Father Gregory Boyle, founder and director of Homeboy Industries, a successful gang intervention and rehabilitation program in Los Angeles, will be awarded the prestigious Presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House on Friday.
Mr. Boyle, a Jesuit Catholic priest, started Homeboy Industries in the late 1980s in partnership with churches and community members in the East Los Angeles area. Homeboy Industries began as a bakery teaching former gang members to make bread and has expanded into one of the most successful intervention programs in the world.
The Medal of Freedom is the nation's highest civilian honor. Boyle will be one of 19 recipients of the award at a ceremony scheduled for Friday at 1:30 p.m. at the White House.
From 1986 to 1992, Boyle served as pastor at Dolores Mission Church in Boyle Heights, an area with a high concentration of gang activity. After witnessing devastating violence from 1988 to 1998, a period that became known as “His Decade of Death,” Boyle joined the church, and in 1988 members of the community came together and later joined the church. Homeboy He started Industries.
What started as a single bakery was a success, providing former gang members with training and services to pursue a better life. The bakery still employs dozens of Homeboy Industries trainees, and spinoff companies include Homeboy Farmers Market, Homeboy Diner, Homegirl Catering, and Homeboy Bakery Wholesale. and supplies products to other restaurants in the Los Angeles area.
Over the decades since its first bakery, Homeboy Industries has expanded into a wide range of social enterprises.
“We've gone from being work-centered to being healing-centered,” Boyle said in an interview at the 2022 NBC4 News Conference. may or may not reoffend.” “But then it became our absolute insistence that a healed gang member never goes back to prison. So now we're confident in that. So heal first. is first, and everything else is secondary to people discovering their own truths.'' Those are exactly what God had in mind when he created them, and everything else is secondary to people discovering their truth.'' You watch as you become and live that truth.
The retail bakery is located at 130 West Bruno Street in downtown Los Angeles.
Boyle is a California Peace Prize recipient and a member of the California Hall of Fame. He also received the University of Notre Dame's 2017 Laetare Medal, the oldest honor bestowed on American Catholics.
