Community Solutions: Importing success to Kansas City from Omaha
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The Kansas City metro is in a middle of a fight to get its residents to stop fighting.
One-hundred and eighty-two homicides in 2023 set a new record, with 58 through April 29, 2023. In 2024, Kansas City has 45 homicides so far with the most recent one happening at 8:30 Monday morning.
In the last month, shootings killed a handful of children in the community, sparking even more outrage.
That’s the environment that KC Common Good has launched its KC 360 model into, trying to bring together a comprehensive group of people, organizations, and government entities to address the complicated web of underlying causes of violent crime.
It’s based on a similar program in Nebraska called Omaha 360 from the Omaha Empowerment Network that has been doing the same work for 17 years while helping drive down the amount of violent crime.
Those relatively sunny feelings about safety in Omaha have come after a long and challenging storm of violence when Ben Gray was a city councilmember in Omaha.
Omaha 360 leaders take KC 360 around Omaha on a trolly tour to see where investment in job training and brick and mortar construction has helped reduce violent crime in Omaha. Omaha Police representatives present during an Omaha 360 meeting, sharing information about what has happened in the community and gathering information from gang out reach coordinators. KC 360 learns about job training programs at Metropolitan Community College and Omaha. Those programs were expanded with funding from Omaha 360 to help more people get trained to expand their career opportunities. The Malcolm X Memorial Foundation President Leo Louis II shows KC 360 part of the 17 acres where the Foundation will develop open land to better serve the community and educate visitors about Malcolm X.
“The thing that got us started was we had 31 shootings in 31 days in July,” Gray said. “We couldn’t have that.”
Around the same time, Willie Barney was starting up the Empowerment Network with the Omaha 360 violence intervention collaborative under its umbrella.
“We just said, ‘There’s no way we can ignore the level of gun violence that was heading to an all time high,” said Barney.
It’s expensive work, requiring hundreds of millions of dollars in fundraising every year from public, private, business, and philanthropic sources to support existing work or try new approaches to address issues that drive people to crime.
“So many cities will look at the police department, ‘What are you doing about it,” said Omaha Police Chief Todd Schmaderer. “What’s happening here is, yes the police department is doing everything we can about it but so is everybody else. Every body else is taking a piece of that pie as well and owning it.”
KC 360 leaders went to Omaha in early April, visiting Metropolitan Community College in Omaha where $100 million from the business and philanthropic community helped expand the MCC’s training offerings.
High school students can get college credit for free before they graduate high school, giving them direction and a head start.
“We recognized what they wanted was jobs and that’s what we did,” said Gray.
19-year-old Marcus Payne says programs like that make a difference for his generation.
“For the younger people, it’s actually a good idea from my perspective,” Payne said. “Somebody’s trying to help you, you’re not alone.”
The massive investment has also sent hundreds of millions of dollars towards brick and mortar construction that can lift up entire neighborhoods.
“The common theme of Omaha has all been around place-based strategies, collaboratively, over time,” said KC Common Good CEO Klassie Alcine.
That’s why she was impressed by a $200 million development on what used to be one of the most dangerous street corners in Omaha. Omaha 360 organizations bought up the land, opening the door for private developers to eventually take over, creating hundreds of units of mixed-income housing, community space, and other benefits.
“It’s very emotional because you see kids outside and when you walk some of the neighborhoods we walk in our own city, you don’t see that,” Alcine said. “You don’t see kids playing in parks, you don’t see kids walking down the street.”
A few blocks away, The Malcolm X Memorial Foundation got $20 million to help build out 17 acres around where Malcolm X once lived into a community space with performance venues, housing, historic markets, and places for educational experiences.
Similar work on a much smaller scale has already started in Kansas City. KC 360 has worked in the Santa Fe neighborhood, investing more than $3.5 million since 2022, trying to drive down shootings while building up community.
“When you build that trust, it allows other neighborhoods to see, that’s an example, progress can happen, what if we could do this on a massive level,” Alcine said.
KC 360 is still working out other locations and communities to focus on, likely looking at the corridor along Prospect Avenue near the Santa Fe Neighborhood.
