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CRADLE to CAREER
An education centered initiative providing wrap-around services to youth from ages 0-24.
Cradle To Career Lansing is a community-driven initiative focused on helping young people succeed from early childhood through adulthood. By bringing together schools, nonprofits, businesses, and families, the effort works to align resources, share data, and support youth every step of the way. It is about building a system where every child has the opportunity to thrive, educationally, emotionally, and economically.
Photo: Cradle To Career Meeting
Creating pathways from cradle to career means more than education and jobs, it means safety. When violence disrupts homes, neighborhoods, and schools, it interrupts every stage of a young person's journey. The same cycles of retaliation and trauma that impact our streets also reach into our classrooms. That's whay our work in Community Violence Intervention isn't separate from cradle to career, it's at the heart of making sure every child can learn, grow, and thrive in safety.
Community Violence IS School Violence
Violence Doesn't Stay in One Place
Conflicts that start in neighborhoods often spill into schools. Disputes, group conflicts, and cycles of retaliation don't pause at the school door.
School fights, threats, and shootings are often rooted in disputes that began in the community.
Overlap in Prevention
School violence prevention and community violence intervention are two sides of the same coin.
When CVI strategies interrupt cycles of retaliations in neighborhoods, schools automatically become safer. When schools invest in mental health, credible messengers, and relationship based supports, communities benefit too.
Shared Risk Factors
Both targeted school violence and cyclical urban gun violence are fueled by the same risk factors: trauma, lack of of opportunity, isolation, easy access to guns, and retaliation.
Addressing one without the other leaves the root causes untouched.
Equity and Attention Gap
Urban gun violence disproportionately impacts Black and Brown youth, yet receives a fraction of the resources and attention that rare but high-profile school shootings do.
If we care about keeping students safe in classrooms, we must also care about keeping them safe in their neighborhoods and community.
Trauma and Exposure
Students exposed to community violence, even outside of school, show lower attendance, lower test scores, higher disciplinary issues, and higher risk of involvement in violence.
A single homicide in a neighborhood can ripple into classrooms, lowering student outcomes across the entire community.
School Safety Without Community Safety is Incomplete.
It is all connected. Shared risk and protective factors link multiple forms of violence.
Coordinated strategies prevent more than one outcome at once.