MILWAUKEE — Milwaukee County’s Credible Messenger Program is expanding its reach after helping dozens of young people in the city to move away from a path leading to incarceration or death, towards life and freedom.
In addition to including initiatives targeting young girls especially, the program will now include a new response team tasked with bringing in more structure and coordinating ways to tap into resources around things like medical care, food security, and housing faster.
“What makes our conversations strong, full of impact is because we come from their background,” Credible Messenger David Sinclair said. “We build a rapport from our own lived experiences and so we’re able to use empathy in our approach to be able to connect.”
Since the summer of 2021, Milwaukee County’s Department of Health and Human Services began a pilot with five different youth-serving agencies and crisis interventionists focusing on street outreach to target kids in danger of being involved in car thefts, gun use, or group violence.
“We saw an enormous amount of money to lock people up rather than get them the support that they need in the community and the bigger question for us was does a young person have to get in trouble to get help,” DHHS Deputy Director David Muhammad said. “We were very happy with the pilot results.”
In 2022, the program served 105 young people, 77 percent of which have stopped engaging in harmful activity since. As a part of the expansion, on Monday the group also began allowing community members to make referrals for at-risk youth to join the program.
Credible Messenger employs about 30 people, and the response team will have three to four members. Muhammed said he hoped the changes would allow them to expand their caseload to serve 150 kids in total.
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