Compassionate Workplaces, Inspiring Global Impact + Resiliency with Tom Vozzo (part 2)

What if you could transform the lives of the most marginalized individuals in society and inspire a global movement? Join us as we uncover the remarkable journey of Homeboy Industries, an extraordinary organization that empowers former gang members to rebuild their lives. Hosts Natalie Davis and Pamela Cass take you behind the scenes of this transformative initiative, sharing stories of resilience and the comprehensive support provided—from counseling and education to volunteer tattoo removal and therapy. Discover how Homeboy Industries grew its operating budget from $11 million to $50 million, thanks to generous donors and an unwavering commitment to tackling some of the toughest cases. Learn about their leadership development focus and how their unique approach is inspiring over 150 organizations around the world to foster change and end generational cycles of violence.

Navigating the challenges faced by the working poor requires empathy and understanding. In our discussion, we underscore the power of creating compassionate and flexible workplace cultures, emphasizing the benefits of hiring individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds. Hear compelling stories, like that of an executive assistant balancing parole obligations with job duties, illustrating the rewards of a supportive work environment. We argue for moving beyond rigid meritocracy to prioritize care, empowerment, and support, allowing employees to thrive despite systemic obstacles. This episode not only highlights the resilience of the human spirit but also showcases how a culture of empathy can enrich organizations with unparalleled loyalty and dedication.

About Tom Vozzo
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https://homeboyindustries.org/thehomeboyway/
 

The Quiet Gift: A Journey of Self Worth and Resilience is now available for download as an audible.  Check it out!

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:06

All of us reach a point in time where we are depleted and need to somehow find a way to reignite the fire within. But how do we spark that flame? Welcome to Reignite Resilience, where we will venture into the heart of the human spirit. Resilience where we will venture into the heart of the human spirit. We'll discuss the art of reigniting our passion and strategies to stoke our enthusiasm. And now here are your hosts, Natalie Davis and Pamela Cass.

Speaker 2 0:41

Tell us a little bit about the team. So you've got counselors, you've got. Tell us kind of all of the spectrum.

Speaker 3 0:47

It sounds, I mean, like tattoo removers. I mean it's just a massive group we have a fairly large size team.

Speaker 4 0:56

Again, two thirds of them are former clients. So it's great to have people who've walked in those steps and know what it's like to leave gang life behind, knows the struggles of to leave the gang, knows when the homie's trying to get pulled on from the gang members how to pull them back. So we have navigators, case managers but we already talked about the programs. But our unsung heroes are our volunteer network. So we have 40 doctors who volunteer their time to do tattoo removal. We have 25 therapists who volunteer their time to provide therapy hours. Along the way we have umpteen number of educators where we have a charter high school. We have a twilight high school program along the way, and so we have therapists on staff. We have educators on staff. We have a couple of lawyers on staff, mostly doing family law, family reunification type of things, and it's like we do all of our services under one roof and we sort of stretch our nickels to make it happen. Wow.

Speaker 3 1:51

That volunteer network sounds amazing and I guess you have the paid staff and those that have graduated through the program and the volunteers that bring it all together. Tom, that's where you are now. The organization was in a different place when you got there. Talk to us about outside of the financial woes. Was it operating to this magnitude when you started? No, no.

Speaker 4 2:12

So we were about when I started we were about $11 million operating budget and now this year we'll be about a $50 million operating budget, which means we're serving that many more people. And so we've grown. But thankfully we've blessed with generous donors, helped us to grow. It's always a struggle, making payroll and all. To me as a corporate guy, you know it's just. You're driven for growth and to help more people.

Speaker 4 2:34

Father Greg, our founder, doesn't care how many people we help, as long as he's helping the person in front of him today, which is the important part. But you know, each week, even today, 15 people interview to be part of the Homeboy Paid Program and the way the numbers work. We can only take two of those 15. And I try to get on the interview committee as often as possible. And how we go about it. Of those 15, we take the person who needs us the most.

Speaker 4 2:58

That's what Father Greg has taught us that if you're the most successful among those 15, we figure there's another program in LA County that can help you. But if you're the least successful quote, unquote there's no one else out there for you and we know that you're running with the gang. Your life spirals downward. So we take the hardest of the hard cases and because we have donations and we're not so dependent upon government grants. On government grants, they have this criteria you have to perform to, which leads to other organizations taking the easiest of cases so they can meet their numbers. Luckily, we don't have to worry about that. And so, again, we do reverse cherry picking. Again, the criteria to get an interview is you have to be drug free, been incarcerated and be affiliated with a gang and be looking to change.

Speaker 4 3:40

Oftentimes people just aren't tired of that lifestyle and they just want out and we help them get out.

Speaker 3 3:45

I love this. What's the future of Homeboy? What does that look like?

Speaker 4 3:49

Yeah, we're, like last four or five years, really pushing hard on leadership development, and so Father Greg and I sort of have this statement that we see down the line Homeboy is running, homeboy right, and while that's not so gender specific, we have men and women but it's sort of people with experience running homeward to the future. Right now, at all levels of our organization we have people with experience. On my executive team of 12, we have five who have lived experience. You know, we also hope we imagine someday there's no prison system, but we're realistic to know there isn't going to be a prison system along the way. So what we do is we catch people when they leave and we get them to sort of change their life along the way and if they do, their children will not, and that sort of will end the generational cycle of violence, of gang violence, and so you know we're trying to do that, trying to help more people.

Speaker 4 4:39

We also have a global homeboy network and so my offer come visit us. Us we literally get 8 000 visitors a year coming through our doors. We happily share what we're about. People take tours, our homies give the tours, they tell their personal story and what homeboys, how homeboys help them along the way, and so what we have is now there are 150 organizations from around the world and all the states who have modeled themselves after us. So 42 states, seven countries, and they take Homeboy what we do here and they make it local, whether it's in Chicago or Oklahoma City or Glasgow, scotland, right, they take how we go about approaching people and put a local flavor on it. So we have this network. So the future is hopefully we're saying more people understand the homeboy way of how to help people.

Speaker 2 5:28

I love that? Do you know the number of people that have completely gone through Homeboy since its resurrection?

Speaker 4 5:34

Probably, we would only guess probably 30,000. I mean, it's been Father Greg's been doing this for a long time. You know we keep growing. Each year we serve 8,000 people, so it's maybe it's 50,000, 60,000.

Speaker 3 5:47

But it all started as a vision with Father Greg, I'm assuming.

Speaker 4 5:51

Yeah, so he started. Let me say that he started over 36 or 37 years ago. His first stop as a parish priest was at Dolores Mission, which is in East Los Angeles, epicenter of gang violence in the 90s Los Angeles epicenter of gang violence in the 90s and he saw these young men losing their lives to gangs and he wanted to change that. And so he hit upon the obviously simple notion that if you get them a job where they can make enough money for the basics of food and shelter, they're not going to go running with a gang for that money for food and shelter. So started a jobs program which then led to the first set of businesses which then led to what we are today is more of a mental health healing organization, but the substructure is, or social enterprise businesses is paying people. It's not like he had this vision I'm going to start a pump boy industry. It's just sort of just organically grew and it became something. Yeah, more than a something came something magical.

Speaker 2 6:39

Absolutely.

Speaker 3 6:41

And it's more than that, because he's also an author and it sounds like he's still doing work within the community.

Speaker 4 6:46

Yeah, In fact, this past May I had the honor and pleasure to be with Father Greg as he went to the White House and he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which is a pretty spectacular honor, the highest civilian honor in the United States, first gang intervention worker, first priest, first Jesuit priest, first non-profit leader to be awarded that.

Speaker 4 7:08

It's pretty spectacular and you know what? He's very humble and while he was getting the medal the president was putting the medal on and all that and in his heart and also everybody watching back home, it was like it was the homies being seen. He was being seen, the homies were being seen, and that was the special thing.

Speaker 2 7:25

Oh, he was being seen. You're being seen. That was the special thing, oh my gosh.

Speaker 4 7:27

Now it's trickling out to other countries and making even bigger impact.

Speaker 4 7:31

Yeah, if I can kind of switch to talking about business for a second, I would love to. So one of my passions is really trying to explain what Homeboy does, and we've been talking about this for a little bit of time and I would love the business community. Do you have any business leaders out there listening? I love the business community to just sort of take a chance on the population we serve. And so why do I say that the poverty rate in America has been the same narrow band for 45 years, same 12%, 13% poverty in America. So no one's really no political party, none of that stuff has almost really made a dent into it since the Johnson administration.

Speaker 4 8:07

And I look at Homeboy and I think about what we do. It was about helping people heal, helping the most poor, the most demonized people heal and become resilient and then get jobs outside of Homeboy and get out of poverty. And so if Homeboy can lift people out of poverty with our meager resources, I think corporate America should step forward and say hire the working poor. So, corporate America, the next 10 to 12% of your hire should be from the working poor. Give them a job and provide a little bit more wraparound services, give them a little bit of latitude so that they can thrive and move their life forward. Because someone you know there's all these things about the homelessness and housing first model or job first model. You know you need all of it together. You need a decent job to be able to kind of have the basic support of food and shelter before you've got to work on yourself.

Speaker 4 8:58

That's my challenge. If you yourself, and so that's my challenge if you have business leaders listening. My challenge is come higher, working forward. You don't do all the support structure homeboy does, but you have to realize that people come in with different challenges. All our folks I'm so committed, I understand this all our folks want to do a good job while their job performance may not show it, because they got other challenges in their life, not just baby mama drama, but rent is a problem, their parole officer gives them a hassle. I mean there's all these things that the rest of us in America don't ever have to deal with and that gets in the way of traditional job performance. But it's not like they don't care If you have a way of they don't feel shame about those struggles and you can support them through those struggles. They're very loyal and obviously great employees.

Speaker 3 9:42

Well, I think if you own a company, operate a company, manage a company and you're in a position of hiring and expanding your workforce within the company or the organization, that's a key piece when we talk about, like creating that inclusionary space for the employees that are working for the company. The fact that we've seen the same percentage for so many years 12 to 14% it's a matter of taking what you said earlier that still resonates with me so deeply I'm too busy loving you to judge you and putting that into a process for employment and new hire. What are some things that you would recommend to those individuals If they don't have a process in place or this has never even been on their radar?

Merits of Hiring Working Poor

Speaker 4 10:25

how can they become more aware of it and, quite frankly, more sensitive to it? Yeah, so there's a couple different ways of attacking that. One way is let me just pick up on exactly what you just said there to be loving, not judging. I'll give you a long wind up to this corporate america is about judging and it's about a meritocracy. And I showed up at homeboy full-throated believer in the american dream because I did that was like in your backpack, ready to go.

Speaker 4 10:45

I know because you know my brothers and I, first generation college graduates. I worked hard, I went up the corporate ladder, made a bunch of money, blah, blah, blah, but I was able to do that. But I come soon to learn that people who are poor in our society don't have those chances because they have these other challenges that get in the way. You know, and it's like you know martin luther king's quote, you know it's cruel jest to suggest to a bootless man that pull himself up by his bootstraps. Just doesn't happen, it can't get there and so it's okay.

Speaker 4 11:13

Corporate america has a meritocracy. Just don't apply it full throttle. And in every aspect of thinking about your employees, right, think about your employees as whole people, as their some their life is being, is lived, and you'll have to measure everything they do, to stop with all the measurements. And so if your thought was first judge via measurements and then care, that's obviously sounds obvious to say it, but it's reverse, right? You got to kind of care for people. You know you can measure a little bit, whether sales, productivity or x, y and z, but come on, let's not like have that, start talking about people's value and their own self-worth and all that. And so people will thrive if they feel cared for and cherished and seen, and that's what I would take back to the workplace, to your question of how do you hire the working poor and our population of people with felonies it's sort of straightforward, but it's also given them more latitude.

Speaker 4 12:06

Let me give you a short story. At Homeboy we try to put our folks in all our positions to keep the organization running. So over the years I've had a number of executive assistants and one of them she was an 18-year-old mother and she was in and out of the youth camp which in la county that means youth jail and came out hardcore gang member, anger, frustration, all that stuff and so she came to our program after six months. We wanted to put her into a business slot and so she became my executive assistant, really cares, very loyal, wants to do a good job, didn't have a lot of skill sets at the beginning but you know she cared and she was smart and she worked to figure it out and dedicated. Her and her daughter lived in a shelter for like a year and a half and she still got herself to work, and on time.

Speaker 4 12:49

Well, as a nonprofit we have a board of directors, so we have once a quarter meetings, and they were 730 in the morning, and so she would get here at 645, make sure the tables were set up, water was out, paperwork was there. I mean, she did that. Not all employees would do that, but she did that, she cared for her job. Well, the night before one of the board meetings she gets a call from her parole officer and the parole officer says she needed to report at 8 am the next day into his office and she said well, I have this obligation. I got a job. I have to be there at 645. He said it doesn't matter, if you don't show up at 8 am, I'm going to violate your parole, which means she gets put back into prison for missing the appointment. Now, obviously, we said okay, go take care of your business, we'll cover it, not to worry. How many other employers would say it's okay, don't worry about it.

Speaker 4 13:43

Probably most, not all. But how much shame would a person have to say to their boss why they're showing up late? Very few people would do that, and thereby they would call out sick or just come in late and get written up, and two write-ups means you get fired. So it's like you've got to hire. Hire these folks but you also sort of help to help them through life, not like you got to give them massively extra treatment or special favors. Just be practical about it. You know, yeah, don't make up their hours. At the end of the day they'll do something. They'll, it'll be fine. You know, hardcore with the rules and rigid and all that stuff. So that's the type of support I'm saying. You need the mindset you need to shift, more so than company policies.

Speaker 3 14:24

Yeah, it creates a culture, right, I mean you have to have a specific culture for individuals to feel comfortable enough letting you know or anyone know. Here are the decisions that I'm left with today. I have to either show up for my parole officer or I have to show up for the board of director, and both have a significant amount of priority in that individual's life. But for them to have an environment and a culture, for them to go to their supervisor or to you to say here's where I am, here's where I'm stuck, right.

Speaker 2 14:54

Yeah, totally.

Speaker 4 14:57

Or the homegirl who worked in our merchandise store and the manager comes to talk to me and says hey, hey, you know she's not eating breakfast or lunch. I'm worried about her. And we come to find out she's not eating breakfast or lunch because she's saving her money, because she can't, doesn't have enough money to buy diapers. So how are we? In America People can't eat because they have to get diapers, and so you can tell my attitude here. So I've learned a lot. There's no great insight, but there's this sort of the America of the poor and there's America of everybody else, and so the struggles of the America the poor is really hard, and more we can bring investment and light into that, the better off. And then that's why I'm trying to sort of say, hey, hire more people, hire the people from the working poor and give them, give from the working poor, and give them some help, give them a chance.

Speaker 2 15:39

Yeah, absolutely, let them know you care, that's a big part of it. They will be so loyal Right and they know you care about them. They will do their best.

Speaker 4 15:48

And it's not like you got to solve all their problems. You just got to let them know you care. Yeah, you don't have to give them a prescription of how to get there, because a lot of them have.

Speaker 3 16:16

Wow, you're doing amazing things and it's the ripple effect is obviously showing, and so now we just need more companies to jump on. Yes, same thing, yes, indeed, and contribution to organizations that are in your community or organizations that you want to support. And then, if you are in a position that you can hire someone and quite honestly, tom like in this day and age there are so many entrepreneurs out there, I feel like and small business owners that I feel like there are more opportunities that bubble up, that this may not be on those individuals' radars, right, the smaller entrepreneurial companies, but the smaller companies and the entrepreneurs can actually make that decision because they're the decision maker.

Speaker 4 16:46

Exactly now, we're going to change the way we think about it exactly you have to do that than the big corporations, for sure.

Speaker 4 16:52

Absolutely, that is what I sort of emphasized. Something else you said there definitely support with money. People need money. The working poor, the poor people in our america need that helps, right, yeah. Support with volunteership right. And so I come up like I'm a corporate executive, I was able to find a way of using my skills to help out right, and so all nonprofits need people with business skills. But the most important thing is that you show up is don't feel like you got to be productive when you show up. So much of this is being in a relationship with people and just letting it happen. Naturally, I'm an executive. I know what I'm doing. I'm going to show up and I'd say we should do X, y and Z, marshal these resources, blah, blah, blah. Just show up and be part of whatever that organization is. Be part of that community. It will work itself out.

Speaker 3 17:41

I call those the moments of putting your cape on. I like to remind people you don't have to put your cape on and come in and save the day you don't need to put your cape on.

Speaker 3 17:52

It's okay, yeah, just being. Yeah. I love that. Well, tom, we have talked about your journey. We've talked about the journey of Homeboy. We've talked about the business side of it. Tell us, is there anything else that you'd like our listeners to know about Homeboy and the work that you're doing, or even just advice for our business owners out there that are listening, or even employees that are listening in, or someone that knows that they may know someone that would benefit from your services?

Speaker 4 18:21

Yeah, well, yeah, got a couple things. So, yes, obviously, obviously there's so much to be learned at homeboy. You know, come to our website. There's a lot of content there, a lot of stories if you want to run a social enterprise, always, always willing to send me an email, always willing to kind of give people some advice running social enterprises.

Speaker 4 18:38

But I guess the last thing I would say is, oftentimes people ask me what would I have told myself as a young man? What I've learned now? Right, and it really is. I don't know if this wisdom comes with age or it just comes from the homeboy, but I've now learned to seek joy in life and that creates balance. Right, I was this hard charging business guy. You know, follow the rules I'm going to do well, win, win, win, lose, all that. But over the last several years I've been on this spiritual journey of mine. It's really about not just happiness but seeking joy, finding joy through other people and with other people. So it's not just about a singular thing is that. It's like this sort of mutualness of humans you're joyful, my joy, our joy together.

Speaker 3 19:25

Right, and you can do that in all situations and if that's kind of like if you wake up every day in your mattress, I'm seeking joy, and you sat to the joy you're gonna have much more fulfilling day yeah, I love that you're actually our second guest this week that has talked about joy and the importance of joy, and it's interesting because it continues to bubble up and this time of year, if you're doing that reflective work or even just looking forward in terms of what you want to do, I think that that's an important one. It's one of my core values for the company and what I look at. If it's not bringing joy to others or bringing joy to me or us, it's probably not something that we need to do, but it is high on the scale in terms of what we say yes or no to. Absolutely yeah, love that. Well, kudos to you on this journey. Seven years, seven year journey they say it's a lifetime anyway, so good luck with the rest of it.

Speaker 4 20:19

There you go.

Speaker 3 20:21

You never arrive. It is the journey, it is the journey right For sure.

Speaker 4 20:26

You need to savor the journey.

Speaker 3 20:29

Savor it. Yes, exactly, and you mentioned checking out the website. We will make sure to put the website in the show notes so all of our listeners can find you and Homeboy. And thank you for putting that offer out. If there are individuals that are looking to create a social enterprise, I mean thank you for that. That's a fabulous offer.

Speaker 4 20:46

No problem. Well, good talking to you.

Speaker 3 20:48

Oh my gosh, Tom, it has been an absolute pleasure For our listeners. If you are looking to learn more about what's happening in the world of Reignite Resilience, you can head on over to reigniteresiliencecom, and if you have not already done so, make sure that you subscribe to our weekly think letter, where you get more from Pam and I, where we dive into our reflection of these episodes and our experiences with our guests. Until next time, we'll see you all soon. Thanks everyone.

Speaker 1 21:15

Thank you for joining us today on the Reignite Resilience podcast. We hope you had some aha moments and learned a few new real life ideas. To fuel the flames of passion, please subscribe on your favorite streaming platform, like or download your favorite episodes and, of course, share with your friends and family. We look forward to seeing you again next time on Reignite Resilience.