switch and the room is flooded with light. And now he’s sobbing as he’s telling me this story, and he says, the light is better than the darkness.

In all my years of living, it was at that precise moment that I went, oh, I’ve been doing this wrong. I thought, I’ve been trying to turn the light switch on for people, and all I can really do in a healthy way is to know that I own a flashlight and I know where to aim it. That’s it. I had been trying to turn the light switch on for people and you can’t do it. It was the discovery of my life. That one has been forever. You don’t go to the margins to make a difference, because then it’s about you. You go to the margins so that the folks at the margins make you different. Now it’s about us.

So I’ve never gone back to that. I’ve been tired, but I’ve never been near burnout since then. I preach on that, especially if you’re speaking to social workers who burn out all the time. The misconception is, I guess I’m just too compassionate. I’ll be needing three months off. And I go, no, I think you’ve allowed this to become about you. If you’re delighting in the person in front of you, that’s eternally replenishing. Fixing, saving, rescuing – that’s depleting. So can you allow your heart to be altered by the people you’re privileged to accompany? Can you be reached by them? Can you receive who they are? That changed me forever. That was my biggest insight.

There were other things along the way. I used to work with gangs and now I work with gang members. It was a misconception on my part. I used to have peace treaties, truces, ceasefires. I’d do shuttle diplomacy -- sign this thing, then they’ll sign it, let’s not shoot into houses this summer. Kind of a pyrrhic victory. And then I thought, no, this is serving the cohesion of gangs. I’m supplying oxygen to gangs. And then I stopped, and we became -- here we are! Hope has an address: 130 Bruno. It’s not for those who need it. It’s only for those who want it. Only for those who want to turn the light switch on for themselves. Come on in. There are 120,000 gang members in LA County, and they all know who we are, where we are, and what we do. We await them, and the place is packed all the time.

Cherishing is what creates sturdy, resilient people. You can’t teach resilience, but you can love your kids into being resilient. If they feel cherished, they’ll be resilient because they’re safe, they’re seen, they’re loved. How do we walk each other home to health and wholeness?

Cherishing isn’t hard, but remembering to cherish is really hard. Mother Teresa said we’re not called to do great things. We’re called to do small things with great love. That’s wise. I think love never fails. If we feel that isn’t true, it’s just because we haven’t fully tried it. I’m bereft sometimes, but I’m hopeful in the kindnesses that people are able to muster.

In the end, I believe everybody’s unshakably good and everybody belongs. We belong to each other, but we don’t always recognize that we are unshakably good, so that gets in the way. If you don’t welcome your own wounds, you’re going to despise the wounded, which is what enables you to call somebody a monster. But health allows you to recognize that everybody’s unshakably good. How do we help people see that truth? We belong to each other. That’s key for me. It’s exquisitely mutual. It allows you to roll up your sleeves and put one loving foot in front of the next.

Father Gregory Boyle is the Founder of Homeboy Industries, the largest gang intervention, rehabilitation and re-entry program in the world. He’s also the author of several books and speaks internationally. He received the Presidential Medal of Honor in 2024.

I first met Fr. G in the late ‘80s when he was trying to get business leaders in downtown LA to hire former gang members. Nobody stepped up, so he decided to launch Homeboy Bakery on his own. Today, Homeboy has close to a dozen industries that employ thousands of gang-impacted Angelenos. Their building on Bruno is a beacon to hundreds who come daily for case management and other services. It’s the only organization I’ve ever known to gather their entire staff every work day for a morning reading of their mission statement. It sounds hokey, but it’s not. It’s astonishing.

Listening is an act of love. Courage is contagious.

This story is part of Whole Lotta Love, an independent project by Claire Peeps born of curiosity about people who dedicate themselves to making life better for the rest of us. It consists of 21 conversations with community leaders on purpose, perseverance and joy. By sharing their stories, the project invites readers to ask, listen, and connect with extraordinary people in their own communities. Read more about the project here.

Thank you for reading! If you enjoy these stories, please subscribe to the weekly series, and share with a friend or colleague.

Subscribe now

Share

Reintegrating formerly incarcerated people into our communities

Listen to an audio clip from Doug’s story:

When I was a small child, both my parents were actively in substance use disorder and addiction. Both were heroin addicts – that’s the term we used back then. My mother was working as a prostitute and my father was selling drugs, which meant I saw a lot of things that I shouldn’t have seen as a child. Both of them got arrested and put in prison and I ended up in an orphanage called Casa de Los Ninos, with about 30 other kids. I was too young to know where my parents were or what was going on.

My sister was a baby then. We went through roughly a dozen foster homes but were among the lucky few siblings that were kept together through each transition. Some of the homes were really bad and some were good, with people who cared.

I remember visiting prisons and jails a lot as a kid. The experience was frightening. It’s something that shaped my life as a young person and still shapes my worldview today. Even after years of visiting prisons, I don’t particularly like going in. When I do go inside, it takes me back to being a small child – seeing my parents behind the glass but not being able to touch them; my contact with them limited to talking through a phone.

But then Amity came and got me out of foster care. These amazing women, Naya, Betty and a few others, would come and see me. They were also meeting with my parents while they were in prison, but I didn’t know that at the time. I remember one day they brought us to this big, beautiful ranch in Tucson, Arizona. It had a swimming pool, and animals, and my father was there. We got to live with him. Other kids were there with their mothers. Me and my sister were the first to be on the ranch with their father. All I knew was that I was in a safe place.

I was able to run around and have fun. I spent a few years there while my dad got the treatment and help he needed. I was in this community of amazing people. Even though I didn’t know everything that was going on around me, I did know they all had pretty serious backgrounds -- they had either come out of prison, or off the streets, or other challenging circumstances. But they were there to heal, and they were super protective of us. I always felt safe in that community.

My mother was still incarcerated. She came to Amity later, but we didn’t reunite with her in the same way. She and my father had a very strained relationship. He sent us a lot of negative, unhealthy messages that made me not want to be around my mother because he convinced me she was the reason for the hardship in our life.

Eventually, my father, sister and I moved in with his mom in Arizona. My grandma was a sweet lady. She worked in the factories in World War II -- a real-life Rosie the Riveter. She had two children. One was my father who ended up leaving school in seventh grade and couldn’t read or write. The other was my aunt who went to Stanford, George Washington and MIT. She ended up being the Director of Science and Technology Indicators at the National Science Foundation, worked for several presidents, and did remarkable things. So I saw two very different pathways.

My father struggled with alcoholism most of his life. That shaped me, as did the fact that his parole officer was my baseball coach! I got to see what it could to do for a community when an authority figure would wrap their arms around a person and invest in their wellbeing. He would check in on my father, and then he would care for me. He gave me pitching lessons.

There was also Judge Thomas Meehan, who took a risk – letting my father out of prison and reuniting our family. Judge Meehan’s generosity was unheard of in 1983, frankly. It shaped how I came to see the community as one, and not in terms of a “we/they” dynamic.

In my teen years, I went through my own struggles. I associated the problems that we had with being poor. I thought that finding out how not to be poor was going to fix me. I went off on my own at 15, lived with my girlfriend, went to school and work, moved in with some guys, and then got in trouble and developed my own addictions.

My father passed when I was 24. I took it hard. I couldn’t see a path forward, and I didn’t have any hope. I was going to either end up in prison or dead. But Naya Arbiter, the founder of Amity – the one who helped me as a foster child and first brought me to the ranch – pulled me back into the Amity community. Naya put me on the couch in her office – taking care of me as I detoxed from all the substances in my system. I was sick for several weeks, but Naya was vigilant. She wanted me close by, and she kept an eye on me until I was healthy.

I stayed at Amity for a long time, first as a client, and then as staff. They never gave up on me, which taught me a lot. I started learning how much my actions affected other people. Eventually, Naya reunited me with my mother. It took a while for me to resolve the turmoil I felt towards her, but I finally came to understand the story of the trauma in her life. Through a long period of growth and healing, I started to understand that my parents didn’t wake up one day and decide to ruin my life, which is what a child thinks.

I ended up doing an internship at Amity, earning what we used to call “walk around money,” just enough to buy a coffee or some ice cream. In 2008 I became a staff person, around the time of the financial crisis. Nonprofits were getting decimated, and Amity was doing mass layoffs. We had to shut down our prison programs, so my first job was to drive around in a truck to pick up all of our supplies from the prisons. That was formative for me, learning how fragile nonprofits are, especially when they rely on one source of funding.

I got to learn all the moving parts of the organization, everything from working in the kitchen to watching the campuses at night to running programs, and from finance to grant making. You name it, I immersed myself in it. I came to understand that each part of the organization has to work in harmony with the others. Then I started seeing opportunities for growth. I saw Amity doing a great job of getting people sober and on a good track -- but realized we could be doing more. I thought, how do we build up a workforce of people who have lived and learned experience? Folks at Amity would leave after six months, then I’d see the same person come back. Conversations with them showed me that we were missing something – we weren’t connecting our community with opportunities for employment, education, or housing. We needed to fix that.

So we wrote some grants to develop employment services, because the employment groups that were coming to us were insulting. They would say, “Comb your hair and brush your teeth and you can be a janitor.” Now, there’s nothing wrong with janitorial work -- but if the person they were talking with was an electrician before, both in the community and in prison, they were missing the bigger picture. They were not seeing the value and skillsets of our folks.

That’s when we started paying folks who were going through our training programs. We have one gentleman who was at Amity and learned how to cook and operate a kitchen through our program. He left Amity with $40,000, and now he runs Holbox, a very successful restaurant.

Students like him who leave our program – who have reached important educational and employment milestones – have been able to save up enough money to jump-start saving for market-rate or affordable housing of their own. This led Amity to start developing an independent housing strategy, and now we’re building hundreds of housing units to support our community.

Many of our former students also volunteer at our campus now. We ask our people to volunteer, at Amity or elsewhere, because it just shows that we’re fully engaged in the community. How do you give back to the community that you may have once taken from? Many students come back and inspire others.

How do we also influence others outside to help make sure that our folks are their priority? I started learning why our services were the first to go in a financial downturn, because we didn’t have a voice with leadership in Sacramento. We saw government as “us vs. them,” alienating ourselves from the policymakers who had the power to change our lives. We were fighting against people on the other side, rather than understanding what their challenges were and trying to get them to understand ours.

So I started building relationships. I asked, what are your pain points? How do you manage a Department of Corrections workforce of 35,000 people and oversee another 200,000 people? What do you need help with? Where do you need support and training? How can we have a healthy dialogue and work together, instead of constantly talking past one another?

We present policymakers with a very simple question: do you want the folks that you have in belly chains and shackled to be released tomorrow without any substance abuse or healthcare medication? Is that how you want them back in the community? And let them be the ones that say that, no, I don’t want law enforcement officers or community members dealing with this every day.

We need to start talking about public safety as a public health issue. Once you take away safety net services, law enforcement becomes the default. Sheriffs understand this, and they don’t want to be in the business of being mental health first responders. Constituents in districts that will be impacted understand this, too.

So we’re trying to get all sides together. I don’t believe what we do at Amity is partisan. If you don’t agree with what we’re doing for people who are incarcerated, you may agree with helping foster children. That’s how I often connect with people. If you’re pro-life and believe in healing families, then you better help us help incarcerated parents. I try to find common ground.

I thrive in challenging times. That’s when you have to be at your best to help people. Even in the hardest times, I’m very optimistic. When there is a sense of urgency, something in me kicks me into high gear to say, okay, let’s do this.

Things are very difficult right now, but they’re not insurmountable. I get up every day knowing that we can do something about it. If we’re up against a bad policy or law, let’s fix it. Some of our agencies were created 50, 60 years ago, so they’re stretched beyond what they were originally created to do. As much as I don’t like what’s going on right now, if we can rebuild our agencies to do better, then something will have come from this. I try to keep an eye on the future. I’ve always done that. I try to think out 10 years. I want to see everyone coming back from prison go into a community-based reentry program. I think we can do that.

I remember one night at work when Rod, the former CEO of Amity, was like, Doug, I appreciate everything you’re doing, but you need to get out of this office and find some balance. He got a rotating Lazy Susan tray and did a demonstration for me. He got a bunch of small objects and put some representing my team around the outside of the tray, and me in the middle. He spun it around. I stayed on the middle, but all the people on the outside fell off. He said, that’s what you do when you’re going at this pace. I keep the Lazy Susan on a table in my office to remind me of that.

I take care of my physical health. I’ve figured out how to be present for my family. If I don’t replenish myself and take care of what I have at home, then I can’t be as good for the organization. After a certain time each night, I stop looking at emails or even the news. Nothing will be there that I can’t see in the morning. I’ve had to learn the hard way that worrying is like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but you don’t go anywhere.

I try to mentor young people, because I’ve been afforded so many good mentors in my life. It’s where I got a lot of my education. It brings me joy knowing people who are going to be the amazing future. I want to see somebody who is going to know things that I won’t know as I age. I hope I can give them the wisdom to understand that there will be some roadblocks, complexity and heartaches, but not to become jaded. If you’re in it for the right reasons, you’ll figure it out.

Doug Bond is President and CEO of Amity Foundation, an organization dedicated to the inclusion and habilitation of people marginalized by addiction, trauma, criminalization and incarceration. Amity helps reintegrate formerly incarcerated people into communities, returning them from number to name, by offering housing, job training and mental health services. Doug was appointed by California Governor Gavin Newsom as co-chair of Reimagining San Quentin Advisory Committee and is advising several other states on the transformation of prisons into rehabilitation centers. He serves on multiple boards and in 2025 he was named a Steinberg Institute Champion for mental health.

Doug came to Amity as a foster youth when he was 8 years old, when the organization was still fairly small, and based only in Tucson. Today, he leads the organization in both Tucson and Los Angeles with a combined budget of more than $180 million, more than a thousand staff and serving more than 60,000 formerly incarcerated people annually. His pioneering work in prison system reform has national and international reach. He is an advisor to several governors around the US on how to transform prisons into rehabilitation centers. San Quentin is the first to have made the transformation.

Listening is an act of love. Courage is contagious.

This story is part of Whole Lotta Love, an independent project by Claire Peeps born of curiosity about people who dedicate themselves to making life better for the rest of us. It consists of 21 conversations with community leaders on purpose, perseverance and joy. By sharing their stories, the project invites readers to ask, listen, and connect with extraordinary people in their own communities. Read more about the project here.

Thank you for reading! If you enjoy these stories, please subscribe to the weekly series, and share with a friend or colleague.

Subscribe now

Share

No one is turned away for inability to pay

Listen to an audio clip from Al’s story:

I grew up in Echo Park. My dad was an immigrant from the Philippines, and he didn’t really understand the system here. It was a new culture, and he dealt with more discrimination than he could talk about or I could understand. My mom was born here, second-generation Italian American, and she had some physical and mental health challenges. They both didn’t have a good sense of how to navigate things and were very isolated. But that was normal for us growing up. When you’re in it, you’re in it.

We lived seven in a one- or two-bedroom place. We didn’t have a lot. When I got older, it bothered me that they had been dealt those cards, but I didn’t feel helpless then. I made friends with older adults in the neighborhood. I found them extremely interesting, and they taught me about life. I talked to them regularly, and eventually started working for some of them, doing odd jobs or gardening, child or dog sitting. I was able to contrast the situation of our family with theirs. It gave me a sense that what we were dealing with was not normal.

When I was a kid of 13, I would go with my mom to the doctor. At least a couple times, her definition of going to the doctor was standing outside of the old Cedars of Lebanon hospital on Fountain and waiting for some white coats to walk out. She would just approach them on the street and say, hey, can you look at this lump that I have? She didn’t know how to ask for help, and eventually she died of cancer. So, if you ask me where my wanting to help people started, I think it started there.

As I got older, I watched my friends get infected and die from HIV. I mean, everybody who was in my close circle at high school is dead now. Everybody. I became part of that, too, not having access to information or insurance. I attributed our being affected by many social ills to the zip codes we lived in. There were few community services in our part of town. Information about the spread of the disease was concentrated in Hollywood and on the West Side. My friends got sick prior to the Affordable Care Act, and none had insurance. We had to go wait in line at the county hospital back then to get medical services.

When I became an HIV activist, I already knew how bad the system was, given that I had watched my parents not be able to get the help they needed and had watched my mother die. And then being in the middle of an epidemic where friends I went to school with were the high-risk populations, guys who were gay or bi or using drugs, it was just so apparent to me that the system wasn’t fair, that something was wrong.

I began to notice that poor people in general, those on the fringe, lacked access to opportunities, educational and job opportunities, healthcare and to basic social services and housing assistance. All the groups I associated with were affected. Certain populations and communities were not even on the radar screens of the folks who had the ability to help. So it caused me to want to get involved. I thought, I’m not going to just sit here and watch all this happen to me or to the people close to me. That’s not going to happen, and if it does, if I do end up dying of this disease, I’m going to do it with a fight. That’s what caused me to get into the field, wanting to make these things better through health, social services, and public support. I didn’t want to feel like a victim.

Alvaro Ballasteros is CEO of the JWCH Institute, a nonprofit health agency that operates the Wesley Health Centers, a group of more than 20 community-based clinics serving some 80,000 low income, indigent and homeless individuals across Los Angeles County annually. Al is also a co-founder and publisher of Adelante Magazine, the longest-running LGBTQ bilingual Spanish and English monthly magazine in the US, launched in 1998 to provide AIDS education to the gay, bi Latino community.

When he is not at work, Al shoots pool, plays poker (he’s a champion competitor of both), collects antiques and roller-skates.

One of my favorite experiences with Al was seeing him teach a group of 40 very serious nonprofit and public sector leaders how to play Texas Hold ‘Em one Tuesday morning at a conference. They were all engrossed.

Listening is an act of love. Courage is contagious.

This story is part of Whole Lotta Love, an independent project by Claire Peeps born of curiosity about people who dedicate themselves to making life better for the rest of us. It consists of 21 conversations with community leaders on purpose, perseverance and joy. By sharing their stories, the project invites readers to ask, listen, and connect with extraordinary people in their own communities. Read more about the project here.

Thank you for reading! If you enjoy these stories, please subscribe to the weekly series, and share with a friend or colleague.

Subscribe now

Share

The Citizen Artist

Listen to an audio clip from Luis’s story:

I always say that I am part of an ancient tradition. Theater is an ancient tradition. My family is an ancient tradition. And somehow the mix of the two seems to make sense to me.

I talk a lot about alchemy. My years in the poetry community were extraordinary, that was a decade. And then another decade in performance art. But the greatest experience of art for me was meeting two mentors who have passed, the dramaturg, Morgan Jenness, and the playwright, Maria Irene Fornes, who showed me that alchemy was a mix of discipline and craft, passion and desire.

I think of family that way - it’s love and care coming together to make something extraordinary happen. I’m part of a long, long line of people whose stories are very theatrical and crazy. Both of my grandfathers died tragically. When my mother was ten, all the men in her family were killed by a train in the fog in Delano, California, one morning, on their way to pick grapes in the fields. They didn’t see the train coming and it hit their vehicle. My other grandfather was killed by a stampede of horses in Mexico. All the farm workers on my mother’s side have died of cancer. A kind of mythology lives on in the family lore.

I was raised in a matriarchy. My grandmother had to lead, and she made a little farm. She was very Pentecostal and became part of the first church built in Delano. I can see these traces in myself in this. When the circumstances you are given in life are not so great, you can make something from them. I think a lot about Pico-Union. How much I love it, and how truly violent and poor it was. I track my poverty in a Chicano joke that we had, where on Monday we had meat, and on Friday we had potato tacos. I could tell we didn’t have money. I knew it as a kid, but somehow that was also joy. Joy in family. It’s hard to imagine that tragedy can bring joy -- that on the other side of sadness is something very beautiful waiting for you, if you can muster through it and dig through the weeds of your grief.

I’m a private person. I’m an introvert, playing an extrovert in my life. I have a discipline: I write at midnight, a thousand words. I only look at it once. I only edit once. And then I write the same version on Instagram, in three hundred and fifty words. And then on Twitter/X, in fifty words. I do this exercise for myself every day, which is to write a big, long-form thing that I love, and then a 350-word essence of it.

It’s become sort of a passion. A lot of people in my community of activists have called me out and said, you could be a little harder. You could say fuck this government, and all that. But I just don’t think there’s enough joy and light. I’m not the person to go to the darkness. I write about darkness, but I really want to write about it in terms of knowing there is light somewhere. That’s the thing that keeps me going. If things are hard, there’s something better out there.

I get up every morning and think of my dad. We lived all in one room. My father would wake up and he’d say in Spanish, ‘It’s an honor to get up for work, and it’s a pleasure to rest’. I always think about that, the honor of getting up and laboring, and then the joy of coming home. I do that every morning. I wake up and I do a little meditation, which is my poor man’s version of it. I sit on the side of the bed in my underwear and think about how to get through my day. In that meditation, I am in joy. I love getting up and going to work. I have never not worked. I started working illegally when I was thirteen at a factory in the city of Vernon, to contribute to my family. I’ve only not worked one day in my entire life. So, I think the notion of getting up and giving yourself purpose and focus is important.

I’m an untrained person. I don’t have a lot of professional training or degrees. What I’ve learned about art is that as you learn, as you go, you get better every day. I learn something every day about the human condition, or about the technical craft of how to write a story or a play. I think that’s an interesting conceptual idea to follow in my life. You could see it in me spiritually, that what I’m really trying to find, is happiness, joy and light always.

When I graduated High School, my roommate at the time loved the performing arts, and used to volunteer running lights and sound and ushering downtown at the experimental art spaces. One day she said, I can’t do it, I have a date. Can you do it? They will tell you what the cues are. It was not at all what she said it would be! I went to a theater on Industrial Street in downtown. They did not take kindly to me. I didn’t know what I was doing at all. I just had to open the door for the audience. I assumed that we should let people in at seven p.m. They were rehearsing inside, so, clearly, I don’t know what I was thinking. I opened the door and the director screamed at me, “Close that door!” I had to close the door and get everybody out again. About fifteen minutes later, she came back and said, “I’m so sorry, nobody should ever talk to you like that in the theater.” It was the most beautiful apology. I said, “I’m so sorry, I just didn’t know.” And she said, “That’s right, you didn’t know. So, you’ve got to do this every night, so you can learn how it works.” That artist was Roxanne Rogers, Sam Shepard’s sister, who became a great collaborator of mine. What a great intro into this world. It was a moment where I was learning, learning, learning.

I’ve never collected unemployment. But nowadays, I think it’s not looked on as good to give your all, and to keep going and going. I came of age in an extraordinary period where I did a lot. I did everything. I made a lot of mistakes, and I made them in public. Every experiment was a lesson. I think that being in it all the time gives you muscle. Because I was writing every day, the muscle came to my writing as well. It wasn’t just about endurance, but progression. Even today, because I’m not well read, I carry a thesaurus in my computer. Every day I try to use a new word. So, it was twenty years of constant, nonstop working, like every night of art making. If somebody said, ‘do you want to come to Chicago, and sleep on the floor of somebody’s apartment, and do your thing?’ I said, Hell, yeah!

I live very, very simply, very cheaply. If you came into my apartment in Koreatown, you’d be terrified. An actor friend came over and he said, “Oh my God, did you die?” I need a very clean, very spare kind of space to make work. And my apartment is not the place I want to clutter up. It’s interesting, all the stuff that makes a life. I can see the journey, I can see how it maps itself out. And partly that has to do with keeping it simple, because the theater is very complicated.

Many years ago, the artist Rachel Rosenthal told me, ‘Keep it simple so that no matter what comes your way, you can say yes.’ I have one credit card. I keep it at zero. I don’t take credit, unless I must. I have another little credit card in a drawer. I call it the funeral credit card, for if I need to travel or buy a suit or something like that in an emergency. I think the best experiences I’ve had were when people called at the last-minute saying, ‘do you want to come?’ I don’t want to overcomplicate things, so I need to have this kind of life.

I think that writing, caretaking and teaching are all the same thing, which helps keep balance. My mother is going on eighteen years of having the Forgetting Condition, which is a long time. As she progresses, caretaking is a lot like a long-term art project. The blessings are extraordinary. I adore her, she is my base.

Every semester I reserve two chairs in my classroom, one for Irene, and one for Morgan. But all the ancestors come with me into the room. All of them. I think the work that I do with graduate students is life-changing, which is to say, it’s not just a technical exercise, it’s a spiritual calling. I tell them, ‘You’re only as good an artist as you are a person in the world as a citizen. So, what are you doing? How are you living? Who are you living with?’ The students either love it or hate it. But there’s a moment when they start to make a connection between life, art and how it’s all the same thing. I like to think that I am valuable to my culture, to my community, to my people, in the same way that I want to feel that I bring value to a night at the theater, even as experimental as I can be.

So, yes, my mother is a great art project. She’s like Morgan and Irene; central to my development. It’s important to understand where you come from, where you’re going, and how you’re remaking yourself. It feels simple and easy, to be honest. I literally must live kindly and live in joy. I don’t think my father was wrong. I think it is good to get up every day, even though you don’t want to.

I tried to process my father’s death in a piece that I did with my dear friend, the director, Chay Yew, in Chicago. We were in this theater and having a lot of tech problems. Somebody just happened to open the curtains to the windows. Chay said, “Oh, there’s enough light in here! Let’s just perform it like this.” I could see where he was going. At the end of the piece, I do this thing about the lesson that I learned about being in the hospital with my father on his last day, taking care of him while my family was in the waiting room. My father’s breath became shallow and watching him give out one last breath was extraordinary. I had been in this room with him for a year. I knew how to move the machines and unplug stuff. I saw that little line on the screen, and I thought, ‘okay, let me turn that off.’ The nurse is going to come in and I’m not ready for that. So, I turned the machine off, and I started weeping.

Chay said, “That’s what we’re going to do. We’re just going to do that ritual of the last breath and then the weeping.” I said, “But when do we stop?” And he said, “Well, we stop when the audience tells us to stop.” So, in Chicago, we did this ritual where I just weep. And I tell you; I did thirty-two performances, and there was never a performance in which someone didn’t step in from the audience. Someone would get up, hand me a tissue. One guy came up on stage and hugged me. Two people got up and reached out their hands. Every performance, the audience did the thing that we know how to do as humans, which is to comfort each other, to be empathetic, to live in the world with each other. Oh my God, that sense of community. It was the hardest ritual of my life. To take my grief to the community, and to have the community say, ‘we’re going to cradle you. We’re going to hold you. We’re going to catch you.’ There is a person like that in every part of the world, in every audience. Isn’t that amazing?

I believe in performance and art as a tool not only for social change, but for healing. That seems essential to what I’m doing. That’s my only job, to create the next generation of people who are going to link up and not let us lose the ancient thread. It’s super damn hard. But it doesn’t feel so hard in that it’s a belief in people.

Irene Fornes said to me, “Luisito, there were many great artists before you, and there will be many great artists after you, so relax; your only job is to tell the story of today, you don’t have to write everything in this play, just one slice.” So, I think, yeah, if I’m going to do this for the rest of my life, I can relax and just do the slices. Just connect us to the next generation. That’s all you must do.

What a great gift she gave me, to think you don’t have to do it all. There’s a lot of talking that goes on in the subtext, in the space between the words, and you can lean into it. It’s the most beautiful space, where emotion lives. When I am engaged in a conversation, silence is powerful and rich. Making yourself available, even in little exchanges, on the bus, or at the market. Often, in a line at the market, at the bank, at Starbucks, I’ll say, “How are you doing?”, or “Wow, it’s kind of empty right now”, which opens a door for conversation. There’s something about letting people in. I’ve never had a bad Uber experience. Everybody becomes your friend. Uber drivers say the most intense, vulnerable things in the safety of a car, and the darkness kind of gives you permission. You make space for people to enter. That’s what I love about being full of inquiry. That’s what being an artist is. I have a question about the world. I have a thought or an idea about how to move through the world, and I need it answered. So, a play for me is a very personal journey. It is a question.

Luis Alfaro is a Chicano playwright, poet and performance artist who was born and raised in LA’s Pico Union neighborhood. He’s also an influential educator, curator, producer and community organizer. The recipient of many prestigious awards, Luis is the Director of the MFA Writing Program at the University of Southern California, and beloved by students.

I first met Luis in the late ‘80s when he was prominent in LA’s performance art scene, and an active member of Teatro Viva!, an organization he cofounded to raise awareness around HIV and AIDS the Latino community.

Luis once shared with me a quote, often attributed to Plato: “Be kind, because everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” It has become a touchstone for me.

Luis is a regular columnist on Substack.

Listening is an act of love. Courage is contagious.

This story is part of Whole Lotta Love, an independent project by Claire Peeps born of curiosity about people who dedicate themselves to making life better for the rest of us. It consists of 21 conversations with community leaders on purpose, perseverance and joy. By sharing their stories, the project invites readers to ask, listen, and connect with extraordinary people in their own communities. Read more about the project here.

Thank you for reading! If you enjoy these stories, please subscribe to the weekly series, and share with a friend or colleague.

Subscribe now

Share

Providing equal access to justice for those living in poverty

I do what I do because I am the product of my parents and of their wishes and goals for a little girl who came to the United States at the age of six in 1969, and who didn’t know a word of English. We lived in south-central Los Angeles, then a small but burgeoning immigrant community. My dad was my rock in education. He wanted me to learn English as soon as possible. He didn’t want me to get behind. So he made me read the LA Times and the Herald Examiner at 5:30 every morning before he left for work. He’d wake me up and we would read one column. It was a ritual, just “read it!”

My dad was limited English proficient himself. He really struggled sometimes with the stories, but he got more of it than I did. But that’s where l learned to analyze -- What’s the story about? Why do you think they wrote it? And then afterwards, he let me skip rope and watch cartoons before taking me to school. So I think I’m also a product of Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig! I would listen to them, and the animation helped me understand what they were saying.

Learning was important to him. My parents didn’t know I was put in a class with children who had special needs. After about a month, I told my dad and my mom, I go to this class every day and we learn the word “apple.” And my mom’s like, “manzana? What else do you learn?’ I said, that’s it, “apple” every single day. I said, I don’t want to go to the class anymore. And my dad was -- what is happening?? It was then he realized that because the school had no bilingual education, they didn’t know where to put me, so I was put with other children who were special needs or who were limited English proficient or non-English proficient like me. I think that spurred him to continue waking me up to reading the paper and sound out words.

Because of that, I learned that my parents needed help, too. As I grew older, as a kid in elementary school, middle school, high school, and for my whole life I’ve been their interpreter. My dad would kid with me and say, that’s the bonus -- you learned English so now you can help us. I had to speak with landlords, rent increases, looking for apartments. I had to negotiate with their employers when they didn’t know information, or needed time off and they didn’t quite know how to ask for it. And so I grew up very quickly. But at the same time, I was able to appreciate what my parents were going through. The work that I do now is about people like my parents -- low-income people who need help, who are smart, diligent, and work so incredibly hard, but they just need someone to help them in a moment of crisis in their life.

My parents always gave back. They became a hub for the small but growing number of Guatemalan families in our community. It felt like we were a hotel because they would welcome family, friends of friends and their families. We didn’t have much but whatever we had they shared with others. I watched them and I learned from them. They said, when you can, you help those who need you, you help them. That’s what drives me. It’s why I do what I do. I see that to this day. It takes the shape of many people who come now from all over the world to Los Angeles, and who come to our doorstep at LAFLA.

When my family moved to Glendale, it was mostly a very white Anglo community. There was also a burgeoning Armenian community and a Cuban community there, but we were outsiders as Guatemalans. Yet we all built community. We took care of each other. My parents said, Silvia, take care of Mrs. Rodriguez, an elderly Cuban American lady who lived three bungalows down and needed help. Her kids lived in Miami, so we watched out for her. My parents said, Silvia, help her with her paperwork, her insurance, whatever it was she needed.

Sometimes as a child, you get a little resentful when your parents tell you to go to Mrs. So-and-So’s house and help them. But once I got a big gash on my hand, and it was the neighbor women who were home who came rushing to care for me. I broke through the window because I’d lost my keys. They took me to one of their bungalows. I kept saying I was sorry. They were like, stop saying that Silvia, you take care of us, we take care of you. When my parents came home, the women had already taken care of the injury. They said, maybe you’ll take her to the ER just to make sure nothing else is wrong, but we think she’s okay. It was that rush of people coming to help me that made me understand we are all so bound together. When I saw them do that for me, when I was in middle school, I was like, wow, these women are amazing. They were just like my mom. I have a scar from the gash, and I’ll never forget that.

Community’s important, you never stop helping others. To me, it’s a duty we have to our fellow human beings. They are our sisters and brothers. I mean that in every iteration you can have. We are here for each other.

I am more towards the end of my career now, and I see this beautiful community come together in the work we do at LAFLA to uplift others, to say it’s not okay for people to be left behind, it’s not okay for people to be hungry, to not be housed, to not have opportunity. I feel this urgent need to help because there were other people who paved the way for me.

I’ve learned that you have to be able to see who your mentors are. Titles don’t matter. Sometimes people think the most senior people are going to be the mentors. But sometimes it’s the junior people who mentor me. They see something that I can’t see for myself. At every job I’ve held in the nonprofit sector, I’ve had someone or some people who have helped me thrive, who see beyond what I see, who look at me and say let me help you go further.

Many of us are taught that we have to do everything ourselves. But if you want to have a thriving organization, you have to have multiple people in it who are able to lead. My job is to look for hidden gems among our staff -- it doesn’t matter what position they’re in – and to cultivate their leadership and growth. I’ve learned that, given the opportunity as it was given to me, any of us can lead and thrive.

My mentors put me out there and said, Silvia, take the case. Do what you need to do in order to learn. And they allowed me to fail, which is important. There are times I have failed spectacularly. But it’s knowing that you have that safety net of support that’s going to catch you.

Learning how to lead is also learning how to step out of the way. For those of us who’ve been in leadership for so long, you think you know everything, but you don’t. Young people will always challenge you and make you think differently. I love that about them. I hope I’m not growing into this old fogey who says, “no, no, no.” I want to allow young people to thrive.

I tell young people, I want you to be frothing at the mouth when you come to LAFLA because when you drove to this office today, you passed a major unhoused people’s encampment. That should make you angry. That should make you go, what is wrong with this system? And then you pause and think, how can I change that? What do I do at Legal Aid? What do I do in any job I will ever have to make sure that that does not continue? A lot of people spout anger, especially now, but what are we doing about that? It’s all about channeling that rage, or whatever you’re feeling. I want them to carry that fire of rage within them, but then to have the courage to do something about it. That’s why we exist. We’re people who make change.

It’s okay to fear the unknown. It’s natural with what’s happening in the world, in this country, in this city. It’s very hard right now. There are a lot of external forces impacting us. But we come to work to do what our community needs from us. I keep bringing people back to our mission, to our values. No one externally can change that. It’s about having the courage to move forward, to say I’m not going to stop my work. Because if you do, the external forces win.

Our clients bring us joy. They laugh sometimes and even tell us we’re too serious. Just calm down. Say, how’s your mom? How’s your partner? How’s your dog? In those small moments of joy, I don’t see anybody talking about the world falling apart. There’s nothing like a good hug.

I have lots of hope. Our tagline at LAFLA is “justice, equity, hope.” We all hope to change our circumstances as individuals, whatever we’re going through. And if we don’t offer hope to our clients, what are we saying? Then we’re just another cog in the wheel of filling out paperwork. We’re not robots, we’re humans. Hope to me is what brings humanity to our work.

In this moment especially, I think we have to broaden our community. To me, it’s the community of organizers and activists and other folks and just regular people in our neighborhood who are saying, we’re not going to let this change our country or who we are as a people. In community, we’re really strong. We forget that sometimes. We are bigger than the sum of our parts. Community saves community. 100% true.

Silvia Argueta is the Executive Director of the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, a nonprofit law firm that protects and advances the rights of the most underserved, leveling the playing field and ensuring that everyone can have access to the justice system. LAFLA’s always busy legal team has been working overtime in the aftermath of LA’s deadly wildfires of 2025, and the immigration actions that have since spread across the nation.

Silvia loves flowers, and time in her garden with her 6-year-old niece. I took the picture of her at the top of the story at the LA Flower Mart in downtown LA.

Listening is an act of love. Courage is contagious.

This story is part of Whole Lotta Love, an independent project by Claire Peeps born of curiosity about people who dedicate themselves to making life better for the rest of us. It consists of 21 conversations with community leaders on purpose, perseverance and joy. By sharing their stories, the project invites readers to ask, listen, and connect with extraordinary people in their own communities. Read more about the project here.

Thank you for reading! If you enjoy these stories, please subscribe to the weekly series, and share with a friend or colleague.

Subscribe now

Share

Instructions for Living a Life:

Pay Attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.

- Mary Oliver

I love people. I’m drawn to those who are committed to making life better for the rest of us. I’m curious to know how they’ve come to do what they do, and what we might learn from them.

I suppose this curiosity comes from my own experiences as a child. My parents immigrated to the U.S. after World War II and struggled to make a new life. Things were tough at home. Like a lot of kids, I wasn’t sure where I fit in the world. My strategy was to watch others, for clues.

I was a good student. I loved reading, I still do. Stories became my compass. I discovered photography in high school and fell in love with visual images, too. I am a generalist by nature, though if pressed, I’d say that people are my genre. I’ve invested a lot of time in looking and listening, which set me up well to work in the arts, and later, unexpectedly, in philanthropy.

I worked for 28 years at the Durfee Foundation, a grantmaking entity in Los Angeles. Durfee focuses on supporting people who are devoted to making L.A. a better place. I’m biased, of course, but I’d say that Durfee is unusual in its approach. It offers leaders time away from their work to recharge, or to explore new strategies. When you ask people why they need or want that kind of time, you learn a lot about their lives and their work. I’ve had the privilege to hear hundreds of stories from brilliant leaders over the years.

We don’t often get to hear people’s back stories. We usually meet folks in the context of their current work and hover there. We might catch a fleeting glimpse of something else in them that inspires us, but it often lacks dimension. Whenever I glimpse that spark, though, I want to get closer to it. I have a sense that it might offer illumination, like a ray of sunlight on a topographical map. Seeing how others navigate the trails of their lives helps me gain new perspective on the contours of my own.

What will follow are the stories of 21 brave individuals who are leaders in the nonprofit or public sectors, told in their own words. Their stories were edited from hour-long conversations recorded in the spring and summer and 2025. Most of the storytellers are Durfee alums. I asked each of them: Why do you do what you do? What have you learned along the way? What keeps you going in hard times? And what brings you joy?

There are more than 200 leaders in Durfee’s alumni network. I could have had this conversation with any of them. So, why these folks? I had to begin somewhere. Fragments of these stories have stayed with me over the years, and I wanted to capture them whole. But this is just a beginning. I believe I could continue having these conversations for the rest of my life. Maybe I will.

I conceived of this project in the fall of 2024, before the presidential election. I couldn’t anticipate then the extremity of the chaos and cruelty that has consumed us since. Each of the individuals I talked with has been on the front lines of upheaval. They’re providing shelter, healthcare, food, safety, and most importantly, dignity and voice, to those being cast aside or left behind. They are protecting our civic infrastructure and sustaining our fragile democracy.

Amazingly, they remain optimistic, even while under assault. They refuse to be defeated. Their wisdom and perseverance are an antidote to the darkness and give me hope. Their stories are filled with light. As individuals, they have faced difficult challenges, but I believe they are like Japanese Kintsugi pots whose cracks have been repaired with gold, making them even stronger and more precious than when they began.

Justice is what love looks like in public, as Cornel West has said. It takes a lot of love to care for people in need. And it takes an almost superhuman set of organizational skills, too. These extraordinary individuals possess both in abundance. They are lighting our way to a more just world.

There are magnificent people like these leaders everywhere, including in your own town, no doubt. I hope you find them and get to know them. Be sure to ask them questions.

Listening is an act of love.

Courage is contagious.

With a Whole Lotta Love,

Claire Peeps

Special Thanks

There are so many people who have offered help and encouragement in the making of a Whole Lotta Love. I’m deeply grateful to them all. I’m indebted to my dear friends Holly Sidford, who sparked the idea, and Judy Belk, who encouraged me to sit down and get to writing. Tony Brown kindly offered me space to record the conversations and Lee Van Over provided expert audio engineering. The wonderful folks at Mesa Refuge provided me time and space to give shape to the project, as did Anne Focke and the Mighty Tieton Cabinaires. To my longtime pals Carrie Avery, Tory Bailey, Bob Calfas, Steve Lepore, Janice Pober and Cynthia Rallis, my deep thanks for being early readers. My dear friend Tom Rhoads encouraged me to go back to taking pictures, and Caroline Renzelman has added a wonderful graphic design to the series. My amazing partner, Nathan Birnbaum, has been a wise sounding board throughout a year of interviewing and editing, and has cooked incredible dinners to keep me going. And my profoundest gratitude goes to the 21 game-changing leaders who have provided the content for this project. Thank you all for agreeing to have conversations with me. Your actions and words change hearts, shatter barriers, and make the world a better place, which nourishes us with the essential hope and optimism we need so much, particularly at this pivotal historical moment.