The kids sit facing the white board and collectively tell a story, ... As they're coming up with the story, there's a typist sitting here, so they see their words coming up on the wall.

I try to get anybody coming to San Francisco to come to the Mission. Not to misuse the word 'authentic' - I think that's such a troubling word - but the Mission really does have all the best parts of San Francisco intersecting here.

I really believe strongly that kids should be spared the runoff of their parents' lives and problems.

The idea of 'Voice of Witness' is to let survivors and witnesses of human-rights abuses tell their story at length. It started with a course that I co-taught at U.C. Berkeley journalism school back in 2003.

To me any given story has its appropriate form. There might be some story I get involved with that's begging to be a graphic novel, so that will have to be that way.

Some of these kids just don't plain know how good they are: how smart and how much they have to say. You can tell them. You can shine that light on them, one human interaction at a time.