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President Nick began the meeting with the club reciting the Rotary Four Way Test. Justin Sheehan gave the invocation, follow with all signing “America”. Cathy Zell roamed the room to allow visiting Rotarians and guest the opportunity to be introduced. President Nick announced the health of the club with no news to share being good news to all. Club announcements began with Diane Sanborn sharing photos of her trip to Guatemala and how the club’s international grant is being used to further the literacy program in the country. Laurie Baumer announced she will be giving a talk at a luncheon on May 16th on qualifying gifts to the endowment fund. The luncheon will be held at The University Club. Finally, the local grants application period is open now through April 5th, applications can be submitted via the following link: https://rotarycluboflansingfoundation.slideroom.com/#/login/program/77697 . Ben Rathbun, chair of the month and day introduced our speakers Erica and Michael Lynn, Jr. Michael Began his portion of the presentation discussing his background as a lifelong resident of Lansing, has lived throughout the city during his lifetime and has watched how gun violence has affected the youth in our community continually throughout the years, in part as a licensed EMT, as well as being firearms instructor, gun ownership advocate and firearms safety instructor. Currently Michael also serves as the Executive Director of The Village Lansing to address youth gun violence in the community to teach youth responsible gun ownership and handling and the consequences of not following gun safety protocols. As part of this mission The Village Lansing has launched a program called Lansing 360, which aims to address the youth gun violence issue through a holistic community approach modeled after a program he was exposed to called Omaha 360. The Omaha 360 is the model; however Lansing 360 will use this framework to build off, but Lansing 360 will have it’s own approach as they learn what works best for the Lansing community.  Michael believes we need to change the current approach with law enforcement and the community viewing each party in a closed adversarial approach, but rather come together in an open transparent approach to explore how the community including law enforcement can proactively address youth gun violence and how to solve the problem rather than being reactive to the problem when an event occurs. Ideally if you can address directly one on one with a younger person with higher risk factors to commit violent acts with a firearm, such as family members that have committed violent acts or have been victims of violent acts involving a firearm. This will serve to break the cycle of gun violence in our community. Erica Lynn spoke focusing on The Empowerment Network, in which the first initiative is the Lansing 360 program. The Empowerment Network is a big  picture goal for our community to be free, safe and alive. Violence in our community overall should be treated as a public health issue. Erica cited a quote the drives the organizations mission “There comes a time when we need to stop pulling people out of the river, we need to start going up the river to see why people are falling in the river”. The organization believes in letting the people lead the way, through involvement of leaders come from business, philanthropy, and political organizations with The Empowerment Network to serve as a support system to allow all parties to focus resources where they have the most impact on the issue at hand. After many great questions from our club and equally great response to those questions from Michael and Erica. President Nick sent us on our way until we meet next at the holiday social gathering on Thursday, March 21st at Lansing Brewing beginning at 4:30 pm. Email for Tim Adams is: TAdams@manercpa.com |
