Chicagoan Chance the Rapper was presented with the 2014 Youth of the Year award by the Windy City’s Mayor Rahm Emanuel. “You have given of yourself to the upward mobility of young people,” the plaque reads.
With his father Ken Williams-Bennett, the 21-year-old Chance helped to launch #SaveChicago, a campaign to help combat gun violence in the city. The idea was to prevent every murder on Memorial Day weekend. Chance said of his father’s efforts: “All he asked of me was to say something on social media. and so i did ambiguously through tweets that hinted at an album, or a song #MAY23rd.” It worked. There wasn’t one shooting for 42 hours. Unfortunately, two people were shot the very next day, and over the next couple days, three more were killed in shooting across the city.
