Father Greg Boyle, author "Tattoos on the Heart"

Air Dates: April 15-17, 2017

"You can't SCARE a person straight, you can only CARE a person straight."-- Father Greg Boyle

This week's REPORT FROM SANTA FE presents a special encore program with Father Greg Boyle, Jesuit priest and the founder and Director of Homeboy Industries, a gang-intervention program located in Boyle Heights, the part of Los Angeles considered the gang capital of the world.

Father Boyle is the author of the New York Times bestselling book, "Tattoos on the Heart, the Power of Boundless Compassion," which received the 2011 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Creative Nonfiction.

“Tattoos on the Heart” is a breathtaking series of parables distilled from Father Boyle's twenty years in the barrio. These personal, unflinching stories are full of surprising revelations and observations of the community in which Boyle works and of the many lives he has helped save.

In 1988, Father Boyle began a grassroots effort to address the escalating problems and unmet needs of at-risk and gang-involved youth in the barrio communities of East Los Angeles. Those efforts sparked the creation of Homeboy Industries, which today is the largest of its kind in the nation, emphasizing alternatives to gang involvement.

The most distinctive feature of Homeboy Industries is its social enterprises, which offer job training for former gang members and at-risk youth. Father Greg offers gang members intervention, rehabilitation, and tattoo removal. Homeboy Industries has rehabilitated over 11,000 gang members.Father Boyle has been nationally recognized with numerous awards, including his recent induction into the California Hall of Fame, for his humanitarian work. Other awards include the California Peace Prize, Bon Appetit's Humanitarian of the Year, and the Civic Medal of Honor from the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce. He has appeared on “Sixty Minutes” and CBS-TV's “Sunday Morning.”

Additional Quotes:

· "Here is what we seek: a compassion that can stand in awe at what the poor have to carry, rather than stand in judgment at how they carry it."-- Father Greg Boyle

· "Businesses have come and gone at Homeboy Industries. We have had starts and stops, but anything worth doing is worth failing at. We started Homeboy Plumbing. That didn't go so well. Who knew? People didn't want gang members in their homes. I just didn't see that coming." -- Father Greg Boyle