Some issues call us to action and make it impossible to remain indifferent.
For Arne Duncan, former U.S. Secretary of Education under Barack Obama’s administration, gun violence in his hometown of Chicago was one of those. When he left Washington, D.C., in 2015, he decided to confront what he felt had become one of the city’s deepest crises.
Back in Chicago, Duncan founded CRED (Create Real Economic Destiny), a nonprofit organization that describes its mission as addressing gun violence through a “holistic” model. The idea, Duncan and his team explain, is to go beyond traditional crime prevention. CRED hires outreach workers, many of them with street crime experience, to connect with young people in neighborhoods at high risk for gun violence. The organization also offers therapy, life coaching, education programs and job opportunities.
“Many who are involved in violence have lost multiple family members to gun violence and themselves been injured,” said Jennifer Keeling, chief of operations at CRED, who, together with Duncan, welcomed the WPI fellows at the organization’s office just steps away from Millennium Park in downtown Chicago. “We have found that unless you work very diligently at addressing that underlying trauma through clinical interventions, it’s really hard to break the cycle.”
According to the organization, since 2016 CRED, which is privately funded, has reached more than 2,200 participants across Chicago. Nearly 1,900 have received therapeutic services to confront trauma, more than 700 have secured jobs and over 250 have found stable housing.
Chicago’s violence problem is not new. Between 2016 and the end of 2020, the city recorded more than 3,200 homicides and over 13,500 non-fatal shooting victims, according to the Mayor’s Office Violence Reduction Dashboard. By comparison, New York City, with nearly three times the population, recorded about half as many murders during the same period.
Although the number of murders in Chicago has been dropping since 2022, the city still struggles with violent crime. In the past 12 months, Chicago reported 2,065 gun violence victims, a 28%drop compared to the previous year, and 42% lower than the five-year average from 2020 to 2024.
Duncan acknowledges that the obstacles go far beyond policing. He points to polarization and the spread of social media as drivers of intolerance and violence.
“We are a very divided country, and there are many guns,” he said. The combination is really bad. “The hard days can destroy you, but the progress is real. Seeing the transformation these guys go through makes you want to do more. You don’t want to walk away from it.”
