OAKLAND — Cesar Cruz, a teacher whose after-school program, “Homies Empowerment,” provided a safe place in East Oakland where kids from rival gangs found common ground and an appreciation for education, is back from Harvard with a doctorate and new tools for taking that work to the next level.

Now, he wants to open an entire school using the same inclusive principles that made Homies Empowerment a success.

“He’s the Martin Luther King Jr. of our community, of Oakland, and I don’t say that lightly,” said associate minister Harry Williams of Allen Temple Baptist Church, who writes about Cruz in his 2016 book, “Street Cred: A hood minister’s guide to urban ministry.”

In researching that book, seeking “boots on the ground, grass-roots leaders, one name would occur over and over: Cesar Cruz,” Williams said.

“His specialty is gang-impacted youth. He helped so many young people to go to college who never would have. He has a serious heart for young people. We’re comrades in the struggle for peace in the city,” the minister said.

On the second weekend of February, Cruz’s vision for a school based on his Homies Empowerment program that operated from 2009 to 2013 took top honors at a Kapor Center for Social Impact “Startup Weekend” focused on “Schools and Tools for Oakland.”

The win earned him a trip to New Orleans for the 4.0 School Essentials program, which promises further mentoring to help him realize his ambitions.

Another award given to all competition finalists at the Kapor event was a website. For Cruz’s proposal, it is HomiesEmpowerment.co, which he is developing. He invites anyone interested in his program to reach him through it.

Cruz has more than a decade of teaching in the Bay Area behind him. Homies Empowerment, an after-school program he began in 2009, was his reaction to the harsh realities he saw at Richmond and Oakland schools where he was working, he said.

“I was going to more funerals than graduations. What was criminal was the way kids were being educated,” he said.

Cruz offered courses in ethnic studies: Latino studies and Latino film. Kids who would cut school would show up to his programs to learn their own history, he said.

A year into it, Cruz got space at the YMCA to host dinners and social gatherings Wednesday nights. Attendance quickly rose from a dozen or two kids to hundreds. Kids whose understanding of the codes of their neighborhood streets meant that they could not talk to or be seen with each other, found a safe haven to be together at Homies Empowerment.

Those successes impressed on Cruz the need for such efforts and inspired him to seek ways to do more.

“Gangs are the sororities and fraternities of the ‘hood, but there are very few schools with open arms ready to accept them,” he said of the young men and women who get caught up in that lifestyle.

“What makes us unique from other programs is that we don’t demonize,” Cruz said.

” ‘OK, you were incarcerated?’ ‘Welcome.’ ‘You’re in a gang?’ ‘Welcome.’

“The assets that they’re getting from those gangs, we want to mirror,” he said, comparing his vision to more traditionally accepted groups for kids, such as the Girl Scouts.

The school he envisions would include a movie theater — “we don’t have one in East Oakland” — and other youth-run businesses, such as a cafe, Cruz said. If space permits, he would operate it akin to a boarding school, with emergency shelter available for young people in crisis.

Learning how to negotiate the administrative side of operating a school has been “the hard work I’ve been trying to figure out,” he said.

At Homies Empowerment, he said, it became clear that “We were in over our heads; that’s what motivated me to go to Harvard,” he said. “Now that I’m back, the goal is to revive it.”

He pointed out an Oakland school district property on 72nd Avenue, vacant for 10 years, as perhaps an ideal site. The former adult school has the unique advantage of being in the middle of two rival gang territories — Norteno territory from roughly 20th Avenue to 69th Avenue, and Border Brothers’ turf from about 76th Avenue to 98th Avenue, he said.

“Part of what we’ll be doing is peace work. We have a Palestine and Israel in Oakland; we don’t want to put kids in harm’s way,” he said.

One of the youngsters who attended Homies Empowerment, Javier Martinez, is now 23 and a student in kinesiology at Cal State East Bay. The lessons he learned at Homies Empowerment of challenges his community faces and its history helped him find a focus for his own efforts, he said.

“You need to put in the work to learn. You can’t just sit there expecting things to change,” he said. That lesson, he added, came through mostly by the example Cruz set.

“He was putting in all the work. We saw that we should do the same. He’s made a lot of changes for people already. Now he’s trying to do it at a bigger level,” Martinez said.

“I think it’s so necessary. We were losing young people at a rapid rate. To capture their imaginations regarding the purpose and power of education, you need a new kind of model, a new paradigm. Because young people need to see through a different lens, y ou need educators with a background in the community, with trauma-informed services. These people have seen hell on earth,” Williams said.

Contact Mark Hedin at 510-293-2452, 408-759-2132 or mhedin@bayareanewsgroup.com.