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Aligned in the Fight for a Better Kansas City Region
It was fitting on what Ingram’s likes to call the Warmest Day in December that the skies over Kansas City on the morning of Dec. 12 brimmed with sunshine ahead of the 2023 Philanthropy Awards luncheon and the Industry Outlook assembly that preceded it. The assembly brought thirty non-profit executives, business leaders and funders to the table in the Student Union at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. In a two-hour discussion that participants said moved all too quickly, they discussed emerging challenges in their sector, as well as opportunities that are presenting themselves. Co-chaired by Leigh Anne Taylor Knight of The DeBruce Foundation and Terry Dunn of KC Common Good, the discussion covered a wide range of topics, from Kansas City’s seemingly intractable problem with violent crime, thoughts on how non-profits might pursue more innovative strategies to meet their missions, generational differences in giving, recruiting hurdles to leap with a young work force and much more. Most at the table agreed that there is room for further collaboration between non-profits, as well as with the public sector, for-profit business, the volunteer community and others.
First Up: Collaboration
With an opening question about what each attendee would like to see improve in Kansas City, Leigh Anne Taylor Knight kicked things off by calling for an increase in an already impressive level of collaboration between non-profit interests. “We work well together here in Kansas City in the space of maximizing collaboration,” she declared. “I like it, I love it, I want some more of it.”
Commerce Bank’s Charlotte Kemper Black, who oversees the bank’s robust foundation operations, said she “would create more time and space for strategic thinking for non-profit leaders who are out there just trying to get the work done every day. It’s so hard to think about structural change when there’s so much to be done.
Ability KC’s chief executive, Amy Castillo, took note of the many moving parts required for a thriving non-profit ecosystem. She would like to see more strategic thinking, “especially for non-profits—it’s bringing all the different facets of a partnership to the table: The for profits and non-profits, and to think about it as an investment for our city, and not just from a sense of grants and donations.”
Economic conditions—especially those that give rise to social ills—were also of concern. Lindsey Patterson Smith, director of the Patterson Family Foundation, said that “one thing I would change about Kansas City would be the economic division and the two Kansas Citys that we have. That’s one the of the most challenging parts of our story.”
Lisa Fleming, CEO of the Rose Brooks Center, said she thinks about “bringing together a systematic, strategic coordination in response for intervention and prevention and leveraging the resources and expertise in our community for that.”
The issue of violent crime weighed heavily on this assembly, which might be expected given the current state of affairs in Kansas City, Mo.
“One issue that comes to mind is our violent crime,” said Klassie Alcine, chief executive for KC Common Good, which is working with various programs to address root causes of violence and craft strategies that, like the Omaha 360 initiative, have a proven success record. “We’re on pace for the most violent year in our history” with the 2023 homicide count, she said.
Terry Dunn, who founded her organization after a long run leading JE Dunn Construction Co., cast the matter in metro-wide terms, not simply a Kansas City issue: “I believe that a community of 2.2 or 2.3 million people needs to have a moral compass and carry things forward to help those at the greatest risk,” he said.
Jerry Reece, the retired real-estate mogul who is chairman emeritus of the UMKC trustees, suggested a remedy: “We need to lower the crime rate,” he said, “and education will play a huge role in that.”
Indeed, investing more in education, said Julian Zugazagoitia, Director/CEO of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, is paramount. “Not only in Kansas City but nationally,” he said. “If we don’t invest in education at every level, we’re facing problems. We try to do our part at the Nelson-Atkins.”
UMKC’s Kevin Truman, dean of the School of Engineering and Computing, and Amanda Davis, the university’s chief advancement officer, concurred, as did Nicole Ratliff of the Nelson, who has reasons at home to be concerned. “Perhaps because I have twin daughters, education and affordability are key,” she said. “Especially when you think about college and how you prepare for it and what that looks like, and how you can afford that.”
Former UMKC Chancellor Leo Morton, was optimistic that “there is sufficient capacity and willingness in Kansas City to invest in what we need to get started, to ensure that every child has world-class preschool education.”
Linda Woodsmall-DeBruce, who with husband Paul would be receiving Ingram’s Philanthropist of the Year award later in the day, said those responses were good starting points. “I would like to see more meetings like the one we’re in right now,” she said, “so that we all work more closely together and hear from people who are reaching out.”
In-Your-Face Need
With an estimated 37 million Americans living in poverty, and average household income well below what most people consider needed to be comfortable, the need is pervasive, even in the face of a thick social safety net of federal, state and local programs and the works of charitable organizations.
Bob Dunn, the longtime steward of JE Dunn’s foundation and corporate philanthropy, said just that morning, he had seen a family living outside the old Bingham Elementary School in Waldo. “I believe we need more affordable housing; there are a lot of homeless camps around Kansas City, and I can’t imagine what will happen when the temperature drops to zero. We need to address that soon.”
The economic, divide, said Alphapointe’s Jennifer Kraenzle, “is contributing to a lot of things you all said. I also think we’re approaching a mental-health crisis in this community.”
Resolving those issues, and other factors that contribute to crime, including high unemployment and school dropout rates, will require “a lot of collaboration from talented people over time,” said Klassie Alcine. The launch of KC360, modeled after the Omaha program, has already shown positive results in the high-crime Santa Fe neighborhood in east Kansas City.
Violent crime there, she said, was down 78 percent, but it took more than 5,000 hours of community service and participation to drive that change. In addition, she said, “one thing no one is talking about is trust. KC Common Good has been able to increase that trust level 52 percent in neighborhoods that have been disconnected from the community.”
A particularly insidious form of violent crime—domestic abuse—could become an even thornier challenge here. “Those of us in victim services learned last week about a proposal to cut out $4 million of victim-service money” in Jefferson City, said Lisa Fleming. “I will tell you, that will decimate victim services in our community, and these are people at the highest risk of being killed. We need to break the generational cycle of violence.”
The Jobs Lever
While there’s no silver bullet for this roster of social ills, one powerful potential remedy would be more people earning paychecks. To that end, The DeBruce Foundation has developed a robust set of tools to help people assess their own abilities and find potential pathways. It also has worked with KC Common Good and other local partnering non-profits and businesses with the Kauffman Foundation to create the ProX program, bringing at-risk youth into the employment sphere with five-week summer internships.
“We know that there are many youths across the metro area that are not in school, not engaged in working over the summer,” said Leigh Anne Taylor Knight. “We find unique ways for them to have hybrid experiences with some of our businesses so they are not left out. We have seen that with the youths we work with, hundreds so far over the past couple of years, and the impact with them.”
Over the next year, she said, a program that started with 33 teens will serve closer to 1,000. “All the time, we’re thinking every dollar has a job, every entity has a responsibility in this, because that’s what it will take to scale it,” she said.
The challenge, however, will not stop with connecting people to jobs. Once on board, they must be able to perform.
Charlotte Kemper Black cited the case of a recent hire at Commerce Bank who had to have the concept of postage stamps explained. “What we’re hearing from our training program is that they don’t come in with office skills. They don’t know how to do Outlook, things like that.” The focus on creating STEM-level jobs is a noble cause, but Kemper Black said it’s just as important for young workers to acquire interpersonal skills and an understanding of how to operate in a working environment.
Corporate Engagement
At one level, hiring a worker with such a background is a type of corporate engagement. But it can’t stop there, said Terry Dunn.
“What we are seeing and encouraging is a number of businesses to be civically engaged corporate citizens,” he said, a request that will be presented to various chambers of commerce and the Civic Council next year. “We want this to be a large number of companies talking about what is their engagement, what are they giving back and what are they encouraging their employees to do. We need a moral compass that reflects the values we need to have in faith, hope, love, integrity and trust to change this community in a dynamic way.”
Amy Castillo noted that many companies include paid volunteer service for their employees, but advised that such service needs to be aligned with non-profit missions, especially with “the expertise that corporate partners can bring to the table to think about new ways to innovate and deliver those services.”
For Jonathan Mize, fifth-generation owner of a regional hardware distributorship in Atchison, a growing challenge finding workers is substance abuse. “Drugs are the biggest concern for all of us,” he said. “A lot of youth who come to us can’t pass the drug test.”
Relaxed laws on marijuana usage have largely made that a non-issue, but “it’s the severe drugs out there, and that’s a concern for the entire community,” Mize said. Beyond that issue, Blish-Mize’s engagement includes asking all employees to give back, and especially supporting local organizations with time and finances.
In some cases, a call to action is thrust upon business leaders. The spike in violence associated with a growing homeless population around Commerce Bank’s Downtown campus, said Charlotte Kemper Black, had motivated the leadership to engage with neighboring companies to pursue solutions. “We have some great resources, but how do we connect them instead of just doing ad hoc things?” she asked.
Widespread Challenge
Lindsey Patterson Smith, heading a foundation that focuses on the needs of rural communities, said smaller towns outstate are challenged with similar issues, especially the task of finding qualified people who can step up with solutions.
“In a rural community, it’s a smaller pool,” she said. “How do you build a continuum where education, K-12, and business bring awareness to opportunities and make those connections, because there’s a pipeline issue.” Even something as mundane as the retirement of a plumber becomes a civic crisis if he’s the only one in town.
With the right education and preparation, younger workers can step up to fill not only that commercial need, but have the skills to serve on a town’s hospital board, she said. “That whole continuum is how you make a community.”
Linda DeBruce invoked the power of networking skills, and said the foundation was working to address that in multiple ways. “But it’s still hard to find that first path,” she said.
When it comes to connecting workers to careers, said Leigh Anne Taylor Knight, “sometimes it’s just as important to learn what you don’t like to do, so that you don’t pursue two or four more years of education on the wrong track.”
Ted Higgins asked whether corporate engagement included looking inward to the challenges of a company’s own staff. His charitable medical clinic in Haiti, he said, has a therapist on staff who is blind, but still must deal with a line out her door every day.
Many companies, said Terry Dunn, respond to such challenges by outsourcing in-depth engagement for people with issues and challenges. “There is some degree of counseling, but also they encourage usage of that particular benefit. I can’t say that’s every company, but I do know it was very much part of the values and tradition” at JE Dunn.
Corporate engagement, he said, “was really a communal opportunity for businesses to stand up and say we are engaged in our community, we care about our community.” When KC Common Good engaged with urban-core neighborhoods to learn about their biggest challenges, even something as routine in other parts of the city was a potential crisis.
“We found that people who said they were losing a number of people to drugs, murder, and they are being put in containers out there—they can’t even afford to bury them.” The group stepped in to provide a benefit, arranged for funeral homes to provide services, and recruited ministers who could help calm tensions in the case of homicides, to prevent retribution killings.
Innovation’s Promise
What, asked Leigh Anne Taylor Knight, do stake holders need to drive innovation? Almost uniformly, the answer was: Talent and Data.
“We serve older adults, and I would offer to anyone—corporation, foundation or not-for-profit—that we have a giant work force over 65 years old who want to work and have the office skills, the diplomacy, the experience and networking skills, so I would encourage you to look not only at young adults, but this group. You’re not 65 and sitting in a wheelchair from now on.”
Katherine Schorgl, a Local Heroes honoree in part for decades of volunteer work with the Junior League, said she was concerned by a trend related to the talent pool. “In 34 years of volunteering,” she said, “I’ve seen a huge shift in the composition of volunteers; so many things that used to be done by volunteers are now by more and more paid staffers.”
As for data, Baker lamented that only about 2 percent of philanthropic dollars are directed toward the nation’s largest demographic—the elderly. Because of that, “we are forced to look innovatively at different business models,” she said, including a messaging effort to help people understand that, for the cost of a single day of hospitalization, she can provide a hot meal and well checks to a senior for an entire year. “There’s a real business-economic case to be made for partnering with corporations to understand the ROI of keeping people well.”
At JE Dunn, said Bob Dunn, the company’s response to the onset of the 2020 pandemic was to create a strategic plan that would assist non-profits crushed by the loss of fund-raising abilities when galas were shuttered. “That was, I felt, a real boost to the company and the foundation,” he said. “It enabled us to stay connected to non-profits and resume things once the masks were done and people had vaccines.”
He also welcomed the return of face-to-face meetings. “You can pick up, with non-profits as well as donors, things you might not get through a Zoom meeting.”
Other barriers to innovation, said Kevin Truman, are non-profit structures themselves, as he found upon arriving in Kansas City from St. Louis 15 years ago, intent on creating the STEM Alliance. “The biggest issue is that all of them have their own little fiefdoms,” he said. “That creates a situation where they fear that they are going to lose their identity and ability to control things.”
Precious Stargell Cushman, chief impact officer for the United Way, said innovation is sweeping that umbrella funder on multiple levels, including staffing structures that are becoming more diverse. The organization’s 211 referral line touches more than 300,000 individuals, connecting them with services, and its grant-making efforts reach a dozen different areas of need. “Because of the unique space we occupy, we are able to be really responsive to strategic initiatives that pop up,” she said.
Turning to the data challenge-opportunity, Klassie Alcine cited the role that metrics played in Omaha’s crime-fighting success. Unfortunately, she said, “we are the only city with crime this high that does not have a university partner with a research center where we can actually track the data coming from the community and our law-enforcement partners so that we can measure how we are moving the needle. That’s a huge gap, and we feel everyone could get around that.”
Her frustration as a leader is that not only is violence-prevention funding hard to come by, but “at the end of day, it’s not fair for us to keep guessing. A strong university partner would help us streamline and assess what’s not working and what’s working really well, and to keep doing it every year.”
Everyone, said Jennifer Kraenzle, “is struggling with data now. We don’t have the infrastructure to collect the data we need, not only in outcomes, but who are we not serving? How are we going to reach those people? With visual disability, in particular, technology is not a help, it’s a hindrance. I know that big corporate partners know what their data is telling them, where their customers are. Help us use those tools, adapt those tools to fit the models we have.”
Investment in infrastructure, said Janet Baker, would make a critical difference. “But funders don’t want to pay for infrastructure, don’t want to pay for data collection, for marketing to get the word out there, or for staff,” she said. “They want to pay for x-number of meals to be delivered.” She wondered whether that might be an area of corporate partnership where the Shepherd’s Center can acquire a loaned executive with IT and data collection/analytics skills.
Corporate engagement in the region took a hit in recent years, said Bob Dunn, as companies like Sprint, DST and Waddell & Reed were acquired by outside and foreign owners who don’t bring the same commitment to the region.
But he’s encouraged that a younger generation is stepping up. “It’s got to be a top-down and bottom-up effort, for private business especially, he said. “Look around; there are some very generous people at the table, and I’ve seen the impact their giving has had. We need more people to come forward. If you are complaining about crime and all these other things, if you’re not getting involved to solve the problem, then you are the problem.”
Paul DeBruce, bringing the discussion to a close, praised non-profit executives around the table for the increased levels of professionalism he’s seen in the C-suites of charities in the years since he created The DeBruce Foundation back in 1988.
“I don’t think that 10 years ago, a non-profit would have even known what KPIs are,” he said of earlier comments noting the need for non-profit transparency and use of key performance indicators. “I found that to be a positive statement, recognizing that you have to be responsible” in leadership roles.
