A Model for Others
Hollie Garrett lives at the 587 HTL at Larkin and Eddy in the Tenderloin. He is part of the Leroy Looper Graduate Program, which serves justice-involved individuals who have completed a previous residential treatment program.
Hollie grew up in Hunters Point, “One of the last black neighborhoods in San Francisco.” The great part about growing up there, he said, was the culture. “Everybody just was family, and that’s all I knew.”
The bad part was the violence.
“We just were taught that. We watch TV, they show us that, we listen to music, that’s what we hear, it’s like what else you gon’ do, it’s just the shit we do, you feel me?”
Hollie’s mom was a bookkeeper for 30 years, but his dad rarely worked a regular job. “He told me, he was like, ‘I can’t imagine having to get up every day and go do the same thing every day.’ I took that thinking on.”
To young Hollie, it was a no-brainer to get into the drug scene, where the money was good and the workday varied. After he got his GED, “I just got in trouble and shit. Go to jail, go to prison, sell drugs. Worked a little, tried to go to school some more, got in trouble some more.”
He was eventually sentenced to 20 years on an assault charge. At first, the goal in prison was the same as on the outside: to look out for himself.
“Drugs, I was selling drugs, I was using drugs… I was involved in whatever the underworld was wherever I was at, especially in there… it made me feel like a man instead of a little boy in there.”
Like in his childhood, the obvious outlet for ambition was the drug scene. But things changed when Prop 57 was passed, and Hollie could get out early for being part of classes and programs.
“First it was just, I’m just doing it to get out. And then it was, well let me actually use this time to make myself better and learn things and be a better speaker and a better giver and just a better person. I learned about science, learned about neuroplasticity, I started practicing Islam, you know, and never stopped. I started doing little groups, I started teaching groups, I wrote groups, I did like a dramatic change… all my talents, I got to use them to help people.”
He wrote up a 16 chapter curriculum for incarcerated fathers, called Discovering Fatherhood. It begins by teaching a bit of choice theory, moves to effective communication exercises, and the final chapters have “little things that I added together. So I’ve got one section talking about your health, another section talking about how to build up the mother of the child.”
Hollie got out after 13 ½ years on good behavior, went into transitional housing for a 3-month program, and then got placed in the 587 HTL by the Tenderloin Housing Clinic.
The drug-free supportive housing, Hollie said, allowed him to process the last 13+ years. In his telling, he first went through a transformation as a child when he got into drugs and violence, went through a “second transformation” in prison, and underwent a “third transformation” in the years since, while in supportive housing: “This was the transformation of understanding.”
“That’s where the most growth comes from. When you’re going through something you can’t really grow. But when you get through it, and then you can look at hindsight… think about all the losses, all the people who are not here anymore.” One of Hollie’s brothers was killed last year.
“You know, to be in a kind of situation where I didn’t have a lot of choices, this gave me a lot of room to breathe and think about where I was at.”
The 587 HTL, where he has since moved, also affords Hollie a home base so he can work as manager of San Francisco’s “Pit Stop” program. He’s also written about the program himself, in an article for the homeless advocacy paper Street Spirit.
Hollie graduated from SF State last year with a degree in construction management. When he is not managing Pit Stop, he is writing – “poetry, fiction, non-fiction, rap” – and coming up with ways to make a living by helping people. So far, he hosts webinars on Facebook where he teaches financial literacy.
And living in a drug-free SRO provides the stability that makes all of this possible.
“I’m just not at the state that I should be at my age. So this is definitely giving me… the help and support I need to catch up.”
