Like a great structure, you can't succeed at building a movement without a solid blueprint.

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In fact, no building, great or small, can even go through construction process without referring to that plan at every phase.

 

My father would bring blueprints home when I was a kid all the time. He would roll them out and begin the tedious task of figuring out where tile or granite should go, map out a design, and then get to work calculate labor and material costs for an accurate bid.

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When we lost him, we knew what it was going to cost this community to lose a mentor and a builder. So we rolled out a plan to continue his impact to the building community. The plan we came up with was simple: Fund. Mentor. Build.

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But within this simple blue print is a grand vision for reconnecting to what is sustainable by repairing the disunity within ourselves, and from each other, and reconnecting to what is universal and divine.

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One of my greatest inspirations, Father Greg Boyle of Homeboy Industries believed he could help heal the gang problem in Los Angeles. His plan was simple as well: jobs not jails. His facility grew from that simple plan into an all out entity depended upon by the local government, law enforcement and other NGO's city wide. They have played a major role in successfully rehabilitating hundreds of LA area gang members. But a lot more goes into that than just placing their clientele into suitable jobs.

 

Love is a complicated word, particularity when used in public capacities as asolution to community wide problems. But, within their community, there's an enormous push toward what Boyle calls kinship.  While changing their life stories depends upon the foundation of purposeful employment as "industries" suggests, the primary fastener at Homeboy is a demand one must place from within for the ultimate form of empathy: treating everyone as if they are blood family. Without this form of love, which they had previously only found fraudulently in their respective gangs, there is no overcoming the obstacles to recovery.

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Like Father G, another one of my personal heroes Viktor Frankl, the famed Holocaust survivor and a key influence on modern psychology, leaned upon the same ideals to sustain him through the worst evil this world has ever imagined.  

 

To Frankl, love (or kinship as Boyle refers to it) combined with the acceptance of the reality that suffering (a life lived on the margins as Boyle puts it) is a part of every human story in some way were to be understand as monumental and universal truths. Not simply for survival, but to thrive in the most awful of conditions and traumas.

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According to both, these combined with purposeful work are the keys to the structural integrity of a meaningful and healthy life. Getting someone to work as a tradesperson may seem practical, but to us there is much more that has to happen to see long term success for this city in the midst of recovering from the natural disaster of fire, and the human caused disasters of poverty, addiction, and crime that are dimishing the quality of life within our city.

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Acceptance of one's suffering, kinship with one's self and others, and finding meaningful work are intrinsic points of our blueprint. for helping the Northern California area recover from what has burned us and what is still burning us down. 

 

Our team believes these ideals as basic fact, and everything we do is tied to this reality of the human story.