By Andrew Blum

Rise Up Industries emerged from the work of Kairos Prison Ministry in the early 2010s. During an event organized by Kairos at the Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego, Father Greg Boyle of Homeboy Industries5 in Los Angeles challenged Joseph Gilbreath, a Kairos volunteer, to establish something similar in San Diego. In response, Gilbreath, Ross Provenzano, and other Kairos volunteers founded RUI in 2013. The mission statement of RUI reads: Rise Up Industries minimizes gang involvement by providing integrated gang prevention, gang intervention, and post-detention reentry services. RUI describes their longer-term goal for this three-pronged approach as breaking the “intergenerational cycle of gang violence.”  RUI began by launching their 18-month reentry program in 2016, after just over three years of research on the needs in San Diego and the organizations already working on reentry services in San Diego County. According to RUI leadership, they launched the reentry program first in part because alumni of the reentry program could then participate in their gang prevention and intervention efforts. RUI is currently laying the foundation for more robust gang prevention programming through a series of speaking engagements, in which reentry program participants and alumni speak with at-risk and justice-involved youth with the goal of assisting them in making more positive life choices. As part of these efforts, RUI is also developing an MOU with Monarch School. Monarch School is a school in San Diego that educates children impacted by homelessness. Participants in the program will continue to regularly visit the school to speak with the students. RUI’s future plans for its gang prevention and intervention initiatives will be discussed in more detail below. 

San Diego: University of San Diego, Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice,  2022. 25p.