In May of 1992, following the Los Angeles riots, I saw a television news report about gang members who said that one of the causes of the rebellion was a lack of jobs. Focusing on gang members who had been bussed to northern California to fight forest fires, a reporter asked a 19-year-old African-American how much he was making and how he liked his job. "I'm making $600 a week," he replied. "I could make much more in the gang, but at least when I take this money home I don't have to worry about the cops breaking down my door. And you see this guy over here," he continued, pointing to a Mexican-American, "if we would have met in South Central, we would have tried to kill each other, but here we've become buddies."

As I reflected on that interview, I thought to myself, "There's the power of a job!" Not only did a job give that 19-year-old the dignity of earning "clean money," perhaps for the first time, but working with others also broke through his walls of racial prejudice, again perhaps for the first time. I was beginning to see that holding a real job for the first time could indeed be life changing...

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