Gunshots rang through the streets every night. Youth were killed both in front and in back of her home. Sister Eileen McNerney was living in the heart of Santa Ana’s gang territory. And she had moved there on purpose.
“I had turned 50, and I started reading about shootings, gang-related violence in Santa Ana, and I couldn’t stop reading about it,” McNerney ’83 (M.S. counseling) recalls. “I moved into a gang neighborhood and reality was a lot more horrible than I could have imagined.”
But with her strong faith and her counseling background, McNerney set about trying to help gang members and potential gang members out of the cycle of violence.
In 1995, she founded Taller San Jose, an innovative, nonprofit educational and job training program for out-of-school youth. Its goal is to help undereducated and unskilled Latino youth to move from paralysis to productivity. Since its opening, the program has helped about 4,000 young people to clean up their lives and move on to responsible adulthood.
Taller San Jose (translated as St. Joseph’s Workshop, after the patron saint of workers) is a workforce training program that encourages each trainee to accomplish seven goals: Obtain a GED or high school diploma; master basic computer skills; open and use a bank account; obtain a driver’s license; register to vote; remain crime- and drug-free; and obtain a job at better than minimum wage.
In September McNerney resigned from her position as executive director. She took a three-month break and returns this spring in the position of president emerita. In the future, she hopes to focus on the problem of rehabilitating former criminals who have been through the prison system.
Taller San Jose graduates include Juana Santos, a 22-year-old mother of two who has recently found her dream job as a front office receptionist in a physician’s office, and Rafael Prieto, 18, who works as a cement mason with Edge Development. Both of these young people are struggling to emerge from generational poverty.
McNerney has been honored with numerous awards for her work, including the Community Service Award from the National Hispanic Businesswomen of Orange County, the Women of Vision Award, the James Irvine Leadership Award and the Hispanic Influentials Award from Orange County United Way.
Chronicling many of her experiences as founding director of Taller San Jose, she wrote “A Story of Suffering and Hope: Lessons from Latino Youth,” published in 2005 by Paulist Press (www.paulistpress.com).
“For every young person who fails to successfully negotiate the barriers of poverty in crime-infested neighborhoods, countless others do succeed,” she writes.
