Stop Yelling. Start Walking.
I have been saying this since 2020.
Western Washington is screaming about the spiral I spent six years warning about. I am done warning.
Inside a prison, I am succeeding with the very people who make up the majority of our streets, using the process that saved my own life and is now practiced by hundreds. Men society wrote off are flourishing, living lives that no longer create the problems everyone is screaming about. They are solving them. And I have the data to prove it.
I spoke up in 2020 about the problem that was getting ready to happen in Seattle. You do not have to take my word for it. On July 29, 2020, five days before the council voted to defund the police, I testified before the Select Budget Committee. Watch it.
The unedited version sits in the city’s own archive. That same week I sent the Seattle Times an op-ed with the full warning and a rational alternative. They never published it. I have now, word for word. In December 2020, The Federalist quoted me making the same warning. And in April 2025, the council unanimously passed a resolution admitting that defunding failed. Five years to concede what I said into the record before the vote.
Seattle committed away from solutions in 2020. I called it out. I fought it on the record. Since then, I have worked tirelessly to not leave my people behind to spiral and decline in the horrifying ways you are watching unravel right now.
Unravel is not a figure of speech. In the past six weeks: 40 shell casings collected off both sides of Aurora Avenue after gunfire struck nearby buildings. A 15 year old boy shot in the torso on the same corridor. Days ago, a man shot at 97th and Aurora, where gun battles between traffickers put bullets into homes. Residents built their own barricades because the city would not protect them. The city removed the barricades, and within 48 hours police were collecting casings 50 feet from a daycare, on a corridor current reporting describes as overrun by gun violence, open air drug activity, and the trafficking of minor girls. This is exactly what I told the council in 2020: “The defunding is going to attract and encourage more criminal behavior. As a former criminal, I would have taken full advantage of a lack of police presence to victimize citizens in this city.” Countywide, 914 people died of overdoses in 2025. When I gave my warning, fentanyl deaths here were under 200 a year. By 2023 they passed 1,000. Deaths are down from that peak, and I am grateful for every life spared. But 914 bodies in one county in one year is not success. Measured against the year I stood at that microphone, it is a slower catastrophe.
Everything being professed now, the encampments, the overdoses, the wasted billions, I have been saying since this all began. To everyone finally saying it out loud, and many of you are my friends, welcome.
I am not going to ask what we should do about it. I am already doing something, and it is actually working. What I have learned is stranger and darker. Solving problems seems to be very unpopular, and I am blocked from helping even more people. Why is that? Hold that question.
I yelled too, for years. Then I realized the yelling was not fixing anything, so I dug my heels in and poured everything into the solution.
I am one of the people being yelled about. I learned a way out and got out years ago. Then I went to work in the help industry, believing they were providing a way out too. They were not. I got tired of working under organizations that were not concerned with helping people get out, so I left, refusing to stomp on my own values by staying employed by the very system that is destroying lives and writing the policy that destroys them. I ventured out alone into the work I do today: pulling lives out of the fire and stabilizing them intentionally.
We are not the same. When you come from hell, you are inclined to teach people how to get out of it. When you go back in to make people comfortable while they are burning, you might want to take a good look at yourself.
It baffles me to watch people who have never been in a low place tell me and others what it takes to get out. Our communities are in disarray because society has been listening to those very people. Look around you. This is what their advice built. There is an entire industry profiting from human suffering, and more people jump on the gravy train every year. I am not on that train.
I work to not judge. I work to solve.
And here is what solving actually requires. You cannot hand people things they have never learned to navigate, like a job, a rental, or parenthood, because someone who has never managed anything does not magically learn to manage on the day you give them something to manage. Success begins with self awareness, self navigation, and self management. Until a person learns to look within, they will never be able to manage what is outside of them. So the solution, and I say this because I was one of the declining lives, is to teach the people who are declining how to solve the challenges that put them there in the first place. And they want to learn. People on drugs, on the streets, do not love their life.
I built that solution and walked it first. I created my program when I was arrested while homeless, kicking dope, and facing a fourth prison sentence, on a hunch that if I could get out, I could share that way out with people like me. Today it is a 26 week transformation program running inside a Washington State prison, under contract with the Department of Corrections, with parallel cohorts in the community. It does the internal work first, the work nobody ever taught them, then builds the external life on that foundation.
And it works where nobody thinks to look. The carceral environment is an education incubator waiting to be used. That separation from the chaos is the most expensive intervention society makes, and it gets wasted warehousing people instead of teaching them. I flipped it. My graduates and I turned the time into the transformation. Every graduate is tracked. Every outcome is verified. Of our released graduates, 98 percent have not committed a new crime, confirmed against Department of Corrections data. I did not just build a story. I built a dataset. The framework for taking it national is in my book, The Gabriel Plan.
So, the question I planted. Why is solving so unpopular? Why am I blocked from helping more people? Part of it is money. A person who becomes abstinent, housed, and working stops generating billable services. A recovered addict is a lost customer. The system is staffed and budgeted to the size of the problem, and every institution defends its own continuation. Part of it is fear that stories like mine will be used to abandon people still struggling. I respect that fear enough to answer it with data instead of inspiration. I am not an exception. I am a methodology, and 98 percent is the proof. And part of it is deeper. Believing people can transform means expecting them to. It is more comfortable to manage decline than to witness transformation, because transformation exposes every excuse a person has ever made for themselves.
Washington spent 75,576 dollars in 2024 to incarcerate one person for one year, up 84 percent since 2019. It costs us 4,500 dollars to put one person through this program. For the price of warehousing one person for a year, I can walk sixteen people through a transformation that keeps 98 percent of them from committing another crime. One approach is a solution. The other is a subscription.
A program with these outcomes should have funders lined up around the block. Instead, I have not taken a paycheck in over a year. I am going broke, but I cannot abandon the guys who rely on me for hope. So on July 19, I am walking more than 300 miles from North Bend to Spokane along the Palouse to Cascades Trail, averaging over 25 miles a day for twelve days, to change 40 lives. The goal is 250,000 dollars: 40 people through the full program, and the organization that walks beside them sustained. A fraction of what the other approaches cost, with a far higher success rate. Abstinent. Housed. Working. Making their communities safer. Sponsor the walk at outimpact.org/walk.
And I will not walk alone. My released students who are thriving, the very people society says cannot improve, will be on that trail with me. Living, breathing, walking out success, because someone did not give up on them. Because I came back for my people.
Sit with that. The person with the proven model is walking across the state to fund it while billions flow to what keeps failing. That is not a fundraiser. That is an indictment.
There have been claims made about me and this work. Lies, from people who have never once stood beside it. If you doubt me, good. Put your hiking shoes on and match me mile for mile. The route and dates are at outimpact.org/walk. Bring the success metrics of your approach and I will introduce you to mine. Mine have names.
To my friends finally sounding the alarm. You are right. It is as bad as you say. So this is between me and you now. Stop yelling and come solve it with me. Walk. Sponsor miles. Be a trail angel. Donate. Share this. All of it starts at outimpact.org/walk.
I told you in 2020. I am showing you the way out in 2026. Pay attention this time.
Stop yelling. Start walking.
Go Ginny go. I pray your plans come to fruition and that you are safe and healthy