Greg Boyle Quotes

Gangs are bastions of conditional love, and one of the ways to counteract it is to offer community, which will always trump gang, and that's what happens at Homeboy Industries.

I work with gang members, and I feel a kind of affinity and gift, even. But who would've thunk it, you know? I mean, I didn't anticipate it.

A group of us started a community center in Santa Monica. We've tried different programs, and three have worked really well. A poetry group. Once a week we visit Venice High and talk to girls at risk.

I founded Homeboy Industries in 1988 after I buried my first young person killed in our streets because of gang violence.

The idea that any law enforcement agency or person would ever know these gang members better than Homeboy Industries is impossible.

I think I would encourage leaders to start working with communities in order to inoculate angry, young teenagers.

The power to prevent violence is a power that no police force seems to have anywhere in the United States.

Tackling violence on our streets is a complex problem, and we need not only all parties, but whole communities to come together to tackle it.

With gangs, there could be a positive outlook because it takes the older guys to come school these younger guys on the right roles.

I started up this program here in Bermuda, working with what society deems under-privileged kids, at-risk kids.

What we do best is we target the young men and women who are on the fringe. They could go either way. Maybe they have been in trouble before, but not serious trouble. ... We cherry-pick them and circumvent them away from the gang members and drug dealers ... (and encourage) them to hang out with us and become a Guardian Angel.

Violence is a problem we all want to solve. I want to make sure that kids learn to deal with anger by learning how to talk with people to solve problems. Here in the United States Senate I want to make sure we have safe schools, safe neighborhoods and good things for kids to do after school!

The solution to putting an end to bullying is to stop it at the source but also to find out what is causing the person to behave the way that they do.

I've also been working with the Challengers Club in the inner city of Los Angeles for 15 years now, I guess, and it's essentially an inner-city recreation club for boys and girls.

We need to get serious about combating gang violence on Long Island, and the entire nation.

I've worked with homeless kids, kids in foster care, and I've never met a kid who couldn't be reached.

I run a program called Amer-I-Can. We've taught in prisons, schools, juvenile facilities and we teach in the community. We have the greatest record from the standpoint of dealing with grade point averages, disciplinary action and attendance in schools.

You can't reason with gang violence: you can't talk to it, sit it at the table, and negotiate with it.

In Chicago in 2000, the Cure Violence health approach saw a 67 percent decline in shootings and killings, which soon replicated to 70 communities nationwide with multiple independent evaluations from world-renowned institutions, such as the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Local businesses and communities must be included from the very start in developing solutions to fragility, violence, and conflict.

People are murdering each other without any recourse... So we need to get in our communities and work from the inside out.

Every cop will tell you that their real job is being a social worker. That's what they do all day. The large majority of police officers in this country never even draw their gun, let alone fire it. They do conflict resolution, right? And if that's their job, why do they need to look like they're an occupying force?

As a nation, this is the moment to start seriously investing our time, energy and resources into proven methods of reducing violence, both within our nation as well as internationally. The cost of violence to our culture and our children is simply not sustainable.

You're always trying to find ways of getting guys in positions in which they will be comfortable.

I began working within the streets of Harlem, where, after graduating from Yale [University, New Haven, CT], I became the artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem [New York, NY]. I wanted to know what that was about. I would actually pull people from off of the streets and ask them to come to my studio.