Peace Talks Radio
Gang Life Narrative
JESSICA TICKTIN: This is Peace Talks Radio, the radio series and podcast on peacemaking and nonviolent conflict resolution. I’m Jessica Ticktin in for series producer Paul Ingles.
Today we’ll talk about the rehabilitation of former gang members and the peacemaking work of Father Greg Boyle, Founder of Homeboy Industries.
GREG BOYLE: You can say that I want to talk about hate, I’d rather talk about health. My guess is that by talking about health, you’ll address hate far more effectively.
JESSICA TICKTIN: Later, we meet the founders of Narrative Four, an organization that uses storytelling in classrooms to help young people connect with each other across cultural, racial and geographic divides.
GREG BOYLE: We have an epidemic of loneliness and isolation. People need desperately to connect not only with themselves but with others at the same time too. That’s what telling the story and telling someone else’s story does; it connects you with yourself and it connects you with someone else.
JESSICA TICKTIN: Storytelling and social change in part two of this episode produced by Correspondent Megan Kamerick who will first introduce us to the peacemaking work of Father Greg Boyle.
In the mid -1980s parts of Los Angeles we're in the middle of gang wars. That's when Jesuit priests Father Greg Boyle was assigned to Pastor Dolores Mission Church in Boyle Heights.
It had one of the highest concentrations of gang members in the city, and Father Boyle recalls one week when he buried eight kids. The urgent need for the parish to address this crisis led him to develop an organization in 1988 that would become Homeboy Industries.
Homeboy employs and trains formerly gang involved and previously incarcerated people in a range of social enterprises. It also offers critical services to thousands of men and women every year, like therapy, tattoo removal, groups and anger management classes.
Father Boyle is the author of the 2010 book, Tattoos on the Heart, and The Power of Boundless Compassion. He also wrote Barking to the Choir, The Power of Radical Kinship.
Homeboy now has a global network of 400 organizations that have used the model to address similar problems in their own communities. For its first 15 years, Homeboy focused on connecting gang members with jobs, but Father Boyle told producer Megan Kamerick it was necessary to shift the focus to healing.
GREG BOYLE: We started to discover that an employed gang member may or may not go back to prison and a educated one may or may not, but then it became clear that that a healed gang member won't ever reoffend, period.
But in the early days it was interesting because we started a school first and so gang members came to the school. And then they said, "If only we had jobs." So if you're listening to gang members, you go, "Oh, jobs. Okay, well, let's find felony -friendly employers." But then once you know gang members, you know that it's about healing. So that's kind of how that happened.
But I remember there was a guy who we found a job for, it was really a career in the movie business and he was really on the move. And then his girlfriend leaves him and throws this monkey wrench into his life. And next thing you know, he's now doing 125 years to life. He was exactly the reason why I said, "Okay, there's something wrong here. Yeah, we got him a job, yeah, we got him a career, but there wasn't any healing," And so that became our priority almost overnight.
MEGAN KAMERICK: How do you start that process? How do you go about it?
GREG BOYLE: You know, part of it is our program is not for those who need help, it's only for those who want it, so they have to walk through the doors and that's step one, just like any kind of recovery. So once they walk through the doors, you know, they're greeted and they're welcomed. And so the culture, Homie said once there's an aroma to it, you know. So it's kind of pervasive where you feel welcomed, where you feel included. Plus, you know, everybody's had very similar experiences to each other, even though everybody there is surrounded by enemies and rivals.
MEGAN KAMERICK: You have rivals and enemies work together. Why?
GREG BOYLE: Well, you're trying to deal with gang members, and all gang members have enemies and rivals. So, it's dicey, probably, at first if you're standing next to a guy you used to shoot at while you're making croissants in the Homeboy bakery, you know. And then they kind of work it out. They don't talk it out, but they work it out. There's something that's by osmosis that's getting worked out, where suddenly you go, "Wow, you know, this guy's good people", and you can't demonize people you know. Human beings can't sustain that, so that's kind of how it works.
MEGAN KAMERICK: You have written and you've spoken about the people who come to Homeboy having a lethal absence of hope. What do you mean by that?
GREG BOYLE: I talk about that mainly about what's the profile of kids who join gangs, but it's also true of those who walk through the doors at Homeboy. So, it's about despair, it's about trauma, it's about mental health issues. No hopeful kid has ever joined a gang, ever.
And so, if you're a kid and because life is so hard for you and kids are being forced to raise themselves, then it's hard for them to conjure up an image of what tomorrow will look like. They can't imagine it and if you can't imagine your future, even on some level, then your present is not very compelling and if your present doesn't compel you, then you're not going to care whether you inflict harm or duck to get out of harm's way. That's why the main kind of solution to gang violence is an infusion of hope for kids for whom hope is foreign. We'd go a long way if that's what we did as a society.
MEGAN KAMERICK: How does Homeboy, to help these young people, see that they're the heroes of their own story? You've written about that. Why is it important?
GREG BOYLE: When homies tell their stories, they start to inhabit them a little bit more and they start to see that they have to honor their own dignity and nobility and they know that they've had to carry more than a lot of people. Then they are more gentle with their story. Then they see the heroism in it, where they've been able to navigate things that I never was asked to navigate as a kid growing up in the same city in the gang capital of the world. I was never asked to do any of that. A lot of that has to do with white privilege, of course and the winning of all these kinds of lotteries parents and zip code and educational opportunities. So if I say there's no chance I would have joined a gang, that's not an assertion of moral superiority, that's just geography and the dumb luck of geography.
MEGAN KAMERICK: You have said the practice at Homeboy is to be in a safe place, then people can come to terms with what was done to them. What are some of the traumas many gang members grew up with?
GREG BOYLE: People don't have an experience sometimes of parents, and they endure abuse and torture and violence and neglect and abandonment. So it's never about good or bad or right or wrong, it's about wound. And maybe the day will come when we stop punishing wound and seek to heal it instead but it's all about wound, none of it's about morality.
MEGAN KAMERICK: You've said this is a community of kinship at Homeboy Industries. What is that, and how does it work?
GREG BOYLE: Well, kinship is a connection. There is no us and them, there's just us. Kinship is obliterating the illusion that we're separate. It’s exquisitely mutual. Nobody comes in to save the day. Nobody receives that saving. Everybody is holding the mirror up to each other, reminding them to remember their own unshakable goodness. When we do that together, I would say God's dream come true, which is bridge the distance. It's the separation that's dispiriting, but it's also an illusion.
MEGAN KAMERICK: You've written that some of the folks who come to Homeboy have done really terrible things in another time when these come and go as they came in the '80s when there were more calls for tougher penalties for people who break the law, more incarceration, more punishment. What is missing from this debate?
GREG BOYLE: There's no comprehension, there's no kind of getting underneath. You know, I was thinking the other day, it never would have occurred to me to denounce gang violence. I’m not even sure what that would mean if I had called a press conference and I pounded on the podium and [said], “I stand against gang violence.” Only because from early on, you discovered that it's about something else. Gang violence is an indicator. It's not a thing. It's an indicator of a thing, namely despair and undergirding issues.
It's a little bit like hate at the moment. You know, people go, let's address hate. I can't talk about hate apart from mental health because nobody healthy, whole or well, has ever been anti -Semitic, ever. Yes, that’s a thing, antisemitism, but if you want to actually address it, you want to get underneath it and address our own health crisis, mental health crisis, which I think we're in the midst of.
It's the same thing with gang violence. I would have never shaken my fist at it because I knew that it was a waste of time. You want to comprehend. People are nervous because they think if you explain something, you're excusing something, which is very odd. But if you comprehend, then you're getting, as the homies say, you're finding the thorn underneath, which is what you want. You want to be able to excavate the wound. All of it is like addressing a persistent nagging cough rather than address the lung cancer which the cough is pointing to. It's the same thing.
But I think that's the same for every vexing social dilemma, from hate to homophobia to racism to homelessness to the list is long. We're on the rise at the moment for all these things, antisemitism, suicides, fentanyl overdoses, murders, homelessness. You want to say, “What's this about? Otherwise, you're just calming the cough rather than addressing the lung cancer.
MEGAN KAMERICK: The subtitle of your book, Tattoo's on the Heart, is The Power of Boundless Compassion. I was thinking about it this week because, like, many people, I had a minor conflict with a friend. Like most of us, I have challenges with work colleagues and family. What is boundless compassion and how can it help us navigate conflict?
GREG BOYLE: I'm never much of a believer in conflict. I think everything's about something else. So like at Homeboy, if two guys fight, and then you focus on the behavior, well, we're not really toppled by the behavior. You want to know, well, what language this fighting is speaking. You want to get underneath Everything's about something else. If you have a conflict with another coworker or family member, it's always going to be about something else. You have to step back and rather than take the attacks personally, lean into it and be curious about it and even end up savoring it until you realize what it was. For example, he just had a fight with his mom, and that's why. I don't want to say it is almost always the case because it's in fact always the case.
MEGAN KAMERICK: You have said and you've written that you think everyone is unshakably good, but you have presided over many, many funerals. Have you ever had doubt in your work?
GREG BOYLE: No, I don't have doubt because I don't care about success. You just love being loving, and love never stops loving and so that's all you're called to do. You're not called to be successful. You're not called to have a tally sheet of here are my pluses and here are my minuses.
Those are the two essential truths. If we embrace them, the world would obviously look differently; everybody's unshakably good, no exceptions and we belong to each other, no exceptions. If those became our principles, you know, watch what happens. It would be just magnificent.
MEGAN KAMERICK: People should think of the person they despise the most when they think about it.
GREG BOYLE: Oh, yeah, I mean, that's still the truth. For me, health is kind of the thing. So you can say, I want to talk about hate, but I'd rather talk about health. My guess is that by talking about health, you'll address hate far more effectively.
It's the tale of two t -shirts. I was at Chicago Midway, and there was a young woman wearing a t -shirt, and it said, “Love, not hate.” And I looked at the t -shirt and I said, oh, that's why we don't make progress, because if I wore a shirt like that, it would mean one thing, this is about me, self -congratulatory. I'm on the camp that loves. There are people out there who are on the hate side. I stand in high moral distance from you. This is why we don't make progress.
At the same airport I see an older woman wearing a shirt and it says big block letters, “UNWELL,” and I said, "Oh, finally, progress!" I think that's true; none of us are well until all of us are well.
You can want to fight Asian hate crime, for example, or you can try to acknowledge that nobody healthy in the history of the world has ever attacked an aged Asian woman on the streets of San Francisco, which is the one that triggered that event. Nobody healthy has ever shot up a school in Uvalde. Nobody well, has ever invaded Ukraine. Nobody whole has ever slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars. I mean, suddenly you're in a different realm. You're going, "Oh, how do we walk each other, love each other, into health rather than, you know, pointing things out?” But what points the way is inviting people to health and healing.
MEGAN KAMERICK: That’s a lot.
GREG BOYLE: Yes, part of it is, you know, even as a priest, you have to kind of abandon notions of things like sin. Sin was a language we used when we didn't know what trauma was or what despair was or about mental health issues.
Jesus seeing the guy having seizures and he thinks he's possessed by a demon but he really just has epilepsy and God loved Jesus and God knows I do, but he was wrong, the guy had epilepsy and was not possessed by a demon!
In each generation, we do the best we can in naming things, but how we name things is really pretty essential.
MEGAN KAMERICK: This is Peace Talks Radio. I’m Producer Megan Kamerick. You’re listening to an interview that I did with Father Greg Boyle, a Jesuit Priest from Los Angeles who started Homeboy Industries that transforms gang involved and previously incarcerated people and offers therapy, anger management and other services. Homeboy also has a global network of some 400 organizations that have used the model to address similar problems in their own communities.
Boyle has written two books, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion and Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship. Later in the interview, we’ll hear from two of the men who found their ways to Homeboy Industries, Anthony Tuttle and Hector Rodriguez.
There is a remarkable passage in your first book Tattoos on the Heart, the theme is that people on the margins of society need us to stand in awe of what they’ve had to carry rather than stand in judgement. Can you talk about that?
GREG BOYLE: We are always dealing with judgment and that's the thing we have to fight against, stand against, really, not fight it. Once you listen to people, once you allow your heart to be altered by people, once you don't try to reach gang members, you let gang members reach you, then you stand in awe at what they've had to carry rather than in judgment. That's kind of a principle tenet of Homeboy.
MEGAN KAMERICK: The idea of not what is wrong with you but what has happened to you.
GREG BOYLE: Yes, what happened to you? That's a way better question and illuminating.
MEGAN KAMERICK: You’ve said in interviews that we shouldn’t settle for happiness when being offered joy. What does that mean?
GREG BOYLE: We all want to suffer less, you know. There's nothing wrong with happiness, but joy is fuller. Jesus says, "My joy, yours, your joy complete." That's where you want to end up in a place where it's deeper. Plus, it's also a place where no one can touch you. I mean, once you're not afraid of death anymore, then you're not afraid of anything. By the same token, once you know that the goal is joy, you're not going to settle for just happiness. You want to hold out for this thing that's not reliant on how things turn out like happiness kind of is. Happiness is, "Hey, I had a good day” or “Oh my gosh, today I had a bad day." Joy floats somewhere above both those experiences. That's the hope, you know, is that you hold out for joy.
MEGAN KAMERICK: What does joy look like instead of just happiness?
GREG BOYLE: Well, joy is just kind of a more fuller thing where love is impenetrable, you know, that nothing's going to puncture this. And happiness is kind of, it's like the relationship between forgiveness and mercy. Why settle for forgiveness when you can have mercy? So, forgiveness is, I did you wrong, you did me wrong, I apologize, what about you? Forgiveness waits, but mercy doesn't wait. Mercy is the father in the prodigal son running to his kid. I don't care about apology, you're alive, I thought you were dead, that's mercy. It's a richer, fuller, deeper experience.
MEGAN KAMERICK: You have faced death many times with these folks. You have also faced your own mortality with leukemia. So how do you stay so hopeful when death is so present?
GREG BOYLE: You want to find the thing that no one can take from you. One of the great gifts of my life was being diagnosed with leukemia because then you had to be on the receiving end of a lot of people's goodness. All I had to do was receive that, which was extraordinary.
I've buried 257 young people killed because of gang violence. You have to kind of put death in its place. That helps you stay with your head screwed on correctly, but be where your feet are. The more you can be anchored in the present moment, you're in the living room otherwise, you're in the kitchen fretting about tomorrow and anxious, or you're in the bathroom lamenting about what happened yesterday. Both rooms are necessary but the living room is where you want to live which is the present moment.
MEGAN KAMERICK: Thank you for talking with me those are all my questions right now.
GREG BOYLE: Talk to these guys.
MEGAN KAMERICK: Can you give me your names?
ANTHONY TUTTLE: Anthony Tuttle.
HECTOR RODRIGUEZ: Hector Rodriguez.
MEGAN KAMERICK: Tell me how you came to Homeboy Industries.
ANTHONY TUTTLE: I came home with about six months ago. I got out of prison. I had homies that went through the program. I really wanted to change. I knew that was a spot where I could take care of everything that I wanted to change, help me get my kids back. They have legal services, parenting classes, Project Fatherhood, therapy. They got me a job right away, got me enrolled in classes.
MEGAN KAMERICK: How old are you, Anthony?
ANTHONY TUTTLE: I'm 36 years old.
MEGAN KAMERICK: What led you into gang life?
ANTHONY TUTTLE: My parents were gang members. I was born jail. My grandma raised me. My father was killed by gang violence. My brother was a gang member, my older brother, so I seen him. I wanted to be a gang member, you know what I mean? So I started, I got into the gang like around 14 years old. That's what I wanted. That was my life, you know what I mean?
MEGAN KAMERICK: Why now? Why did you want to leave that life?
ANTHONY TUTTLE: I was just tired. I was tired. Like I said, it was my fourth time going to prison. My kids, I have two daughters that, you know what I mean?
MEGAN KAMERICK: How old are they?
ANTHONY TUTTLE: Twelve and two. And like my 12 year old, I've been in prison most of her life, you know? And she's getting older. Like I was talking to her on the phone and I told her like, that's it, I'm done, you know what I mean? So it was like my kids, it was the main thing, you know? I wanted to be more involved in their lives. I decided, I'm like, man, I'm just tired of being in prison all the time, wasting my life. I just seen no future in it. I didn't want to be there for the rest of my life, so yeah, I just told myself, when I get out, I want to change.
Yeah, Homeboys is like, it made it a lot easier. You feel the love. A lot of people there, I used to hang out with, or I was in prison with, you know, so you can relate to them. I see them and I’m like if this guy can do it, then I can do it.
MEGAN KAMERICK: What kind of work do you doing?
ANTHONY TUTTLE: Right now, I just finished the training phase. They're putting me in a business tomorrow. I start at the cafe. It's, like, temporary though. I have plans probably to get into carpentry. It's like a long -term goal. In a few months when I'm ready, I'll try to get a career, something where I can make some decent money and have a career. So that's the plan for that.
MEGAN KAMERICK: What other stuff have you been doing the last six months?
ANTHONY TUTTLE: The last six months is Project Fatherhood, helping me to be a better father, learning tools to deal with my kids. I've been away for so long. Criminal Gang Members Anonymous is a class that you don't find anywhere else as well as Breaking Bad Habits.
Therapy, talking about my issues as a kid, you know? My mom was a drug addict for a long time. I had a lot of resentment towards her. I learned just to finally forgive her. I have a relationship with her now before I didn't have that.
I've been working on me and I'm being sober too. I've been sober for 16 months. That's like the longest I've ever been clean.
MEGAN KAMERICK: What about you, Hector, how did you find your way to Homeboy?
HECTOR RODRIGUEZ: I had a handful of drug charges as a result of being addicted to meth for a long period of time and I had throughout my life we're talking about maybe 20 years, I had been forced to go through other programs and nothing really ever stuck. I don't know I guess I just thought there was no hope, so I just rather just be on drugs. I'm 38 and I got addicted to meth when I was 14.
I could recognize the harm I was doing, but only when I was high would I see it more. But when the effects of the drugs would wear off, I kinda just would convince myself that it was just better to be on drugs. By being arrested, I had gaps where it was either go to prison or go to jail, or complete a program. So I would try and I would complete them, but it was never long-term. I would get out and just keep getting high.
There was a couple of times where, you know, I would even get arrested almost like the next day and even the police officer would say, "Dude, you just got out of jail." You know? Everything was pointing to the problem, but I didn't see it.
MEGAN KAMERICK: How long have you been with Homeboys?
HECTOR RODRIGUEZ: So now I've been with Homeboys for four years. I went to Homeboys to try to do the drug classes, but when I got there, I seen people, like my friend here, like a friend there, and you know, you're really embraced and it almost sounds like a good idea to do it, like maybe there's something past this. So I got into the program. I completed the drug classes. I went to court and the judge, she saw me several times, she was like, “I can tell that, you know, you're doing something different. Whatever it is, just keep doing it.”
MEGAN KAMERICK: It was the love and the embrace that helped you?
HECTOR RODRIGUEZ: Yeah, it introduced me to a lot of other perspectives. Then they offered me a job in the restaurant. And it's been now four years. I'm actually just been promoted to a supervisor. Yeah, so things are going good. And I guess I really couldn't have done it, or else I would have did it already with the Homeboys.
MEGAN KAMERICK: What was it that they helped you get at what Father Greg was talking about, getting at what’s underneath?
HECTOR RODRIGUEZ: Oh well yeah, I went because of free drug classes, other places you have to pay. But there's a schedule of all these things that at 30 years old, they sound a little bit interesting, like anger management, the four agreements, just like way things that you would be like, "What is that? Well, I want to see what that is." And then you go to these rooms where the people that are teaching the group are people like me. And we all have a lot of the similarities, so it kind of makes it more like I believe it more.
And then there's therapy, I work with a therapist once a week, you know, which is something I never done. It kept me clean, and I had tried to get it clean. I used drugs for four years, from 14 to 18, and then I wanted to stop, and it took me a long time to be able to stop.
MEGAN KAMERICK: I don't know if you've always smiled this much, Hector, but you smile a lot!
HECTOR RODRIGUEZ: Yeah, I didn't used to smile before when I was high and confused.
MEGAN KAMERICK: I’m curious, Anthony and Hector, when you were listening to Father Greg, was there anything he said that resonated for you?
HECTOR RODRIGUEZ: It always sounds really good to hear Father Greg. It sounds like poetry.
ANTHONY TUTTLE: Yeah, I just wonder how he does it.
HECTOR RODRIGUEZ: He's a bit of a Los Angeles legend.
MEGAN KAMERICK: I've heard that.
HECTOR RODRIGUEZ: And it's not rare when somebody's like doing bad, worse than the rest of the group, some people will be like, “You should go to Homeboys, not me, but you should.”
JESSICA TICKTIN: That was Anthony Tuttle and Hector Rodriguez, two of the participants in Father Greg Boyle's organization, Homeboy Industries. Earlier, Producer Megan Kamerick spoke with Father Greg Boyle.
To hear Megan's complete interviews with her guests and find links to more information on Homeboy Industries, visit our website, www.peacetalksradio.com and look for episode two in season 22. That’s also where you can go to hear, read more about and share all the programs in our series dating back to 2002. There you can make your own donation to our independent nonprofit organization that produces this program ensuring that there is some media space devoted to talk of peacemaking.
Up next on the second part of the program, you'll hear about an organization that uses storytelling in classrooms to help young people connect with more compassion and understanding for each other across cultural, racial, and geographic divides.
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This is Peace Talks Radio, the radio series and podcast on peacemaking and nonviolent conflict resolution strategies. I’m Jessica Ticktin in for series producer Paul Ingles.
Producer Megan Kamerick is with us today to speak with Lisa Consiglio and author Colum McCann, founders of Narrative 4, a global organization that uses story exchange workshops and related curricula to help people engage by telling one another's stories. How can the power of storytelling build understanding and compassion? That’s the idea behind the non-profit group Narrative 4, which brings together authors with educators and students for story exchange workshops. Since its founding in 2010, the group has held story exchange workshops with people around the world with a particular focus on classrooms.
Independent studies of student cohorts who engaged with Narrative 4 have found increased attendance rates and graduation rates, but also more positive emotions and better communication skills. The workshops have brought together college students with people who were incarcerated, students in the Bronx with students from rural Kentucky, and queer victims of bullying with their former bullies.
Cofounder Lisa Consiglio was running a literary organization and a small story exchange in Aspen, Colorado in 2004 when she was inspired to bring together writers from around the world to the mountain town after she met Irish author Colum McCann, whose books include Let the Great World Spin, Transatlantic and A Paragon.
COLUM McCANN: We went up into the mountains, a group of artists, activists, and we found this sort of nuclear power of storytelling, which sort of ignited us in this incredible way. We all began to tell one another's stories, and that was Terry Tempest Williams, it was Toby Woolf, it was Ishmael Beah, it was all these fantastic people getting together, sort of telling one another’s stories, and the power that came from that was phenomenal. Lisa recognized it, and she recognized that this could be taken globally.
So one of the things that we did very early on, we just decided that we would be a global organization and we're now in 30 plus countries around the world and in 36 states in the United States and it's just growing because, I mean, we have an epidemic of loneliness and isolation and people need desperately to connect, not only with themselves, but with others at the same time too and that's what telling a story and telling somebody else's story does; it connects you with yourself and it connects you with someone else.
MEGAN KAMERICK: The format that you have was that always part of the original story exchange like you tell your story and then that person tells the story as you.
LISA CONSIGLIO: It's actually an old theater technique that has been used for many, many years. We just took that methodology and placed it in the hands of high school English and art teachers actually in the early days and what we saw happening and in some of those classrooms, all those classrooms really in an area, the Roaring Fork Valley in Colorado, where you've got Aspen, which is known as the playground for the rich and famous, all the way down to Parachute, where immigrants are coming in from all over the world to work in oil fields or work in the service industry. And these barriers, we were breaking down barriers and shattering stereotypes, and these kids were falling in love with one another, people that they thought were just natural born enemies or they didn't want to talk to or bullied or were being bullied.
It really took shape in the classrooms themselves with that old theater technique, but we added an art component to it. We layered on some curriculum notes and now, Narrative 4, that story changes the entry point onto a very long curriculum. It's designed to sort of split the atom. Now what are you going do with it? And that is, okay, let's get kids to start engaging with literature again. Young people don't read for pleasure all that much anymore, and that perpetuates a decline in democracy or civic engagement, philanthropy, the list goes on, and that's proven.
So we've designed amazing learning modules around some of the best books ever written to get kids engaged with learning, whether it be with a unit or an entire module, and also civic engagement, which is the through line of the organization. They connect with artists, and, of course, they connect with others. other kids all over the world or in their own communities to decide what they want to change about the world because they have now understood what it means to be human by walking in the shoes of another, engaging with a book that they may not have read and also engaging with an artist that cares about them and their community.
COLUM McCANN: It starts with a story and it ends with a changed life and hopefully then ends up with a world that's slightly shifted from where it started out.
MEGAN KAMERICK: Where are some of the most challenging places you've gone with this?
LISA CONSIGLIO: So Narrative 4 is not a conflict resolution organization, and it's not a rapid response organization But what we decided to do very early on is have a more nuanced approach to areas that are steeped in conflict So we don't go necessarily to Israel and Palestine and say oh look today we’re going to connect you, but we make connect kids in Tel Aviv with kids in Chicago and kids in Nablus, Palestine and the West Bank with kids in Sarasota, Florida or Lagos or what have you. And so they're learning about the world and that conflict has been around for a very long time.
We are human and we all want the same things that we may go about it in very different ways. And eventually the hope is that they will want to connect with each other, but it's organic. It's not some American or other organization coming in and saying, "This is what you will do." It's them saying, "This is what we want to do. This is what we're comfortable with,” certainly working in the Middle East, of course, in the American South, all over these days. You pick a town.
COLUM McCANN: Yeah, we've been to Belfast, and we've been to the West Bank, and we've been to Gaza, and we've been to the South Bronx. There is conflict everywhere, and we all know it, no matter whether we're in Albuquerque or we're in New York or we're in Dublin, this conflict is sort of within ourselves in many ways.
One of the great things about the Narrative 4 exchange is that it can sort of belong to everyone. There are no Olympics for storytelling. You don't get the gold medal for a certain type of grief that you had or difficulty in your story. The story can be any type of story and people connect then in the most extraordinary ways. It could be a funny story, it could be a love story, it can be a tale of terrible grief or belonging or loss, all of these different things. The world is knit together with stories. That's how we recognize and know one another. Even across barriers, boundaries, this is the one thing that we have. It's sort of the essence of democratic intent. Everybody has a story and a deep need to tell a story, but even better, to listen to someone else's story.
LISA CONSIGLIO: Just to add on to that, we're not out to change minds, we're out to help open them to a certain extent. We're not asking people to change their values, you can hold on to the integrity of your beliefs and your values, but to really understand, as Colum said, we're human and stories are the thing that make us the most human.
MEGAN KAMERICK: So in the group I was in, one pair had a very intense exchange. And as the man told the young man's story, he started to tear up and get very emotional, even though it was not his story. Have you seen that a lot?
COLUM McCANN: I saw it in my group too. I mean, I teared up telling the story of this young 17 -year -old girl whose parents are from Syria. Without giving too much away, because these stories are held in place, she told me the most heartbreaking story about whether she felt to be American or Syrian. And she said, "Well, I come from the country of nowhere." And then she found, she eventually said, "Well, but I'm somebody in this country of nowhere." I teared up trying to articulate her story. And yeah, it happens a lot. It happens an awful lot. And I think that's a good thing. I mean, we expose ourselves and our emotions in extraordinary ways through telling something that's powerful to ourselves.
Sometimes we ask young people, tell us a story that if you buried it in the ground and someone came along 100 years from now and dug it up and listened to it, they would know the essence of you. People tell some really profound and fascinating stories.
LISA CONSIGLIO: When one of the groups broke, one of the women who was in that particular group came up to me and said, "I just became a 17 -year -old again." And she said, "I cannot believe" she had tears in her eyes “how much of myself I recognize in that person?" and that's the power. This is a very, very simple thing. It's storytelling, but what happens is you recognize yourself in almost every single person that you connect with through a story exchange and otherwise and that is the power. That's the atom right there that's being split! We are all part of one another we're part of this beautiful blue marble.
One of the very first story exchanges that we ever had was with a Vietnam veteran who told the story of a young girl who took her teddy bear to college and he teared up. He was actually in this absolute mess because he remembered taking his teddy bear to Vietnam and having to hide it and of course, everything that he saw. It was just an incredible story. People have accused us sometimes in a nice way of rigging this pairing people up accordingly, but we have no idea. It's totally random. That's just what happens when you're a human being
COLUM McCANN: People have this idea when you say the word “story” that it's going to be something airy or kumbaya or something like that but no the fact of the matter is that stories can be dangerous. Stories can take your house away. Stories can take your country away. Stories can be used in all sorts of ways to change the perception in the universe. So we have to be very, very, very careful to understand that these are stories about difficulty too and about grief and all these things. It's not just something where we all get together and go running over the hills singing the sound of music. It isn't like that. In fact, I feel after I've done a story exchange incredibly raw and alive at the same time which is a really wonderful place to be.
MEGAN KAMERICK: People can fall in love with or get stuck in their own stories or narratives which could stop them moving forward. Does this seem to shake that loose?
LISA CONSIGLIO: Well I think what happens is people realize that they're not one story, we contain so many narratives, but also what happens is when you hear someone else tell your story as if it is their own, you're hearing the way that you're telling your own narrative. It might be like, wow, that's the way I sound. That’s what people are getting. Maybe it jogs something within you that says, oh, maybe that's why people are stereotyping me, or maybe that's why I've been perceived as X, Y, or Z. I do think it shakes it loose these perceptions of ourselves and how we're being portrayed or how we're portraying ourselves and that's what a story exchange can do. It's not just about learning about somebody else. It is, as Column said, about learning more about yourself and shaking some of that loose.
COLUM McCANN: I'm gonna ask you a question. How does this make you feel? "Hi, my name is Megan.”
MEGAN KAMERICK: A little guarded, intrigued. What's going to happen? (laughing)
COLUM McCANN: So if I get a chance to tell your story, it's strange. Here's this voice coming from Ireland, coming from elsewhere, and inhabiting your story. I may get parts of it wrong, but I will get the texture of it right and somehow, you sort of hover outside of yourself.
Like if I say to Lisa right now, "Hi, my name is Lisa. Ten years ago I started this organization,” things happen in her brain that are different to her, saying the exact same words. The brain when we tell our own story is like a circus. There's all sorts of things going on and there's all sorts of spectacular acrobatics going on, but when we tell somebody else's story as well, it's like a carnival. You're accessing imagination, you're accessing memory, you're accessing empathy, you're accessing all sorts of different things, including your own experience. There's a lot of brain power going behind telling somebody else's story.
LISA CONSIGLIO: I think the key is that we're not just telling someone else's story, we're telling it as if it is our own. I think that we have to keep coming back to that. “My name is …” we're not just saying, “When you were …” and that's when the pinball machine starts lighting up in the brain, like boom, boom, boom, boom because you're suspending engagement with the rest of the world. It is an honor to hold that person's story, a piece of their life, a piece of their narrative. You want to. You have to. Public speaking is so terrifying already, but when you're telling somebody else a story, is it terrifying? Yes, as Colum said, you're being vulnerable, and vulnerability is a muscle, and it takes exercise, but it's also fun, and imaginative, and heartwarming, and takes us out of our shell and our comfort zone to the point where we're like, I want to get out there and engage with the rest of the world.
COLUM McCANN: So much of the world is coming indoors these days. We're locking down ourselves. We're putting GPS coordinates on our imaginative intent. We're closing the curtains. We're all coming into these smaller and smaller rooms. We're becoming so much more atomized. What happens then when you break out of those rooms and you begin to acknowledge others is that the world is actually just a more joyful fascinating place to exist and also you recognize deeply human things, but it's a bigger better place.
MEGAN KAMERICK: My experience was when the young woman, a teenager told my story was that well yeah I mean it was really short and I guess she got it. I was like I have a lot more flourishes, but then at the final exercise when you write a note of hope, what she wrote to me was so wise. She got me! She went right to the core. That's when I got teary -eyed.
LISA CONSIGLIO: I think that, yeah, we do, we see ourselves in others. People do get you and the essence of the story, that's what needs to be captured, but at the end of the day, it's also about the relationship. You'll never forget that person. I've had people that I've been working with for 15 years who did a story exchange back in 2008 or whenever still say to me, "I still keep in touch with that person. We were in a room together for two hours, but I feel like she's a part of my soul now." Because that relationship was established in a very fast, Mach -speed type of way that you'll never forget.
COLUM McCANN: My partner made a mistake, which was kind of gorgeous. You know, I told her my son was a cyclist, and when she came back to retell the story she said my son was a psychologist and I thought wow that's kind of true in a way because my son had been listening to me and the mistake didn't matter as long as she got the full intent of the story which she absolutely did!
I told a story about an incident that had happened to me in New Haven when I ended up in hospital and she got it and she told it as if it were her own. Of course, details were changed and slightly misremembered, but not the deep truth of it. The deep truth of it was there, and that was really powerful for me.
MEGAN KAMERICK: Why is this so impactful beyond today? It seems like it has a lasting change.
LISA CONSIGLIO: One of the major reasons that Narrative 4 was formed and that the vision was established was in 2010, right after the first earthquake in Haiti. There were two teams, one went into New Orleans, one went into Port-au-Prince, the obvious common denominator being natural disaster at that point.
The kids went through a virtual, of course, story exchange and they fell in love with one another virtually, so we knew we had international components. We also knew that we had virtual components so we could pull all this together. But what I learned right after the story exchange is that these kids wanted to know everything about one another. They wanted to know their history, their politics, their music, what they saw when they looked out the window. There was this whole educational component to it that I saw, "Wow, we could really change the way kids learn in classrooms."
There is a fate effect with the story exchange. It's kind of like going to a concert. I'll date myself in the 80s with the cigarette lighter, "Oh, whatever you're telling me to do, I'm going to do it!” You walk out of the concert, maybe two hours, three hours or a day later, you’re like, "I don't know."
What we try to do is continue that experience in different ways, always with the story exchange and going back to it so there's connectivity in different ways, always in person first and then virtual, but having these kids engage with one another in different meaningful ways so that education, that experience, that human connectivity continues long after the story exchange. As I said, there is a very, very long continuum that goes into when they enter a corporation or a law firm or nursing school or the Peace Corps or whatever, they can carry that with them and continue to use what they've learned. It doesn't fade.
COLUM McCANN: So for example the kids in South Bronx started groups where they actively engage with people who had been victims of gun violence. The kids in Kentucky engage with groups where they talk about opioid use and abuse. Kids in South Africa started this whole gorgeous program of trash-to-treasure recycling, and so turning that stuff into action, the story then becomes action at the end.
I do believe in that sort of emergent power of storytelling that it can be greater than the sum of its parts. I think what's new and different about what we see happening in front of our eyes is that this is coming from what some people might call the underneath. It's actually coming from the ground upwards. It's not being imposed from outside. We're not coming into a community and saying, “This is what you have to do.” All of these stories come from the ground and then these young people recognize the common denominator and begin to change things as a result.
MEGAN KAMERICK: This is Peace Talks Radio. I am Producer Megan Kamerick. This is an interview that I did during the 2023 Santa Fe Literary Festival with Lisa Consiglio and author Colum McCann. They are cofounders of Narrative 4, a global network of artists, teachers and students using creative tools to teach compassion and develop strong student leaders in the classroom and community. At the core is the story exchange where people come together to share and then tell one another’s stories.
You're working mostly with young people? I mean we had adults and young people here today, but is it always young people?
LISA CONSIGLIO: So when we started out, our target audience was 15, 16, 17 year olds, and they're mostly sophomores and juniors in high school. That holds true from a metrics point of view lens. People ask, who's your target audience? Everyone. Everyone needs this. Everyone. Adults need it, corporations need it, politicians need it, moms, school boards, certainly children, artists, everybody needs it.
The reason we chose that, and again just having dealt with these kids for a very long time when I was still in Colorado, their thinking is so fresh. They think they know so much about the world and yet they know they don't somehow and so they're little sponges and they're not siloed. They haven't been asked to declare a major. They haven't been asked to declare what their politics are. They're very open and they're old enough to be able to understand the value of these relationships and what connectivity actually means and to have fun, to spark the imagination and allow this to be something where they actually inform us much more than we could ever inform them.
COLUM McCANN: And also, I mean, you have a captive audience, you have our schools, and for me, some of the great heroes in this country or anywhere around the world are the teachers, and I don't think we pay our teachers enough or pay them enough respect. They have in the palms of their hands a captive audience which is open to the idea of learning. So it's great to work with young people, but I have to say it's artists and teachers as well who are fundamental to what we do at Narrative 4.
MEGAN KAMERICK: You just said all these groups who need it, would you extend to all these other groups? I hear what you're saying about the young people.
COLUM McCANN: Yeah, I mean, I'd love to take it to Congress! I mean wouldn't that be fantastic and if we could actually get them to sit on their rear ends for a couple of hours and listen to one another, truly listen to one another, I really do think that there would be some shifting and changing. We might have to strap them down somehow, but it would be great to do an exchange at some of the highest political levels as well as anything else because it happens everywhere.
LISA CONSIGLIO: Arguably right, Congress is supposed to represent the people. We are a grassroots organization. We don't go to principals, we don't go to superintendents. We go to kids, we go to teachers and let it trickle up.
Eventually these congressmen and women hopefully will pay attention to what the people are saying, yes, hey, wait a second, they're supposed to be helping make better lives and shaping the future and getting past all this bickering and infighting and bureaucracy and red tape and so forth. I agree, I would love to let it find its way naturally and organically or maybe not. Maybe one day we'll get a call from I don't know somebody and “Hey come on down,” sure we'll be there.
COLUM McCANN: And it's not a matter of left and right or up and down or whatever else that you want it to be. The great thing about stories is that it can take the whole spectrum in. Sometimes if people are coming from absolute different ends of the spectrum, you get this incredible dynamic that goes on, and they really do get changed. But I think most people who go through a story exchange and get changed anyway.
Lisa has seen it through all sorts of different groups, whether it be people on one end of the political spectrum to the other end, one end of consciousness to the other end. We've worked in, say, West Belfast, East Belfast. We've worked with immigrants and people who are anti-immigrant. We've worked with gun group. When they step into that other person's world, they somehow get knocked off balance a little bit and all their comfortable balance gets shot out from underneath them, and suddenly they begin to think in a brand new way. Hopefully then that new way of thinking translates into a deeper, long-term engagement.
LISA CONSIGLIO: These issues are not black and white. The reason for owning a gun may be very different than you might think right off the bat, the snap judgments. As Colum said, we did this amazing project up and down the spectrum from gun rights advocates to gun banning and it was incredible. We've done it all over the place. We’ve addressed immigrant issues, and the list just goes on and on. People come together in these ways after a story exchange and realize, wait a minute, it's not just that far one way or that far another, there are actually different shades, many different shades.
COLUM McCANN: Just for example, this is a personal example, a young lady from the South Bronx goes down and exchanges a story with a young man from Eastern Kentucky and he has a rifle in his pickup truck and she doesn't know why he would have to have a rifle until he tells her the story that he goes out every day and he shoots rabbits and brings them home and puts food on the table. And she says, "Wow, I never realized that, you know, white people, for instance, would have that hunger in their lives or have a need to do this sort of thing. “Oh, now I realize why he has that rifle in the back of his pickup truck," and suddenly it becomes messy. The world is messy, messier in a good way.
I like the three words, "I don't know." I think we've forgotten in this day and age. We are all so certain of ourselves. "I know this. You look like me or you sound like me or you vote like me.” But really the beauty lies in the “I don't know,” the sort of nuanced area where everything becomes mirky and beautiful at the same time.
MEGAN KAMERICK: How do you decide where to go?
LISA CONSIGLIO: So at first, again, it was organic. When I was living in Chicago in 2013, I was working in a school. The teacher introduced me to someone who was living in South Africa that he thought would love to have this program.
When Sandy Hook occurred we were connected to a person who is now the director of global programs for us and has been with us for nine years. Because of what happened in Sandy Hook someone in Tampico reached out to Newtown High School to this particular Lee Keylock and said I really want to help so we got connected to Tampico and we're still there.
For a while it happened organically. Now we have a COO whose skill set very much involves scalability and so now it's a more targeted approach. Part of the reason that we're in Santa Fe is because we've got a community college here. We have high schools here. We have a literary festival here. We've got some of the makings of a real hub for Narrative 4. We can see it getting out and moving out really, really quickly. So even though there are elements that are still organic in some ways, we actually have much more of a plan and a strategy to grow our programs exponentially or scale our programs exponentially over the next two to five years, especially in the United States.
MEGAN KAMERICK: And I know you have studies showing kids have improved reading and improved behavior. Have you gotten a sense that people who've done this improve the peacefulness of their lives in general?
COLUM McCANN: Yeah. I mean, I don't want to overstate it or over-praise it, but people do get changed. Once you get shifted, then there's no shifting back. They carry it on in all sorts of ways. They get involved. We've had young people who did story exchanges 10 years ago who are now central to the organization, watching it grow and bringing it out there, which is kind of amazing to me to watch these people who were 15 years old who are now in their mid-20s and thinking, "Okay, well, one of the things that might possibly save us is our ability to tell our stories and the stories of someone else."
I wrote a novel called A Paragon, which is a weird word, and a paragon is a shape with a countably infinite number of sides. I find this whole process to be a paragonal process. Maybe that word will filter into our consciousness, because I do think it's wonderful, the idea that we have an infinite way to live our lives and sometimes that infinity exists in the ability to tell someone's story.
LISA CONSIGLIO: People over and over have told us, "My listening is so much better now. I listen better. I'm actually hearing you."
MEGAN KAMERICK: I felt that strongly in my group because I'm a little bit of an extrovert and I want to engage and ask questions, but not being able to do that opened up kind of a different part of my brain.
LISA CONSIGLIO: Exactly. Yeah, I'm an extroverted thinker I've been called. I talk my way to my point and to actually stop and actually really deeply listen to someone else's story, to feel a part of their life, and again, the honor of carrying that with you as intimidating as scary as it is is such a part of the human experience that we just don't seem to be allowing ourselves to do all that often. I think with politics and media, we're tired of being screamed at. I think we just don't necessarily know. it. We just want to, we actually do want to turn it off for a little while and just engage with another person and it's fabulous!
MEGAN KAMERICK: If someone is not fortunate as I was to take part in this, do you have some advice for how to take these principles into our lives?
COLUM McCANN: Yeah. My advice to somebody who wants to know what's going on is hop onto www.narrative4.com. You can go through the training. You can actually go through an exchange. You can meet people from all around the world and exchange online. You can also become a facilitator and become part of this group that's growing so rapidly that my head is spinning here as I speak. We're going out to countries all over the world and to people all over the world.
LISA CONSIGLIO: You can find out where we're going to be and at which communities you can join us in person. We welcome one and all.
JESSICA TICKTIN: That was Lisa Consiglio and author Colum McCann speaking with Producer Megan Kamerick during the 2023 Santa Fe Literary Festival. They are founders of Narrative 4, the global organization that uses story workshops and related curricula to help people engage by telling one another’s stories.
You can find more about them and their work at www.peacetalksradio.com. Look for Season 22, Episode 2. To see pictures, listen to full interviews, read and share transcripts and to find out more information about all of our guests go to: www.peacetalksradio.com. That’s where you’ll find all the programs in our series dating back to 2002. That’s also where you can go to sign up for our podcast and importantly, to consider a donation to our nonprofit media organization to keep this program going into the future.
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