Director’s Statement
A myriad of incidents and Experiences have led me to this project. Perhaps more poignant than the others is living through looking into the barrel of a gun three times before I turned 18. One was held by a young gang member, the other by a strung out drug-addict, and the third by a young man who seemed more scared than me during a robbery. That first young man, a gang member since he could remember, is now in Joliet, Illinois prison, serving life for first-degree murder.
The delicate nature of our place in this life has become more apparent since I began working directly with incarcerated men and women. So many factors that determine our path in life are set before we are born - who our parents are, where we live, our socio-economic status, race, culture, health, etc. Only when we reach adulthood, unless we are especially gifted and determined, do we begin to carve our own path. In America, there are ten thousand people currently serving life sentences for crimes they committed before they reached this point.
Every day I am thankful that the day that young man held a gun to my head, he had not come to the point where he could so easily pull the trigger and end my life before it had truly begun. I wish, too, that I had been able to say or do something to change his seemingly inevitable path. I have seen twelve year olds as comfortable with a gun as with their Playstation, and I’ve seen other young men and women ready to induct them into the comfort, ‘the family’, of the gang. What makes this more harrowing is that many of them receive more caring from those young men and women than they have from their own families. There is more to tell, but this was just the beginning of my path to this work.
At age twenty-one, my cousin, whom I loved dearly, killed herself. That was the most devastating day of my life. This turning point led me to work with Kara Grief Support, and was the time I decided to change my career focus from the corporate world to nonprofit and community development, filmmaking, teaching Yoga & meditation, and grief support counseling. The latter two brought me to The Trust.
In 2006, as founder and program director for a Yoga-based non-profit organization, Niroga, I worked closely with Alameda County Public Health and Probation. Our main collaboration was a stress management and holistic health program for the young people in their juvenile detention center, now called The Justice Center. While there, I was introduced to Dr. Garry Mendez, Jr. Dr. Mendez is the founder of The National Trust for the Development of African-American Men, known affectionately as The Trust. The Trust is a community development program run inside prisons. It began at Green Haven Prison in New York State when Dr. Mendez was asked to come in and recruit men to attend college courses. Immediately, he realized that unless these men first learned and embraced a strong, culturally-infused value system, the skills learned would just help create smarter thugs. The Trust recruits men to become part of the community building effort as they take on the responsibility of rebuilding the communities that they once helped to terrorize. The idea of regaining one’s manhood by lifting up neighborhoods currently on the path to ruin - and intervening in the lives of those young people who would otherwise end up incarcerated in a neighboring cell without such intervention and direction - is proliferating faster than a viral marketing campaigns I worked on as an international marketing executive.
Two years ago, Dr. Mendez invited me to teach Yoga with The Trust Fellows at San Quentin. Getting to know the men, and hearing their stories, I began to see how and why The Trust program works. So many of the men have only dreamt of what we all strive for; belonging, family, love, success, and, of course, a sense of purpose. The men who gave it to them were gang members and criminals who love to recruit the young. The street code they learned was not in line with society’s values, and they eventually ended up in San Quentin. Though many will never walk down the streets of their youth again, kiss their wife or sweetheart, see their children graduate, or breathe the air of freedom, they have found purpose in their transformation and in the mission of ending the cycles that led them to this fate, transforming their families and communities toward a new, more peaceful future.
