Thirty-Five Thousand Meetings: How Father Peter G. Young Built a Path to Recovery

Some people change the system with one big speech. Father Peter G. Young did it one meeting at a time, by his count thousands of them. In this hook from The Slingin Podcast on Hoodz Radio, the Albany priest sums up fourteen years of knocking on doors at the New York State Capitol with a single goal: build a path to recovery.

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Watch: “Thirty-Five Thousand Meetings and a Path to Recovery”, 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

“For thirty-five thousand meetings in fourteen years of my life, that’s the only priority I had. How do I put in place the things that would allow people to get a path of recovery? And at that time I was the only game in town that was doing that kind of thing.”

Listen to how he frames it. Not a career. Not a title. A priority, the only one he had. In his telling, nobody else was doing this work then, and that gave him an unusual kind of freedom with the governor and with the people who believed in what he was building. He wasn’t selling a product. He was selling an idea, and he sold it in person, over and over again.

A Priest Who Worked the Building

Father Young had something most advocates don’t: location. As he tells it in his memoir, he was five minutes from the State Capitol. “Here I am right next to the legislative chambers,” he thought, and that building became his target. He served as a chaplain to the State Senate, which put him there every day it was in session, learning how things really worked.

Plenty of his access started with coffee. After ordination he’d stop by the Capitol to visit an old Albany friend, Harry Albright, who worked in the governor’s office. Governor Nelson Rockefeller would wander through, curious about the priest drinking coffee in Harry’s office. Father Young says he never had an official meeting with the governor and never needed one.

But the meetings he did have, he counted. They ran from quick five-minute “meet and greets,” where he made sure a legislator heard his request, to long formal hearings. By his own count it came to thirty-five thousand meetings in fourteen years. This was a grind, and he did it every day.

From the Memoir

He’s direct about what all those meetings were for.

“All told, it took fourteen years and thirty-five thousand meetings to move public intoxication from a crime to treatment.”

From Chapter 32, “Recovery Sites and the State Expansion of Services,” in his memoir Fifty Years Young.

He also admits he didn’t start out knowing how to do it. In Chapter 17, “240.40 — Don’t Incarcerate, Rehabilitate,” he writes: “I started out in 1959 as a do-gooder, and that was my mistake.” He didn’t have the documentation to show what the old cycle of arrest, court and jail really cost. So before computers and the internet, he spent slow hours in the library digging up the numbers that would move legislators. The same chapter explains why he stayed a volunteer: he turned down offers to run state prisons at six times his chaplain’s pay, because it could have moved him far from the legislature. “Being a volunteer gave me freedom to speak in my own voice.”

With Governor Rockefeller’s backing, he recalls getting one major bill every year for ten years, plus a letter of endorsement he always carried.

“I felt like John the Baptist, preparing the way for the signing of the law ten years down the road.”

From Chapter 9, “When Governor Rockefeller Asked About the ‘Harlem Drug.'”

And the work lasted. In Chapter 23, “Success at the Capitol: Changing the Penal Code,” he calls the alcohol treatment centers the work he’s proudest of. They started with eleven, and in 1976 eight more passed with bipartisan support, making 19. “They have been running for more than 40 years, are part of the regular budget process, and are solidly accepted as part of the health care system.”

Why It Matters Now

The legacy here isn’t one law or one building. It’s a method. Show up. Know the facts. Make your five-minute case, then come back and make it again. Father Young writes that he borrowed from the civil rights movement: “build up the believers, then build the power to be heard.”

That’s the move for the next generation. Whether the fight is reentry, recovery housing or second chances for people coming home, change still runs through rooms where decisions get made, and somebody has to keep walking into them. As he puts it in Chapter 34, “Vets and Parolees”: “Not many people march anymore, but that doesn’t mean we can’t go to the lobby and make ourselves heard.” Thirty-five thousand meetings started with the first one.

Watch the full conversation with Father Peter G. Young on The Slingin Podcast at HoodzRadio.com, and follow Hoodz Radio so you don’t miss what’s next. His story gets the full treatment in 50 Years Young, our upcoming 10-part series, so keep an eye out.

Respect the Legacy. Amplify the Movement.