This post is about a topic that encompasses both my day job and a visit we made last year on our ‘Californian Dreaming’ trip. By chance I spotted a Food tour ‘LA Latin Spice‘. How could we resist we love Latin food …being partial to the odd margarita’s and taco! but this tour gave us so much more than we could imagine and I highly recommend to anyone laying over in LA Melting Pot Food Tours. The people we met and the stories we heard were inspirational and it was truly the best start to our holiday. I would love to talk about every stop and every taste sensation but it will be a very lengthy post so I will cut to the chase with the title – Jobs not Jails…and then maybe in later posts I can entice you with snippets from this tour.
My day job is one of a Recruitment consultant. John and I have always been passionate about helping people find a great job..a rewarding and accepting environment to earn the money to support a family or achieve goals. Our business is in the main Blue Collar Industrial..Warehouse, Manufacturing..not fancy just honest hard work. We meet people daily that are challenged by job loss, redundancies, low self-esteem and I guess being raised on what would be termed the wrong side of the street – South Auckland New Zealand.
Boyle Heights in East LA is a melting pot of immigrants, low-income with also a very high population of young people (median age of just 25). We started our tour at Homegirl Cafe. This is one of Homeboy’s six social enterprises, where young men and women are placed in probably their first “real job,”. Shoulder to shoulder they work with former enemies and in this supportive environment gain fundamental job and social skills. We were utterly impressed and with tears in our eyes listened to one of the young women tell ‘Her Story’ on battling the demons of drugs, violence, poverty, jail and now resurrection.
We went back to the Cafe on our last day in LA to have lunch – the best soft shell tacos, the most gracious service. The employment centre was in full swing that day – and we saw Father Gs tag line ‘Hope has an Address’ in action. We have read his book ‘Tattoos on the Heart‘ and I wear my Jobs not Jails t-shirts as a wonderful reminder of this part of our trip. Any excuse to go to LA will find us back on the Homeboys corner. The experience was a gentle reminder to John and I to keep it real.
My point of this post is to challenge stereotypes, to look beyond racial bias and to remind us that we can all do our part in acceptance of diversity. What could you do to give some one a ‘Hand Up’…it is very easy to turn a blind eye!
Turn Right 2 Go Left 