one human being can help create today has never been greater. Take Jeff Carr, for example, who helped prove a solution existed to a social problem many at the time thought hopeless.
Jeff Carr grew up in Seattle, but he took off for college to see what more was out there in the world. He chose a physical education major with dreams of becoming a professional soccer player. In his sophomore year of college in the mid-1980s, he took a trip to Portugal's Azores Islands with an all-star team and saw first-hand what was out there in the world. He saw poverty like he'd never seen in his life, and it shook him to his core. When he got back to school, he changed his major to philosophy and religion.
After graduating, he spent the next 20 years involved in urban ministries and directing youth centers in Los Angeles. In 2006, when most forms of crime were falling in Los Angeles and violent crime was decreasing all over the United States, gang-related homicides, robberies, and assaults spiked about 15 percent higher in Los Angeles.2 It was a lightning bolt issue, a flash point for the city, and for Jeff. To stop the violence, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa wanted to appoint a gang czar to oversee the city's gang reduction and youth development programs. The mayor didn't have to look far. There was Jeff, with his extensive background working in some of Los Angeles's toughest neighborhoods.
I met Jeff on a trip to L.A. in 2012. Andy Lipkis actually connected us. I had lived in Los Angeles in the late 1980s when one of the prime gang violence prevention strategies was Operation Hammer (Google it). When I read about Jeff's work, I knew I had to meet him; I couldn't not. Jeff and I talked about his work and its inception. In 2007, he and his gang violence prevention team had to start somewhere, so they picked the “obvious” – the middle of the night in the most violent parks in the city, working with young people at risk of joining a gang or already involved in one.
Working with many others in the community, he helped develop a program called “Summer Night Lights,” which kept parks open through the night with organized activities. Jeff used his experience with other programs but felt there might be a better way to combine multiple tactics. In 2008, they started in eight parks. Jeff recruited at-risk youths who had already joined gangs to manage the parks and told them, “You are here because you were chosen.” He was giving these young people the opportunity to change their life narrative from one of villain to hero. Jeff firmly believed that if you changed gang members' self-perception, you could eventually change their behavior and their lives.
Jeff explained what it felt like. “At first, it was pretty hard; many of the people who had been my friends and colleagues at other community-based organizations seemed to turn against me when I took the city money they had relied upon and created a new strategy and new focus. It meant that some folks couldn't continue the work they were doing. While this was hard, I knew I had to stay the course and follow through with the change, or we would never get the results we needed. We had a window of opportunity and our job was to get as much done as quickly as we could so that we could keep that window propped open as long as possible and drive as much change through it as we could before it closed.” In this work, you face choices like which matters more, keeping friends or helping the kids in our communities that need us to stand up for them? If you decide to take it on, this work won't be easy, but it can be life-changing; and that's a trade-off worth making.
That first summer, the number of homicides in Los Angeles parks went from eight in 2007 to zero in 2008. Overall gang crime dropped 20 percent. The next summer, the program grew to 16 parks, then 24, then 32, with at-risk young people filling more key leadership roles. They were achieving what others felt was impossible.
In 2012, Los Angeles had fewer total homicides (299) citywide than it had gang homicides alone in 2002 (350) and in 1992 (430). Between 2003 and 2013, gang-related robberies in the city fell from 3,274 to 1,021; gang assaults from 3,063 to 1,611. And in 2014, the Los Angeles Police Department announced that gang crime had dropped by nearly half since 2008.3 Need more data to prove we do not lack solutions? Jeff Carr would never consider himself a superhero. Andy Lipkis and Suzi Levine wouldn't either. Like the regular heroes they are, they were just doing something they couldn't not do.
Maybe you, or someone you know, are a little like Andy, Suzi, Jeff, or Bill. You have that internal feeling that you want to do more for your community, to find and give more to that cause that you can't not do something about. As you read this book, meet the characters, and read the stories, I hope you will also engage in an internal dialogue with seven underlying questions. These seven simple questions get at the heart of why certain people reach their greatest potential for social change:
1. Are you a determined optimist?
2. Who are you at your core?
3. Are you willing to go to hard places?
4. Are you ready to be humble and humbled?
5. Can you actively listen?
6. Do you believe 1 + 1 = 3?
7. What is your can't not do?
Using this book, you can work through answering these questions one at a time, thinking through them in order or jump around. Maybe a few of them speak to you more now than others, so start there. You definitely don't need to answer them all at once. It's not like the people you'll read about in these pages ever sat down and took a seven-question quiz; I sort of reverse-engineered and simplified what I learned over 17 years. These questions are most surely the ones they commonly faced, wrestled with and are living out. Answering them will give you a road map to finding your can't not do.
What matters, then, is that you really chew on at least one or two of these to get you started, allowing the question to stick in your mind and open new possibilities to how you see yourself and your choices in life. Open your mind to impulses that may be inside you, waiting to be released. In short, start to unlock your potential to transform your world and the way you serve others.
Why ask questions instead of give answers? The first boss I had out of college, when I was bright-eyed and full of energy and optimism, drove me crazy. When I went to him for answers, he'd ask questions. When I proposed an answer or solution to a particular problem, he'd have more questions. It drove me nuts, and I wondered what was wrong with this guy and how he'd ever gotten a job there in the first place.
Ten years later, he rose to be the CEO – for all the right reasons – of that Fortune 500 company, and I've long since learned the power of the right question. One great question is far more powerful than a dozen answers. A question asks people to think through the problem and own the answer for themselves, far more deeply and powerfully than just giving them the answer ever would. It took me a while, but I came to recognize that my boss's frustrating questions were actually a great gift. Thanks, Brad.
I know that it takes more than just a question to make change happen. But I also know the people who dare to open their hearts to ask themselves and authentically answer these questions are the ones who will take big steps and truly create big changes in our future.
One of the wonderful things about writing a book like this is that many of the people you will read about helped me create it, mainly by how they live their lives. They also gave me feedback, ideas, input, and made it far better than I could have on my own. One of those people is Larry Fox, a financial guy from Portland, Oregon. Those financial types are usually sort of linear, literal thinkers, ya know. Not Larry. He is one of the deepest thinkers I've ever met; every time I'd show him a piece of this book, he'd come back with a way to improve it. Thanks, Larry.
In one of his notes he said to me, “I want to know what the undeniable question is that inspires me and is unsettling enough for me to change my otherwise less-motivated self. And not just move myself into predisposed paths, which is just fulfillment of who I am today. I want fulfillment of who I am not —not now, but potentially able to be. Something like, what would you be if you could be the person that God, or the person you value most, wants you to be?” Another way of asking what's your can't not do?
My roots start in the Midwest; I grew up in Iowa. My dad was a minister and my mom was a mom's mom. I was the