SHE RAN STRAIGHT BACK: Why Jorja Leap Returned to South LA—and How She’s Changing the Narrative on Gangs

By MATTHEW MEYER | Reporter

Jorja Leap has made a habit of running to places most people run from. After war tore apart the Balkans, she headed for Bosnia and Kosovo. When the 9/11 attacks brought down the World Trade Center, she boarded a plane for New York City. And today, as gang violence remains a devastating reality in South Los Angeles, she finds herself working from its epicenter.

It’s a pattern for Leap—a tendency to spend time in places that others actively avoid.

While the longtime Palisadian, who lives in Rustic Canyon, rejects any kind of narrative order to her life, citing its “messiness,” it’s a constant thread in her career of helping others. She goes where she believes she’s needed, and that often means heading in the opposite direction of a crowd.

Leap is a social worker, policy advisor, published author, sociologist, anthropologist and mother. She spent her childhood in Westmont, one of many South LA neighborhoods where violence is now an unfortunate (if unacceptable) fact of life.

It wasn’t that way when Leap was young. While far from extravagant, Leap told the Palisadian-Post that her upbringing in Westmont was stable, safe and steady.

“I grew up with advantages,” she recalled. “I never had to worry about where food was coming from. I never had to worry about where my mom or dad were.”

Leap’s working-class, white family accurately reflected Westmont’s general demographics during the time. The neighborhood began to change about five years after her family moved away. Leap said its transformation followed a familiar narrative: As black families moved in, many white families moved out, taking public resources with them. The neighborhood’s economic decline correlated with an increase in crime and other problems, driving more middle-class families away and draining resources further.

“White flight began in earnest,” Leap explained. Naturally, she ran straight back.

Leap first returned to South Los Angeles as a social worker, fresh from UCLA.

Working at Martin Luther King Hospital, her work focused on child welfare. In dealing with children who suffered from abuse, she found herself drawn to those who joined gangs to cope with their surroundings.

“They seemed to be survivors,” she explained. “They were scrappy. They were tough.” And in Leap’s view, they didn’t fit the narrative that many Americans ascribed to them.

“They were being stigmatized, they were being demonized, rather than understanding why they were the way they were—what had happened to them,” Leap explained.

Among the poverty, drug abuse and racism that permeated their communities, Leap didn’t accept the argument that gang members committed crimes because they were intrinsically bad. She began to believe that by ignoring the circumstances that surrounded these young people, a heavy-handed, punitive approach to gang members would only deepen the hopelessness that drove them to the groups in the first place.

“I’m not afraid of them,” she concluded. “I’m afraid of the people that don’t understand them, and what’s done on the basis of that lack of understanding.”

Leap shifted her work’s focus directly to gangs. She did so just as gang violence exploded in the ’80s and ’90s, a dark, 10-year period that some of Leap’s colleagues refer to as the “Decade of Death.” In the thick of it, Leap worked for years “on the ground,” one-on-one with gang members as a social worker.

“It was the education of a lifetime,” she told the Post.

While remaining on the ground was important, Leap’s desire to change public misconceptions about gangs eventually drove her to expand the scope of her work. She wanted to conduct research, but it couldn’t be “straight academic” work—Leap wanted to ensure that her studies led to concrete policy changes for troubled communities.

She cut her teeth as part of a team of researchers under the command of Constance “Connie” Rice, an influential civil rights lawyer who developed a new gang program for then-Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Leap went on to work in Villaraigosa’s office herself, where she directly influenced policies that still govern the way the city addresses gangs.

Later, she would convince a dear friend and colleague, Father Greg Boyle, to let her conduct a long-term study on Homeboy Industries, a comprehensive program for high-risk youth and former gang members that employs an array of rehabilitation approaches, from tattoo removal to job training. Leap said she believes conducting longitudinal research on Homeboy—a place she regards as “one of the most wonderful on earth”—is an important step toward proving that meaningful change takes time, and that funding programs with a long-term, individualized approach like Father Boyle’s is crucial. Her research there is ongoing.

Meanwhile, Leap has remained hands-on. In 2010, she helped Michael “Big Mike” Cummings start a Watts chapter of Project Fatherhood, a group for former gang members that “want to learn how to be fathers to their children.” Every week, Leap travelled to Jordan Downs—a once infamously violent South LA project—to serve as the group’s primary social worker. The group continues to meet and expand its membership to this day.

Leap’s latest project is one of her most ambitious. She recently received funding to start the UCLA Watts Leadership Institute. The program will take a group of handpicked, “natural, community leaders” from Watts who have the desire to lead nonprofits but lack the resources and training. Over 10 years, Leap said the Institute will train Watts’ next generation of leaders—a group that she said will then train the following generation. It’s Leap’s fundamental belief in South LA’s potential put directly into practice—proof that leadership can come from within, that the tremendous resilience of Watts and other neighborhoods like it can be channeled toward tremendous good with the right resources.

Over the years, Leap has also collected a PhD in psychological anthropology, taught regular courses at UCLA, collaborated with the UN on post-war development for Bosnia and Kosovo, worked with the grieving families of 9/11 victims, and served as expert witness in death penalty trials. She’s also written two books—“Jumped In” and “Project Fatherhood”—the proceeds of which go back to programs that Leap deeply believes in.

Asked if she ever gets tired, Leap owned-up to occasional bouts of “crankiness.”

The world might forgive her.

On a serious note, Leap said that the years of constant, emotionally taxing work have only been possible because she sets aside time for peace, rest and reprieve.

For that, she relies on her beautiful canyon home, where she, her husband and two bounding pups make gracious hosts to friends, family and nosy journalists.

Leap admitted that it can be hard to get in her car at night and head for such a comfortable environ while the men and women she deeply cares for remain in their bleak surroundings.

She reminds herself, though, that she’ll be back. And she will be. Jorja Leap always comes back.