The counseling work was conducted at the street level, in the communities where he had grown up. Pacoima. East Los Angeles. The neighborhoods where the pipeline from childhood poverty and family dysfunction to the California prison system was not abstract but concrete and documented in the lives of the young people around him. He knew these communities from the inside — not as an observer or a program administrator but as someone who had traveled the same pipeline and come out the other side with a reason to believe that the exit was real and accessible.
His friend Mario Castillo, who appears alongside him in accounts of his community work over many years, has been a consistent partner in the specific work of going to juvenile halls and detention facilities to speak directly to young people who are early in the same trajectory Trejo was early in half a century ago. The work requires the specific credibility that no professional credential provides: the credibility of someone who has actually been there, who did the things, who lived in the facilities, and who can speak to the experience from the inside without romanticizing it.
Trejo is not, in the accounts of this work, a charismatic preacher delivering transformation through force of personality. He is, by multiple accounts, someone who shows up consistently, who listens, who speaks plainly about what his life was and what it cost him and what changed, and who does not claim to have special powers. He has acknowledged, across his memoir and his interviews, that his own family — his son, for instance — has struggled with addiction and homelessness. He met President Barack Obama in 2013 while his son was homeless and using drugs. The work he does in the community is not performed from a position of having solved everything. It is performed from a position of knowing how hard it is, firsthand, and continuing anyway.