“I’m from this community. I terrorized this community. I’ve caused so much harm, so much pain. I was the type of person that society wanted out.”
Before Johny Diaz became ARC’s Associate Director of Inside Programs, he was a young gang member growing up in California’s Central Valley, a largely rural region between Los Angeles and Sacramento, where one in four children live below the poverty line.
Eventually, like many of the young men in Johny’s neighborhood, he ended up in prison. While incarcerated, though, he discovered a new community in ARC and decided to transform his life.
“For many of us who were in that gang life, this is exactly what we were looking for: a place of belonging, to fit in, to feel love, to feel embraced.”
When Johny paroled to Los Angeles in 2022, he grabbed every opportunity the city had to offer. He became an ARC member, moved into our Lorena Housing, and found a good job. “Going to LA was the best thing that ever happened to me. Being embraced by a community, an organization as great as ARC. I needed that to happen.”
When Johny’s wife urged him to move closer to family, he took the leap and returned to the Central Valley. After becoming a life coach for ARC’s Hope and Redemption Team, mentoring people in the same Central Valley prison he paroled from, Johny kept hearing the same thing:
“People would come up to us and say, ‘Hey man, I’m about to come home, but I’m from Tulare, and there’s nothing there. What do you suggest?'”
The numbers back them up. According to CDCR, more people came home to Fresno County last year than to Sacramento County. Yet they received comparatively few reentry resources, and no support from ARC.
So Johny and his team started connecting people with whatever help they could find. But “it always felt like we weren’t doing enough.”
This past summer, that all changed.
Just as Johny stumbled upon a great office site in Fresno, ARC received surprise funding to provide reentry services in the region. This will result in not only ARC’s first Fresno office, serving the Southern Central Valley, but an expansion model that should lead to many more satellite offices throughout the state.
And Johny’s vision for the new office? It’s simple:
“The same feeling we get when we go into the LA office, that inviting feeling: ‘man, I belong here. Man, I’m not an outcast anymore.’ That same feeling is what we want to give to our community out here in Fresno.”
And to that community, Johny says, “We get told to look at the light at the end of the tunnel, but at times it’s so dark you can’t see nothing. I want them to know that we’re out here. We fight for them day in and day out. We’re building out here so that when they get ready to come home, half the battle’s already done.”
ARC’s Fresno office will open later this year.
