Gangster Disciple

While I was in Fresno, I spent time with a guy named Brian King. He grew up in the projects of Chicago, and at one point as a young man he was one of the highest ranking leaders of one of the country's biggest street gangs, the Gangster Disciples (nearly 100,000 members). In the book Street Saints, Brian describes how he was mentored as a kid growing up: "In the process of going to the drug houses we would see all the guys smoking marijuana, so we started to smoke marijuana. These were the only cats that took interest in us, and I think where we got screwed up is that we came from an environment where everybody was out there looking for the same thing. Even the older guys who never had it were trying to give us some type of male role model to set an example. I think all of us were looking for acceptance from our father that wasn't there, and we went out in the streets looking for it and it wasn't there either. So we made up our own concept of what it is to love and respect and mentor the younger guys, which was screwed up."

Brian eventually made it out of the gang life in Chicago, and today he heads a ministry in Fresno that provides mentors for a lot of kids. He writes, "Now I'm working with incarcerated youth and with high-risk kids. We partner with high-risk kids and match them with mentors. We go out into the churches and bring in Christians to come alongside young men and women in the system to help them build a foundation and have an opportunity, instead of going back to the same environment."

I learned a lot in my short time with Brian King. Although LAMP has managed to make a significant amount of mentoring matches in Homewood, we still have a long way to go. Many children in Homewood are still being mentored by gang members and other young adults who want to use them and lead them down a path of destruction. Our model is very comparable to the one in Fresno because we recruit mentors from churches. My goal is to help to find a Christian mentor for every high-risk kid in the city of Pittsburgh. I think it can be done. That's my big dream.