* Background is here if you need it. CBS 2…

Billionaire James Crown, a leader of the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, died Sunday in a car crash at a Colorado race track.

Crown, 70, was killed in a single-vehicle crash at Aspen Motorsports Park in Woody Creek, Colorado, according to the Pitkin County Coroner’s Office.

The cause of the crash is under investigation. The coroner’s office said Crown suffered multiple blunt force trauma, but an official cause of death has not yet been determined, pending an autopsy.

In a statement, Mayor Brandon Johnson said he was “devastated” to learn of Crown’s death.

“A lifelong Chicagoan, Jim gave back to the city through philanthropy and leadership on a number of civic and academic boards as he was deeply committed to investing in Chicago and its people. With his generosity, Jim truly embodied the soul of Chicago. I was especially grateful for his commitment to work collaboratively with my administration to build a safer Chicago, having met recently to share ideas. I send my deepest condolences to his wife, four children, grandchildren, and the entire Crown family and pray for their peace,” Johnson said.

* Crain’s…

In recent months Jim Crown began to raise his civic profile, a role in which his father Lester flourished. In October, he was named to chair a public safety task force established by the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago. […]

Earlier this month, in a story on the committee’s plan, Crown said the group spent many months talking to law enforcement officials, researchers, activists in other cities and both Mayor Brandon Johnson and his acting police superintendent.

“We did a lot of listening,” Crown said. “We think the business community has a lot to bring to this conversation, and we’ve been largely absent.”

A statement provided on behalf of the family said: “The Crown family is deeply saddened by the sudden passing of Jim Crown in an accident earlier today. The family requests that their privacy be respected at this difficult time. Further details regarding plans for a memorial to remember Jim’s remarkable life will be released at a later date.”

* More react…

MK and I were saddened to learn of the passing of our friend Jim Crown. Tremendously civic-minded, Jim was kind, and his passion for caring was unending.

Our hearts are with his family, friends, and the countless Illinoisans and Americans he helped. May his memory be a blessing.

— Governor JB Pritzker (@GovPritzker) June 26, 2023

Today we mourn the passing of Jim Crown, who loved the city of Chicago and committed to helping it grow even greater.

I send my deepest condolences to his family, friends, and all who were touched by him.

— Lt. Governor Juliana Stratton (@LtGovStratton) June 26, 2023

Devastating. Jim had a love for Chicago that was constant & unapologetic. Having the chance to know him and learn from him was a great benefit to me and the void he leaves is bigger than words can explain. Praying for his family and all who knew and loved him. https://t.co/elpSAsMIaK

— Rep.Kam Buckner ✶ ✶ ✶ ✶ (@RepKamBuckner) June 26, 2023

* I interviewed Mr. Crown earlier this month about the Civic Committee’s push to bring all stakeholders together to reduce violent crime in Chicago. I pointed out to him that several private sector anti-violence initiatives had been launched in the past two decades and asked him how he knew that this time would be different. His response…

To be clear and fair to all of us, I think the real phrasing of the question is why would we hope this time is different. We’re just getting started. We’re not claiming right now that we know we’re different, although clearly we aspire to be. I’m unfamiliar with some, not all of those initiatives.

But what our research shows is the following. There has been a lot of good work done in this space over the decades. But it has been fairly isolated. It has been unconnected to other participants in this space. There are a lot of people who are engaged in public safety matters and it sometimes doesn’t have to follow-through for its own reasons. And it could be because it was never a person who was charged with working on it full time. It could be because funding was temporary. It could be frankly because some of those design ideas maybe were not themselves good ideas or good enough ideas to be sustainable.

So what we’re hoping to do here, and one of the big takeaways from our work, has been trying to get the various actors that are participants here all around one table. We keep referring to one table, obviously a metaphor. We’re not all going to be able to all meet at once or have monthly zoom calls or whatever. It will be in segments. But we need the private sector. We need the government. We need the nonprofits. We need the universities, we need the police department and the county and the state and the courts. And everybody’s got a job to do here, it would be better if we could have a common goal, a common vocabulary and a common approach to transparency and accountability as to how we’re doing. And I think those features have been absent from the list you mentioned, although I can’t claim to be expert in all of them.

Please pardon all transcription errors.

* I also asked him what sort of takeaways he’d had from spending time in the city’s most violent communities. His family’s philanthropic group has been active in North Lawndale, so he talked about that and one other recent experience…

I was recently at the North Lawndale employment center. And it was interesting, actually. We were working with this group who said, ‘Okay, what would be helpful is if you would talk to them like you’re going to hire them so they had some feel for what it would be like to go for an interview.’ Because that’s the main thing North Lawndale employment center tries to do is get people into the legal economy. And what you find is you’ve got people who really are incredibly, they are eager to work, they want, it’s usually because they’ve got a kid or ailing parent or something and they want a more reliable source of income, but they are quite scared of what it must be like to go for an interview and be asked these questions and to have on their resume that they’ve been in jail, things like that. And it’s going to take a real mind-set shift for a lot of people to look at people like that and say, ‘Alright, this is a good idea for all of us to hire this person and try and train this person.’ And I do not underestimate how challenging that will be. If we’re trying to do this, with several thousand hires every year icoming out these neighborhoods. So that’s one takeaway.

And the second takeaway is about three, four months ago, I went with Arne Duncan, and he’s a good friend. We’ve supported CRED for a long time. And we went to the Roseland facility, where about three weeks later, somebody was killed, assassinated. The takeaway I had from that visit was you talk to these group leaders, who basically the reason they have credibility is because what they used to do and now they’re trying to be sort of the camp counselors for people coming to the CRED program. And there’s got to be a very short supply of people like that. There are only going to be so many who are available, willing, are from the area such that they have credibility and know what’s going on, but also willing to participate in a program like CRED. And so one of the other things I learned is, we’re going to have a bunch of issues that I refer to as ‘pipeline’ issues. Are we going to have enough social workers, are we going to have enough leaders for programs like CRED, are we going to have enough employers? And so that was one of the other big takeaways.

The man had thought things through after listening to others. That’s not par for the course for most wealthy people, who tend to rely more on their gut feelings and conventional thinking when it comes to areas outside their narrow field of expertise.

* I also asked Crown about the Civic Committee’s goal of convincing business to hire alumni of community violence intervention programs along with providing “wraparound support services”…

Crown: This is going to take some energy and some focus from all of us… It’s mostly young men of color, although there’s certainly women involved there, certainly others. Young men of color, by and large, that’s the community that for multiple doesn’t have a clear pathway into the legal economy, into careers.

We need employers who are willing to reach out and bring them into the legal economy, bring them into employment. But they the workers, or the workers to be, need a huge amount of coaching. If they’ve had no familiarity with how to present themselves in the interview, no ability to organize their lives around how you commute to work, how important it is to show up on time, what it’s like to be well-thought of by an employer so that you can advance. And then other people there to receive them and coach them at the end of a day or a week, where, you know, something happened at work, the boss said something something weird happened at lunch, whatever, you know, they didn’t understand it. You know, they didn’t understand it, instruction, whatever it might be. How do we make sure that they’re supported in a way where they can grow into success, to set them up for success? And employers are going to do only so much training and orienting and so forth. And so these wraparound services will be needed before and after these employment experiences so that they can get the coaching they need to stay on track.

Miller: Okay, so that wraparound support services would then come from somebody affiliated with the Civic committee’s efforts?

Crown: Well, affiliated in the sense that this is where we’re trying to get everybody under the same umbrella. They’re already existing. Plenty of violence interruption groups and community based organizations, I mentioned the North Lawndale Employment Network. There is Heartland Alliance and there’s already a bunch of services that, whether it’s mental health services or food or whatever it is, are there at small scale, but they are present to to help the people in these tough neighborhoods. And they will need to be the ones connected to the employers that will do this outside of work coaching.

* Crown also talked about not just reducing crime, but increasing the quality of life through a “virtuous cycle”…

We would like to see investments of two sorts and one is kind of more particular to private sector. Whether it’s distribution warehouses, for a company like Amazon or just something in the healthcare space where you need a big distribution warehouse for supplies, a call center, like Discover has their back office operations for companies like JP Morgan. There are a number private sector, fairly high headcount activities that could employ a number of people. We would like to see those more of those set up in these tough neighborhoods, so that people can get to work, so that there’s more visibility on what this place is and who goes in there to start a virtuous cycle of more applicants and more people working there.

So that’s the narrower version of this. And then a broader version of this is stores and doctors and supermarkets, and parks, whatever the investments might be that would just lift up the quality of life, raise housing values, raise safety in the neighborhoods. These all would be a virtuous cycle that require the government and require businesses broadly to take a risk on putting a Starbucks or putting a dry cleaner there, or whatever it might be. That would not necessarily be so much about employment, but quality of life.

Discuss.

…Adding… From the Civic Committee…

The Civic Committee and Commercial Club of Chicago are deeply saddened to learn of the tragic and untimely death of our long-time member and civic and business leader James S. Crown over the weekend. Jim embodied the very best qualities of Chicago’s business and civic leadership: generous, wise, thoughtful, and committed. Over the years he and his family have contributed in countless ways to the region’s economic and civic health and vitality. Jim most recently chaired our Public Safety Task Force to help shape a role for the business community in addressing gun violence. We extend our deepest condolences to his wife Paula and their children, his parents Lester and Renee, the entire Crown family, Jim’s many friends and colleagues, and to all of Chicago.

More react is here.

Comptroller Mendoza…

In his prime as a civic, philanthropic and thought leader, Jim Crown has been taken from us too soon. He had so much more to give. He was in the middle of mobilizing Chicago leaders to really listen and explore new approaches to reducing violence and bringing new opportunities to Chicago communities like North Lawndale. With his important work for the Civic Committee, Jim has issued a challenge to the rest of us to pick up the mantle and move Illinois forward. My heart and my prayers go out to his wife, Paula, and his four children. May he rest in God’s peace and eternal glory.