Credible Messengers: Meet Breakthrough Violence Prevention Outreach Worker Kaja Cook

“Credible Messengers” passes the mic to the people leading Community Violence Intervention (CVI) work in Chicago. From insights on how they got into the work to the future they envision for our city, they share their lived experiences and how they’re fostering change in their communities.

Meet Kaja Cook, a Violence Prevention Outreach Worker at Breakthrough, who’s made it her mission to be part of the solution to reducing gun violence in Chicago’s Garfield Park neighborhood. Press play to learn more about her journey, how she’s directly impacting her participants, and her vision for the future of CVI.

“To be honest, I was always kind of involved with CVI without knowing that’s what I was doing. I was always trying to talk with friends and people that I knew, advocating for change and trying to get them to do something different, but I didn’t really realize that was CVI work.”

“[My participant] has achieved all these things and literally checked off everything on the list that he had been working on. I’m proud to say that he thought first to talk to me about what he was thinking about doing, and we were probably able to change the course of his future because now he’s in his warm apartment when he might’ve ended up in the county jail.”

“I feel like when you provide people with equitable access to care, equitable access to the things that they need, that they tend to do a great job sustaining that, right? So, I feel like the Chicago that I want to see is a bunch of people who have equitable access and that they’re able to use that access to reach all the goals that they want to reach.”

“ I feel like now I see a lot more opportunities for teenagers. I see teenage sports leagues, I see teenage dance clubs, I see a lot of employment for teenagers. […] I know that makes a huge difference, I see that in teenagers that are a part of the programs at Breakthrough. I know that offering opportunities to teenagers changes the course of their lives. When teenagers have nothing to do, they will find the wrong thing to do.”

“I believe that in violence prevention outreach work, our job is to try to make our job unnecessary. I want to make it so that what I do is no longer needed because everybody already has what they need.”

Learn more about Kaja’s work at Breakthough here.