Trinity Boston Foundation Blog

Seeing Potential in all our Youth

I hope you had a chance to read the lead editorial in this past Friday’s Globe, “Ex-gang member’s sentence should promote rehabilitation.”  The gist is that when a past crime catches up with a youth who has turned his life around, judges should be lenient in sentencing. It also talks about the “gross unfairness” of the police department’s circulation of photographs of gang-affiliated young men.  Foundation staff concur with “gross unfairness,” but would also add “counter-productive.” And “desperate.” It’s easy to understand how frustrated the police are by the violence in our streets. Aren’t we all? And that frustration, that feeling desperate, leads the police to want to “shame” the young men into behaving.

A wise friend once told me that the most important thing parents can do is make sure their eyes light up when their children walk into the room. Everything else is secondary.  Paul Bowen and I talked about that a couple of weeks ago as he was preparing for TEEP staff training. He wants the eyes of his high school and college counselors to light up when they see their students. So in staff training he asked them, “what do you believe about these youth – about their worth, value, potential?”

How about us? Can we look at those pictures of gang-affiliated boys and see vessels of the holy? Do our eyes light up? Do we see their essential worth, value and potential? I know that God’s eyes light up. And that ours can, too.


One final note. With a heavy heart this past Friday morning, I told The Rev. Hurmon Hamilton that the Counseling Center did not have the capacity this summer to run grief groups for members of his congregation who have been directly affected by street violence. He specifically wanted Counseling Center staff to lead the groups because they are able to do that work within a theological context, which he sees as essential for these families to process their grief. I mention this in the context of our ongoing Annual Appeal -- your gifts build the capacity of the Trinity Boston Foundation to meet needs such as these.