“I think it’s a misconception or misguided to choose to work with gangs as opposed to individual gang members,” Boyle told The Register from Pearson International Airport. “It’s about a lethal absence of hope so you want to be able to address that and infuse a sense of hope to this population.”

That’s just what Boyle has been doing for the past 22 years as he has helped thousands of teens leave the gangster life. He is the founder and executive director of Homeboy Industries, which evolved from his first initiative, a program called “Jobs for a Future.” JFF offered positive alternatives in the community such as a day care program and help in finding legitimate employment. JFF started with Boyle reaching out personally to gang members within his parish boundaries. There were eight gangs in his parish, he said, one of the more highly concentrated areas of gang violence in Los Angeles at the time.

“They lived in the parish and that was part of my responsibility within those boundaries. I would go out to them and I don’t regret that I did that but I would never do it again,” he said, explaining that Homeboy Industries now draws individual gang members like rehabilitation centres draw addicts. They come to him.

Boyle launched Homeboy Bakery in 1992, the first of several enterprises that exist today, where rival gang members have worked side by side in an environment that provides training and work experience. Today, Homeboy Industries, a nonprofit economic development organization, also includes Homeboy Silkscreen, Homeboy Maintenance, Homeboy/Homegirl Merchandise and Homegirl Café.

“What we do is we have a therapeutic, multi-system community that creates what you might call a secure base — in psychological terms, where attachment can happen and resilience can be born,” Boyle said. “You want to rescue them, heal them, offer a sense of hope because hope is foreign.”

Boyle was a member of California’s State Commission on Juvenile Justice, Crime and Delinquency Prevention and is currently a member of the National Leadership Council of the Iris Alliance Fund, and serves on the advisory boards for the Loyola Law School Centre for Juvenile Law and Policy and the National Youth Gang Centre in California.

Where the church is concerned, Boyle said people must realize that convincing individual gang members to attend a Bible study is not the  first step in helping them change their lives around.

“It has to be about concrete help,” Boyle said. “You want to go to them and say ‘what would help you’ and then try to do what would help them to get their life back on track again.”

Eighty-five per cent of the time, he said, what they need to start the path out of gang life is a good job.

“It gives them a reason to get up in the morning and not gang-bang the night before,” he said.

With this attitude, Homeboy Industries has helped thousands of ex-gang members regain hope and find their worth.

“I think the fact that there’s a lot of demonizing that goes on, that’s problematic. So you get people to a place of kinship where they can see there’s no ‘them’ there’s just

‘us,’ ” he said.

Leading up to the conference, Boyle was on tour with his newest book, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion, which the Los Angeles Times said would be “destined to become a classic of both urban reportage and contemporary spirituality.”

The stories he shared at the summit and shares in his book would be too long to tell in an article, Boyle said.

“They’re stories about kids who sort of discover the truth of who they are, that they’re exactly what God had in mind when God made them and if they inhabit that truth, they become that truth,” he said.