Community blueprint credited with steep drops in Kalamazoo homicides; presenters caution correlation, not causation

Dr. Kana Ferguson, executive director of Michigan Transformation Collective, told the Kalamazoo County Board of Commissioners on June 16 that the community-led "Blueprint for Peace" coordinates prevention, healing and intervention efforts across organizations and public agencies.

Ferguson described a coordinating council, working groups for the blueprint’s goals and about 120 implementation partners in the ecosystem. She said the program has trained and certified community violence intervention (CVI) workers through a certificate program at KVCC and is building a hospital-based violence intervention program in partnership with local health providers, Griffin Place and community partners.

On outcomes, Ferguson presented KDPS-supplied counts showing homicides fell from 22 in 2023 to 10 in 2024 and to seven in 2025. She stressed the data show correlation, not causation: "No one program deserves the sole credit for this trend," she said, and attributed improvements to sustained, coordinated activity across many organizations.

Commissioners questioned whether the data covered the city or the county; Ferguson said the figures she cited are for the city of Kalamazoo and said the blueprint is expanding systems, data sharing and county partnerships to increase regional coverage. She and commissioners discussed building evaluation capacity, sustaining funding and expanding data-sharing agreements to capture countywide incidents.

Ferguson said the blueprint prioritizes both upstream investments (child care, transportation, housing access) and downstream coordinated interventions, and that the work is continuing to build measurement and funding infrastructure to support longer-term evaluation.