SAN DIEGO (NewsNation) — Larry Sauls turned his life around after being part of a gang and serving 17 years in prison. Now, he works with at-risk teens throughout North San Diego County as a community mentor for Resilience 760.

Sauls explained a gang recruited him right out of Vista Boys and Girls Club in Vista, California, where his parents sent him after school because they didn’t have any other options for him.

“I had too much time on my hands and didn’t have the right people around me,” Sauls said.

He said that as a kid, he was into sports and had big dreams, but his environment shaped a different path for him, saying his own school system was highly populated with gang members.

In one of his speeches, Sauls told kids that he was manipulated into joining a gang when he was younger. He explained that the grooming process happened fast and before he knew it, he was a gang member.

“The manipulation is to think that you can become relevant and have the type of reputation that causes you to have a type of fame in the community, to be known for something. The manipulation is that being young, you’re just easily influenced by older people to believe that you can be something that you really don’t want to be, but it just sounds so incredible that you do anything that it takes to become what it is that they’re telling you you can be,” Sauls explained.

Sauls said he was supposed to go to the boys and girls club to learn how to play sports after school and do homework, but he ended up joining the gang because of the influence. He explained that it was supposed to be a place where he was safe from that influence, but it ended up being a place where gang members ended up hanging out.

“It’s not like 14- 15-year-old gang members don’t like basketball, don’t like football,” he said. He was exposed to gang activity because the young gang members would hang out at the club after school.

Now, Sauls is leading Resilience 760, trying to give kids another option. He said that all their mentors have experienced gang violence or gang affiliation firsthand.

He said the kids he works with need people around them who understand what they are going through. They deal with kids going through the trauma that is hard for most people to fathom, especially when they lose a friend to gun violence and have to pass the same spot every day on the way to school. Sauls explained that trauma and anger could lead to the wrong decisions if they don’t have somewhere good to express it.

Sauls hopes that his mentorship program can help prevent the next kid from joining a gang.