Empowering the Homeless Youth of San Francisco

Jay George, who grew up in the tough streets of East Oakland, California, shared a stage last June with His Holiness the Dalai Lama and two other Nobel Peace Laureates, Jose Ramos Horta of East Timor and Anita Menchú, representing her sister Rigoberta Menchú, of Guatemala. Jay joined the three Nobel Laureates and dozens of other youths who work for peace and justice throughout the United States for a three-day conference titled Peacemaking: the Power of Nonviolence. Jay, who is director of Rising Youth for Social Equity, a San Francisco group that works with homeless young people, came to network with other peacemakers. He talked to Miguel Helft about his contact with His Holiness and the others and his work to empower the youth of the city’s streets.

Miguel Helft: Tell me about RYSE and what you do there?

Jay George: RYSE stands for Rising Youth for Social Equity. What we try to do is give people the tools to be able to be an engaged part of society. We work with kids between 16 and 24 who spend most of their time on the street. They are homeless, they are workless, there is no place esle for them to be, that’s where their friends are, that’s where they learn their lessons, that where they go to school.

What do you mean by school?

In terms of where they learn about things. Not in the formal sense of school, like institution, but they are learning under somebody about how to make up their life. So, in some sense, yes, they go to school there.

What is life of the streets like for some of these kids?

It’s different for everybody. For most people, it’s about making a living, you know: stealing cards, selling weed, selling crack, selling women, selling themselves, whatever. That’s where they kick it, that’s where their friends kick it, on the street, and that’s what they do, they hang out in the street and talk with their friends. Even those that have a home quote-unquote, a place to live, they are not going to bring their friends there to kick it and just hang out and be together. So there are no other places that the street, the park, the corner, to kick it on. That’ their meeting hall, you know. Then they begin to know it.

When we go in a board room, or we go to a meeting with the City, that environment is sort of dangerous. We are like fish out of water there. But if you put us on 16th & Mission, or 24th & Mission, or 17th & Mission, or in the Fillmore, or in th middle of Hunters Point, with the hustle and bustle, everybody is making twenty deals every twenty minutes; in that environment we feel safe. Not because it is necessarily safe, but because we know what everything is. That’s a prostitute, and that’s a dealer, and that’s an undercover cop, and this guy is trying to score some of this.

How did you get to know this world? Were you doing all this stuff on the street yourself?

Yes. I was on a skateboarding team. We spent a lot of time on the street practicing and stuff. We just hung together. We got harassed of course, and we did stuff that wasn’t that cool. It was stuff you had to do to get by and make it, you know. But I think I was kind of lucky myself, that I had something that was positive. Even though people harassed us, parents, administrators, everybody harassed us about skating, it’s like we were aware that we could be out there doing bad stuff, but we were not, we were out there skating.

How did you get from being on the street to working at helping people who are on the street?

I started realizing that there is stuff to be done that is not happening. I was lucky enough to be engaged by several elders on different levels, through skating, through the arts, through leadership development, through being an African-American male, a lot of different levels. They engaged me in ways that weren’t patronizing, in a way that there was room for my thinking to develop. If we have a critical understanding then we can act critically. If we have a naive understanding then we act naively. Once I realized that, [I understood that] either we take an active role in changing our lives or our lives don’t change. Nobody else can do it for you. It can’t be the parents, the teachers, the school, the pastor, the rabbi. No, they have to be central in that process.

So specifically what do you and RYSE do to help someone who is in the streets?

The things that we are focusing on right now are very different from what people think when they think of youth programs. We do not provide services to young people. We are not part of that philosophy. If I give you bread every day, nothing has changed in your situation. You have to learn to acquire that on your own, or be part of a collective, or at least be part of your acquiring that bread.

Right now we have this program called the Haight-Ashbury Youth Outreach Team; we work with homeless youth in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. We are looking at engaging some of them in a youth development leadership program, because there is a void of a critical and organized leadership within that community. Where there were recent attacks by the City against the young people in the park, against all the homeless people in the park, there was no leadership to rally all the young people around clear objectives and develop a plan and take some action to combat the City stealing all their clothes, their food stuffs, their sleeping bags, their tents. They don’t have a structure or leadership to do anything about that. So one of the things we are looking at is helping them develop that.

You and five others from RYSE went to this peace conference with His Holiness the Dalai Lama. There were also other youths from all over the country. What did they do?

There was a whole spectrum of people who were doing conflict resolution, work to develop non-violent attitudes; there was a whole spectrum of youth engagement.

What about the Nobel Laureates? What is it that you learned from them?

I think from His Holiness, who I met first, (pause), I got an idea about balance, an idea that there is this level in which we engage in the transformation of ourselves and the world simultaneously. And then there is living life, and enjoying all that it means to be alive. he has this powerful intensity about what he is about and his spiritual practices and his purpose in the world. He also fixes antique watches in his spare time, he tells jokes, I mean, he is alive! He is alive with the love of being alive. It’s not all just always dealing with the deeper questions, but enjoying also laughter and meeting people and talking with people and have good conversation. It was important for me to see that balance.

He preserves or has preserved so far his role as a holy man. People have all this reverence for him. But at the same time he has this sort of a trickster kind of quality. I don’t know how to explain it (pause). When people try to make him this holy man who’s above everything he sort of tells them a joke. I think that was important to see. And I think learning about him and his struggle in particular, at 16 years old he was not only the spiritual but secular leader of his country in one of the most critical points in history. To be able to do that as a young person, I think people forget that about young people; that that’s a role we have had historically. He, I think, is a good reminder of that.

You were in a panel with His Holiness and several others. Can you tell me about it?

Everybody was going down the panel saying who they were and what they did, and when it got to me my microphone went off. Nothing. His Holiness handed me his and that one cut off. That I went to the podium and that one cut off. So I ended up doing it all unplugged, yelling it to the audience. Talking about young people. And why they are here, to get some tools and resources so that we are able to do our work in a very powerful way and that in twenty years we will not have to have the same conference trying to discuss what are the strategies to ending violence on a global scale. So that we can have a clear handle on some of this stuff. So it is their job (as adults) not to glaze over our questions, to exclude us from the dialogue and the process. We work in the field. And if we meet someone who’s been working in the field for twenty years to offer themselves as a resource and not just pat us on our heads and tells us how cut we are for being involved. So I think that set a tone for the whole conference.

Did you get that kind of respect from His Holiness?

Oh, yes. Most definitely. At the end of the conference we announced that we were going to do our own conference and His Holiness personally pledged $5,000 for it. Off the bat. We didn’t ask for money. Off the bat, he said, I’m going to give them five Gs to do this. You have my blessing as peacemakers. You guys go with it. He kept brining it back to our participation and the level of participation we had and the kind of dialogue we were having. I think he was interested in that, and I think he saw it as really important. He also made it clear that if young people were going to do that, we really need to spend some time with them.

And then from Anita Menchú I got this sense of connection to people. Community and tradition and heritage. And understanding how to use that and look at this in a way that is transformative and helpful. She didn’t come to stand on the podium and wave her finger at us and tell us what she thought about the world. She came to chop it up with us about what we are doing and what is our struggle and what is her struggle. And that I think is important, never to lose sight of that, and not become this person who is set apart. Even if they have more expertise, they are still part of the community, not disconnected from it. So from her I got this idea that you have to be part of the people you are with, that you are leading.

What about the cultural gap? His Holiness is from this ancient culture in Tibet. Anita Menchú is from the highlands of Guatemala. And you guys, African-American and other youth from the streets of US cities. Was their message able to bridge that gap?

Yes and no. There were some things we missed. There were cultural differences. But on some level the stuff we were discussing transcended cultural particulars. You know, they were about engaging people’s humanity and about making connections with people on that level. And how you go about connecting with someone’s humanity is different because of cultural differences. But the concept of Anita Menchú engaging a soldier from a village like hers is the same as Tibetans engaging Chinese soldiers who are from a village like theirs as well. It’s the same idea. And for people like us the idea is similar. But here it’s more difficult. Police officers don’t come from the neighborhoods the work in so that people can’t engage them in that way.

His Holiness is first and foremost a religious man. Do you have a spiritual or religious background? Was there something in his message as a religious and spiritual leader that made sense to you?

I have a spiritual tradition. I don’t have a religion. I come from organizing young people in the San Francisco Bay Area, and at the beginning and closing of our meetings we hold prayers that are non-denominational. So the idea for me that transformation is not just on the material or mental or emotional or physical level, but that they are all wrapped into one. I think what was new about His Holiness, although he doesn’t necessarily us this language, was: I heard him saying, spirituality is important and it dictates who you act in the world. It’s a fine line for Buddhism. Because Buddhism is sort of detachment and ta, ta, ta. But it is very obvious to him that you can’t just sit and meditate and pray and not speak up and do something about what is happening in his country and what is happening to countries and to people all over the world. How you act in the world i reflective of your spiritual development. That was interesting to me.

What other interactions did you have with His Holiness?

We spoke on a couple of the same panels. One of the things that was interesting is that people would ask him about what he thought of the United States. He would look at the rest of us on the panel and say, “You live here.” He would hand it back to us. People would ask him what he thought of the inner-cities: he would look at us and say, “I live in India.” I think that was an important message that he brought home.

How did some of the other young participants in the conference react to His Holiness?

I think that for most people and for me, on a certain level, he presented an opportunity for young people to be able to come together around a certain movement. Not in a sense of capital M like the Civil Right Movement, but in a sense of action and motion happening. He was good about giving us some of the light, some of the limelight. He listened to our presentation and commented on our level of integrity and energy. Part of this conference was about saying, “Look at them, notice them, get with them, they are doing something. Something is happening here.” And that was important.

How do you bring the lessons from the conference and from His Holiness back to your work?

I’m the director of RYSE. My role here is as a leader, so figuring out when and how to wield my authority and power in a way that doesn’t run over my staff, but benefits and develops and blosters their leadership abilities.

What did you get at these meeting that will help you do that?

I think it was a more intense setting and I got to work with young people I would never have got to work with. And I got to learn from the Nobel Laureates about their leadership and their leadership style; and how to work with leader from all over the country. We had three days to create something that was sustainable, so how to do that and still be civil and compassionate and understanding and loving with these people that you don’t really know.

I deepened my practice, it deepened the bag of tricks that I have to draw from. And I think it gave me a new language, and broadened me — like I have never really worked with people who were Buddhist. So hard core organizers and educators and Buddhists, bridging that gap between people whose main idea in the world is transformation of society and people, whose main idea in the word is transformation of individuals through their own process and spiritual process. So how do you bring that together? That’s what youth coalition has been grappling with. How you make those two things happen on equal footing so one is not subordinated to the other.

How do we create a holistic approach?

If you look at the movement are the US and the world, they have a spiritual component. The Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Movement, the Latino Movement in the United States, these would never have had the power they had with a spiritual base. So re-examining how those things work and then doing out own personal research. What are the spiritual practices that we have? How do we come up with spiritual practice that works for those that have a particular faith and those that have no particular faith and those who do no believe, who don’t have a faith at all? How do we have some sort of practice that affirms all those things and lets people participate at whatever level they feel they want to participate in.

One of the ideas that we have talked about doing is developing at the beginning of meetings a ten-minute meditation to focus ourselves. People come to meeting from everywhere. One of us ran into this person on the street asking us to give them a dollar, another person was harassing you about the way you look, they way you dress. Work was like this. This happened last night with my partner. Whatever. So people are everywhere. How do we come into a meeting and figure out where am I now, where do I want to be, where I am going? What is this about? What is my purpose here? What is my relationship with everyone in this room? We look at that as well. A lot of us come here because people didn’t know how to get along. People didn’t know how to have compassion, love and respect for each other. So how do we make sure the we have that?

Anything else you want to emphasize?

One of the things I was amazed by but I was definietly happy about. There were 500 young people at that conference. That is just a cross section of young people engaged in social change and development and spirituality across the US. And they were all so deep and so beautiful and so full of energy and compassion. And passion. I was just reading a couple of days ago the mission statement, and one of the drafts that we were doing with some of the people in Santa Cruz. Like that insight into what our mission is now and forever. If we can keep, if we can get the resources needed to be successful, which isn’t that much compared with the potential for success, we will be able to accomplish things that other people have only dreamed of. Wouldn’t it be nice if one day we are doing it?

His Holiness the Dalai Lama addressed the young people at the plenary session on global peace at the peacemaking conference:

“Among the 5.7 billion human beings, this older generation, including me, is getting ready to say good-bye to this world. The youth, those of you under 25, are now the main people who carry the responsibility for the future. So please, realize your responsibility, remember your potential, and have self-confidence and an open mind and a sense of caring, a sense of belonging, of community. The freshness and strength that you have at this moment, the great enthusiasm, this should not go, fade away. You must keep enthusiasm.

And you should know that every noble work is bound to face problems and obstacles. Before you decide to pursue a certain direction, you should thoroughly check your motivation, your goal — that’s very important. You should be very truthful, honest, and be reasonable and good for others and for oneself as well. Then once you have chosen your foal, a positive goal, you should decide that you have to pursue it all the way to the end. Even if it’s not materialized within one’s own life, it doesn’t matter, there will be no regret. I wanted to tell you this as a sort of warning. Thank you.”

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