Former Crain’s publisher joins Arne Duncan’s nonprofit group

David Snyder, who left a post as publisher of Crain’s Chicago Business last year, has taken a job at a nonprofit founded by former Chicago Public Schools chief and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

Snyder, who spent 30 years at Crain’s in Chicago before leaving in a management shakeup at the business journal, will become chief operating officer of Chicago CRED, a job-training and anti-violence organization Duncan founded last year after leaving his cabinet post, the group announced Wednesday.

Snyder will be “the prime point of contact for business leaders” looking to support CRED, the group said in a news release.

“I’ve spent over 30 years observing this fantastic city, and I’m eager to do this work because the troubling spike in gun violence is not only a humanitarian crisis but an economic one,” Snyder said in a statement. “It overshadows all that is great and special about Chicago.”

Duncan launched CRED — which stands for “Create Your Economic Destiny” — to offer job training and life skills to males between 17 and 24 in economically depressed areas of the city, an approach that Duncan has said will steer participants into jobs and entrepreneurship rather than into gangs.

Hyde Park native Duncan was education secretary under frequent pickup basketball partner President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2015, when he left the administration. Last year, he joined the Emerson Collective, a group founded by Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs.