The Community Is the Answer: Father Peter G. Young on Overcoming Addiction

For more than fifty years, Father Peter G. Young worked the streets of Albany’s South End and the halls of the State Capitol for people fighting addiction. In this clip from The Slingin Podcast launch on Hoodz Radio, he boils all of it down to one idea: the community is the answer.

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Watch: “Community’s Role in Overcoming Addiction”, Father Peter G. Young on The Slingin Podcast, Hoodz Radio.

Father Peter G. Young died on December 9, 2020, at age 90. Kay Bond recorded this conversation with him for The Slingin Podcast on Hoodz Radio.

In His Words

“The community is the answer. What can we do as a community to rebuild, to reestablish the credibility of the people that we have so that they can have a better life, and that will enhance the life of everyone?”

Notice the word he picks: credibility. He’s not only talking about getting somebody sober. He’s talking about restoring a person’s standing, so their neighbors, employers and family can see them as somebody again. And he’s clear about who wins when that happens. Not just the person in recovery. Everyone, in the inner city and beyond it.

A Priest Needs a Constituency

Father Young learned early that good intentions only go so far. Some days, he recalls, more than a hundred people knocked on the rectory door at St. John’s in the South End. He could feed some, shelter some and pray with all of them, but one parish priest couldn’t carry that alone. He needed government help, and government only listens to numbers.

So he built a community behind the cause. For years he drove around New York encouraging local leaders to start councils on alcoholism, then helped pull those councils together into one voice for treatment. He joined every related group he could. And he brought the people living it into the room. One of them was a woman named Martha, who had been locked up in the county jail more times than anyone could count. She was eating in the St. John’s kitchen when he asked her to come to the Capitol and tell legislators what it was like. She told her story. He laid out the cost of jailing her again and again.

In the clip he also names what communities face now, heroin and fentanyl and a synthetic drug market moving in, and he keeps asking the same question his whole ministry was built on: how do we respond to the need?

From the Memoir

His memoir Fifty Years Young shows what “community” meant in practice.

From Chapter 22, “Building Community Constituencies,” he sums up decades at the Capitol in a few lines:

“A priest alone in a hallway is a do-gooder. A priest with the councils, the providers, the counties, the families and people like Martha behind him is a constituency, and that is what the Capitol listens to.”

The same chapter takes on “not in my backyard,” the neighborhood fights over where recovery programs can go. Former inmates, he writes, need treatment, housing and a job when they come home. His conclusion is hopeful: over the years “many early opponents became strong supporters. All politics is local.”

From Chapter 38, “Rebuilding at Eighty-Five,” community gets physical. Back in the South End, he reopened an old church on Second Avenue as Mother Teresa Community and turned its empty sixteen-room convent into a clean and sober house for men in recovery. By his count, about sixteen hundred clients passed through it over sixteen years. After Sunday liturgy, they served a free meal for the neighbors. His explanation:

“We followed what St. Francis told his young followers: ‘Witness by your presence and speak if you must.’ Just being there was a presence the South End needed.”

From the Prologue, “It Was a Duty,” he gives the community the credit for every idea:

“The honest answer is that we listened to the participants, saw the need and tried to respond. The ideas were theirs, and so is the credit.”

Why It Matters Now

Addiction doesn’t stay on one block, and neither does recovery. Father Young himself writes about the heroin epidemic bringing a cry from relatives and friends begging for any way to help, about community meetings on heroin called through social media, and about attending so many funerals of talented young people lost to overdose. No neighborhood gets to call it somebody else’s problem.

That’s where the Legacy turns into a Movement. The Legacy is a priest who figured out that one voice gets a polite no, and a whole community gets heard. The Movement is us doing the same thing today: showing up at the meeting, opening a door instead of fighting the halfway house down the street, hiring the guy with a record, sitting next to somebody at the free meal. People coming home from jail and people coming out of treatment need somewhere to land. A community decides whether that place exists.

Father Young’s question still stands, and it’s on all of us to answer it: how do we respond to the need?

Watch the full conversation with Father Peter G. Young on The Slingin Podcast at HoodzRadio.com, follow Hoodz Radio, and look out for 50 Years Young, our 10-part series on Father Young’s life and ministry.

Respect the Legacy. Amplify the Movement.