Spring Journal 2023

MANY HANDS BEHIND a WELCOME

How civic, religious and nonprofit leaders have united around the common purpose of resettling Afghan refugees in Manhattan.

THE JOURNAL

(Print edition: ISSN 2328-4366; Online edition: ISSN 2328-4374) is published quarterly by the Kansas Leadership Center, which receives core funding from the Kansas Health Foundation.

The Kansas Leadership Center (KLC) equips people with any title or role to lead and engage others. Founded in 2007, KLC is a first-of-its-kind nonprofit educational organization with a civic mission, national reputation and global reach.

KLC MISSION

To foster civic leadership for stronger, healthier and more prosperous Kansas communities.

KLC VISION

To be the center of excellence for leadership development and civic engagement.

THE JOURNAL’S ROLE

To build a healthy 21st Century public square for all to lead.

KANSAS LEADERSHIP CENTER

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

David Lindstrom, Overland Park (Chair)

Kaye Monk-Morgan, Wichita (President & CEO)

Jill Arensdorf, Hays

Tracey Beverlin, Pratt

Gennifer Golden House, Goodland

Ron Holt, Wichita

Karen Humphreys, Wichita

Susan Kang, Lawrence

Mary Lou Jaramillo, Merriam

Peter F. Nájera, Wichita

Patrick Rossol-Allison, Seattle, Washington

Frank York, Ashland

WEB EDITION klcjournal.com

SUBSCRIPTIONS

Annual subscriptions available at klcjr.nl/subscribenow ($24.95 for three issues). Single issues available for $16 at kansasleadershipcenter.org/klcstore.

CHANGE OF ADDRESS

Update contact information at klcjr.nl/register.

KANSAS LEADERSHIP CENTER

325 East Douglas Avenue Wichita, KS 67202 www.kansasleadershipcenter.org

EXECUTIVE EDITOR

Chris Green

316.712.4945

cgreen@kansasleadershipcenter.org

JOURNAL ENGAGEMENT MANAGER

Maren Berblinger

316.462.9963

mberblinger@kansasleadershipcenter.org

CIVIC ENGAGEMENT REPORTER

Stefania Lugli

316.261.1582

slugli@kansasleadershipcenter.org

COMMUNICATIONS STAFF

Sam Smith, Director of Communications

Cindy Kelly, Communications Manager

Julian Montes, Creative Services Manager

WHEN EVERYONE LEADS PODCAST

Chris Green, Co-host

Brianna Griffin, Co-host/Lead Producer

Maren Berblinger, Producer

Julian Montes, Studio Engineer/Producer

Neha Batawala, Producer/Social Media

Listen at: when-everyone-leads-the-podcast.castos.com

GROWTH & STRATEGY

Chris Harris, Senior Director

CIVIC ENGAGEMENT STAFF

Shaun Rojas, Senior Director of Civic Engagement

Dennis Clary, Director of Custom Civic Engagement

Racquel Thiesen, Director of Community Partnerships

Lucy Petroucheva, Civic Engagement Manager

Camille Scott, Program Associate

ART DIRECTION + DESIGN

Craig Lindeman lindemancollective.com

PHOTOGRAPHY

Jeff Tuttle Photography 316.706.8529 jefftuttlephotography.com

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

Stan Finger, P.J. Griekspoor

Kim Gronniger, Jerry LaMartina

Joel Mathis, Mark McCormick, Amanda Vega-Mavec, Dawn Bormann Novascone, Michael Pearce, Barbara Shelly, Mike Sherry, Beccy Tanner

Keith Tatum, Claudia Yaujar-Amaro

Mark Wiebe

COPY EDITORS

Bruce Janssen, Shannon Littlejohn, Laura Roddy

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Kylie Cameron, AJ Dome

CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

Dave Kaup

KAYE MONK-MORGAN

President and CEO

A third-generation Kansan, Kaye began her tenure as KLC’s president and CEO on March 6. A part of her role is serving as the publisher of The Journal.

Previously KLC’s inaugural chief impact officer, Kaye worked for more than 30 years in higher education, including serving as the vice president for strategic engagement and planning at Wichita State University. Her degrees include a Bachelor of Chemistry/business, a Master of Arts in public administration and a doctorate in educational leadership.

She lives with her husband, Derek, in Wichita, where her two adult sons, Payton and Cameron, are also based.

AJ DOME

Contributing Writer

A native of southwest Kansas, AJ is an awardwinning journalist with experience in radio, television, and newspapers. He’s currently a reporter for The Manhattan Mercury. A published poet and an amateur storm chaser, AJ is co-writing a book about the destructive Greensburg EF-5 tornado.

“I was really lucky to have amazing high school teachers who believed in my talents and capabilities. They’re the reason I’ve stuck with a career in writing and journalism.”

2.

KYLIE CAMERON

Contributing Writer

Kylie is a Wichita-based journalist for the local NPR affiliate, KMUW 89.1. She previously worked for Wichita State’s student newspaper, The Sunflower, as its editor and briefly in TV news. At KMUW, she covers the Wichita City Council, Fairmount neighborhood development and other topics.

Outside of the newsroom, Cameron also teaches Media and Politics at Wichita State University as an adjunct professor.

Letting loss speak

It’s funny how something that is superficially a given can, in reality, be quite fluid.

Something like a leadership curriculum, for instance. It might seem etched in stone. But it really represents an ongoing conversation shaped by research, analysis, discussions, debates and thoughtful choices.

A few years ago, the Kansas Leadership Center launched a curriculum renewal process wherein teachers and staff identified potential changes to its leadership principles and competencies. You might not have noticed. The shifts were subtle.

“Speak to the heart” became “speak from the heart to the heart,” because it better captured the essence of the skill. “Engage unusual voices” became “engage new voices,” to eliminate an offputting word.

Lately I’ve been thinking about a proposed change that didn’t get adopted. It’s come to mind as I’ve joined other staff members at KLC in reckoning with the sudden death of our co-worker Thane Chastain. Thane, a decade-long fixture at our office, died in his sleep at the age of 62 in late February. In addition to being a technology guru, he thought deeply about KLC’s leadership ideas and worked to live them.

During the curriculum discussions, Thane championed a reframing of the concept of “speaking to loss.” The idea resonates with many participants in KLC programs. But even though acknowledging loss is crucial for leading, it’s also challenging.

Wouldn’t it be better sometimes, Thane proposed, to simply let loss speak? The rephrasing suggested that conversations about loss are not a box to be checked. They have to come from a place of empathy and compassion. People must work through the process of absorbing loss in different ways and often at different speeds.

In the weeks since Thane’s death, the idea of letting loss speak has taken on new significance for me. I’ve realized that no one can say the right thing to help me move on. There’s no one moment where grief or confusion alleviates.

What’s helped is that there’s been a process to let loss speak. I’ve been able to gather with my co-workers to laugh and cry together. I attended a visitation. Celebrated Thane’s life with his family and his many friends. Each moment allows loss to speak a little more.

To its credit, KLC is an exceptionally supportive place to grieve. What’s heartbreaking is how well-practiced we are becoming at it. The death of Thomas Stanley, a co-worker who died in 2019, still stings. Our family has lost Steve Coen and Reggie Robinson, both of whom championed our organization while leading our chief funder, the Kansas Health Foundation.

Less visible is the incessant drumbeat of loss that periodically touches us all. Loved ones of staff members – mothers, fathers, nephews, grandparents, cousins, mentors – have passed away over the years. Some of us lost treasured pets. A few grappled with private losses even as they mourned Thane in public.

Though losses are inescapable, many groups and organizations still struggle to deal with them communally. The tendency to make grief a burden to be shouldered privately is hard to shake. We also fall into the trap of comparing our grief, succumbing to the notion that the loss we’ve experienced isn’t significant enough to be recognized.

We should be reassured that, over the course of 300,000 years, humankind has developed powerful rituals to help us mourn. As hard as death is to grapple with, there’s a process to stabilize the shaky ground beneath our feet.

But what of less visible losses than death? They are unavoidable in making progress on adaptive challenges. We don’t, it seems, have time-tested ways of attending to that sort of grief. Just being able to recognize losses remains a stretch for many of us. Knowing how to work through them often remains a bridge too far.

It’s OK to not know how to speak to loss in such difficult moments. It might be enough to just let loss speak.

LETTER FROM THE EXECUTIVE EDITOR CHRIS GREEN

CHRIS GREEN

A SHOCKING DEATH PROMPTS INTROSPECTION ABOUT GRIEVING WITH OTHERS.

“IS TORNADO ALLEY DYING?”

The question has been whispered – and then asked aloud – after years of remarkably low tornado numbers in the Great Plains.

“It’s a question worth asking,” says Grady Dixon, dean of the Werth College of Science, Technology and Mathematics at Fort Hays State University.

Some are already offering opinions. In a special program last year commemorating the 15th anniversary of the devastating tornado that nearly scoured the central Kansas town of Greensburg off the map in 2007, Wichita’s ABC affiliate referred to Tornado Alley in the past tense.

Only Texas averages more tornadoes per year than Kansas, according to data gathered

“I think you can definitely see that we’re in a pattern of change right now,” Butler County Emergency Management Director Keri Korthals says. “Whether you want to get into that political hotbed of ‘Is it global warming? Is it climate change?’ Or do you want to just say, ‘What’s our trend right now? What do we have to be ready for?’”

The term "Tornado Alley" was never meant to be used or taken seriously by the general public, Dixon says. It came into use in 1952, when two Air Force meteorologists used it in the title of their research into severe weather in the Midwest. “That was really for tornado scientists, to identify a place in the country where tornadoes were predictable, visible and traceable” for the sake of conducting research, he says.

The Great Plains is ideal for that, he says, because peak tornado season in Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas is May and June. The flat terrain and robust roadway infrastructure in those states makes

PLOT TWISTER

IS TORNADO ALLEY STILL A THING? THAT’S A QUESTION THAT HAS FOLLOWED A RECENT LULL IN KANSAS TWISTERS. THE DECLINE MAY ONLY BE TEMPORARY, AND IT DOESN’T MEAN THAT KANSANS DON’T NEED TO HEED ALERTS ABOUT SEVERE WEATHER. BUT THEY MIGHT NEED TO START PAYING MORE ATTENTION TO FLOODING, WHICH KILLS FAR MORE PEOPLE EACH YEAR THAN TORNADOES, AND IS ON THE RISE.

BY: STAN FINGER

by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Over the past 30 years, Kansas has averaged 86 tornadoes a year. But since 2010, the Sunflower State has reached or exceeded that number just four times.

There were 37 tornadoes in 2021, only 17 in 2020 and 45 in 2018. Even taking into account the EF3 tornado that struck Andover last April, 2022 was quieter than normal for tornadoes, says Jeff Hutton, who served as warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service branch in Dodge City until retiring in December. There were 63 tornadoes across the Sunflower State last year, well below the 30-year average.

tornadoes easy to see and track. The jet stream slows down in late spring and early summer, meaning tornadoes that form will typically be moving slower than they do earlier in the year.

“The idea was, ‘If you want to go see these tornadoes and learn more about why they have formed, you’ve got to go to this Tornado Alley,’” Dixon says. “And it was catchy. It was too catchy.”

Kansas already had a strong cultural connection to tornadoes thanks to “The Wizard of Oz” – after all, Dorothy is transported to Oz by a tornado – and that identity was cemented after “Twister” came out in 1996. (A sequel is planned for release next year.) The movie triggered an

Commercial weather forecaster AccuWeather predicts 1,055 to 1,200 twisters will actually reach the ground in the U.S. over the course of 2023. Because the drought in western Kansas is ongoing, there is a bit of "good" news: Fewer thunderstorms than usual are likely to develop, and along with that, fewer tornadoes. Courtesy of Shannon McPartland

explosion of interest in storm chasing, launched a new industry – tornado-chasing tours, drawing people from around the world who are willing to pay thousands of dollars for the chance to see tornadoes up close – and spawned numerous cable television programs focusing on various chasers. Viewers everywhere saw chasers pursuing tornadoes around the Sunflower State.

“Everybody thinks they have their own microTornado Alley in their county, which is completely ridiculous,” Dixon says.

VULNERABILITY IN THE SOUTH, SOUTHEAST

As the new century approached, however, researchers began to recognize that areas east of the Great Plains had a much higher tornado risk.

“That word is pretty fraught and complicated, but … the odds of an individual citizen being impacted by a tornado were much greater in the eastern and southeastern part of the United States than we had ever considered before,” Dixon says.

The risks are higher, he says, because tornadoes are happening there more often than previously thought and they’re happening early in the calendar year, when the speed of the jet stream means tornadoes could easily be moving 50 to 70 miles an hour.

“These tornadoes that happen in north Alabama, if they are on the ground for 10 minutes, they’re probably going to travel 12 to 15 miles,” Dixon says, “where in Kansas, if you get a tornado for 10 minutes (later in the spring) it might travel a couple hundred yards. The footprint of the southeastern tornadoes was much greater.”

Residents in the South and Southeast are more vulnerable to bad outcomes because those tornadoes have a tendency to strike after dark, he says. Those areas also have far more people living in mobile homes and on terrain so hilly and filled with trees a tornado may not be visible until it’s very close.

Researchers have also done some important reevaluation, Dixon says.

“Looking back through our data, we think we’ve been having a lot of tornadoes in the Southeast, back to the ’70s or before,” he says. “We just were doing a bad job of documenting them. Because all research prior to that time had just counted tornado initiation points. They weren’t looking at the full path lengths of the tornadoes.”

A fresh example of Dixon’s point occurred on March 24, when a wedge tornado traveled 59 miles in Mississippi, decimating a small town and killing 26 people. A damage survey by the National Weather Service revealed the tornado was up to

about three-quarters of a mile wide, was on the ground for about 70 minutes, and had maximum winds of 170 miles an hour, measuring EF4 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale.

he says. But they still deliver rain, sometimes resembling monsoons.

IS TORNADO ALLEY DYING?

Flooding kills far more people every year than tornadoes.

The lull might only be temporary, but tornadoes have been occurring less frequently in Kansas.

Yet danger from severe weather, especially flooding, remains.

At the same time researchers were discovering the Southeast was more prone to tornadoes than previously recognized, they noted a decline in the number of tornado days in the Great Plains – particularly the southern Plains. On the days tornadoes occurred, however, the number of twisters was higher.

“It was a feast-or-famine kind of thing,” Dixon says.

THE DANGERS OF FLOODING

While the number of tornadoes has diminished in the Sunflower State in recent years, the number of rain events has not. Those thunderstorms haven’t produced tornadoes primarily due to “a timing issue,” Hutton says.

The storms haven’t moved through when moisture and instability are ideal for spawning tornadoes,

“We do see a trend of people, when we’ve got a heavy rain event coming in, of just doing the ‘Oh, it’s just rain,’” Korthals says. “And they don’t really think, ‘I need to have the same level of alertness as if it was severe thunderstorms or especially a tornado-conducive environment.’”

People should take rain events and flooding threats more seriously, Hutton said, because floods kill far more people every year than tornadoes, hurricanes or lightning. And flood deaths are climbing too.

“We’re still getting way too many flooding fatalities” around the country, Hutton says. Those numbers “are actually increasing exponentially.”

Since 2000 and especially within the last decade or so, he adds, “We’ve got so many SUVs, fourwheel drive, all-wheel drive vehicles … and people think ‘Wow, now I have 21-inch tires and I can drive through that.’”

More deaths occur from flooding than any other thunderstorm-related hazard, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Flooding along the Walnut River and Grouse Creek in 2022 in Cowley County led to several road closures. Photo by Jeff Tuttle

They don’t realize how little water it takes to sweep even large vehicles, such as buses and semitractor-trailers, off of a road, he says.

Urban flooding is a growing problem thanks to aging drainage systems, the rapid expansion of asphalt and concrete surface areas, and the resulting “heat island effect,” says meteorologist Kenneth Cook, who’s in charge of the Wichita branch of the National Weather Service.

“There’s more average rainfall around urban centers than there used to be,” Cook says. “That’s pretty widely agreed upon” among weather officials and researchers. “That could be from urban heat islands,” which are domes of heightened temperatures caused by the reflection of the sun’s heat off of concrete and asphalt.

In recent years, Cook says, many cities have seen their average annual rainfall increase by an inch or two. That increased rain results in more runoff into drainage systems built for much smaller population centers, and it’s a recipe for flooding.

“We’re seeing flooding in places we haven’t before, and water levels higher than they’ve been” where flooding has historically occurred, Korthals says.

“I don’t know what the answer is ever going to be” to get people to take the dangers of flooding more seriously, Hutton says.

In his annual severe weather awareness presentations – which for years were known as storm spotter training classes held early in the year to prepare people for tornado season –Hutton says he has made flooding the threat he focuses on first, offering illustrations of just how dangerous it is. By focusing on the impact flooding can have, he says, he hopes the message better reaches his audiences.

Flooding in Kentucky last summer killed at least 39 people and left thousands homeless, and heavy rains in California in January prompted widespread flooding and evacuation orders. Such events serve as a real-world reminder of how quickly flooding can threaten – and take – lives, Korthals says.

Advancements in technology could help address that, says Kim Klockow-McClain, a research scientist for the Behavioral Insights Unit at the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma.

Researchers are already looking for ways to use GPS to plot multiple vehicles on maps overlaid with flood warnings and make those maps available to app users so motorists could be made aware of flooding threats before they come upon them, she says.

Such flood warning apps “are more complicated because we’re not just talking about a single point – like a storm coming at you,” she says. “You’re looking at something where it’s all this area around you, or water could be rising around you and you don’t know where it is.”

Thunderstorms with the capability of producing tornadoes are easier to observe because radar can readily detect their presence, she says. Flooding is something else, though.

“We don’t have water gauges on every point on the land surface … so we don’t have the ability to tell people where flooding is occurring with any precision. What we’re seeing is: People don’t know that they’re going to drive up on a flooded road until they’re upon it.”

At that point, Klockow-McClain says, there are two major problems:

1. People are “really motivated” to get where they’re going, so they may well risk driving through that flooded road to get home or pick up their children from school or practice. If they need to reroute, they needed to be planning for that an hour earlier.

2. If drivers turn around, they don’t know if it’s going to be any safer because they don’t know where the water in front of them came from. They can just as easily have water behind them or on the alternate route they’re planning to use.

The answer has to be providing people with the information they need far enough ahead of time to avoid getting into those conundrums in the first place, she says.

“It’s a complicated decision scenario that you find yourself in and you don’t have, necessarily, easy solutions. We encounter water on the road all the time. And if we want to do better at this, we really do need better detection technologies like what they’re trying to develop for cars.”

The technology being developed would allow “smart cards” in vehicles to communicate with one another to alert others to flooding.

“Imagine having a map display on your computer or on your dash, where if there are cars around you that are getting stuck in water, or having to go through like some high level of water, the sensors can detect that you’re going through that. If you were able to see that on a map, and it’s up ahead of you, imagine what you could do. You could look at that and say, ‘Route me somewhere else.’”

With more sensors in and near streams and floodplains, she says, emergency managers could start to take steps such as having warning signage

“I think you can definitely see that we’re in a pattern of change right now,” says Butler County Emergency Management Director Keri Korthals. She sees the need for Kansans to be prepared to meet new trends in Kansas weather. Photo by Jeff Tuttle

Longtime Kansans have a reputation for nonchalance when it comes to tornadoes, but the presence of one in the neighborhood — in this case near 143rd Street and Kellogg Avenue in Wichita in April 2022 — still catches their attention. Courtesy of Shannon McPartland

alerting motorists and perhaps even closing roads ahead of time.

For example, the Kansas Turnpike Authority installed larger drainage culverts and warning signs at mile markers 116 and 118 south of Emporia, where deaths occurred 15 years apart. Six people – including five members of one family – died in a flash flood along Jacob Creek at mile marker 116 over Labor Day weekend in 2003. Torrential rains caused water to rise and cover the turnpike after sunset on that Saturday. A number of vehicles became stranded in the water and were swept away by a wall of water estimated to be more than six feet high.

One person died in 2018 two miles away when his vehicle hydroplaned off the turnpike after hitting standing water and went into the ditch, where surging floodwaters sucked his vehicle into a culvert.

Korthals says she agrees that more sensors are needed in flood-prone areas, and Butler County has requested additional sensors from the weather service. Such requests are on something

In 1998, flooding swamped south central and southeast Kansas after nearly 11 inches of rain fell in some locales. Augusta, above, was particularly hard hit. More than 550 homes, 200 mobile homes and 100 businesses were damaged. In the 12 counties that sustained damage, losses were put at more than $30 million, according to the National Weather Service.

of a wish list for emergency managers, she says, waiting for additional federal funding.

A few years ago, the National Weather Service moved to the Wireless Emergency Alert system to issue flash flood warnings. It’s a public safety system that allows customers who own compatible mobile devices to receive geographically targeted text messages alerting them to imminent threats to safety in their area.

Chance Hayes, warning coordination meteorologist for the Wichita branch of the weather service, says officials there have been pleased with how the alert system has worked.

But there are limitations: Participation in the system by service providers is voluntary, and not every device offered by a provider has the capability of receiving the alerts. That creates the potential for one person to receive an alert and someone standing right next to them not getting it – simply because they use different providers or have different phones.

People who want to receive those public safety alerts should check to see if their provider participates and their phone is able to receive them, Hutton says.

There’s room for improvement in tornado forecasts as well, officials say.

According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, tornado forecast accuracy has fallen from 75% in 2011 to 62% in 2021 – a decline of more than 17%. Several times in that period, the accuracy rate dipped into the 50s.

Those statistics are misleading, says Mike Muccilli, acting severe program manager for the National Weather Service. The weather service separates longer track, stronger tornadoes – typically classified at EF2/EF3 and stronger on the Enhanced Fujita Scale – from weaker, short-lived tornadoes. Tornadoes that have winds of at least 136 miles an hour are classified as EF3 on a scale that goes up to EF5, a classification given to tornadoes with winds of more than 200 miles an hour.

“The National Weather Service is exceedingly successful in warning for these EF3-plus tornadoes and has either maintained or improved year over year in both probability of detection (accuracy) and lead time,” Muccilli says. “We have seen a decline in deadly tornadoes given the increased warning success and lead time for these stronger tornadoes.”

The probability of detection for tornadoes rated EF3 or higher from 2017 to 2021 ranged between 91% and 96%, Muccilli says. The lead time for these same years for EF3-plus tornadoes increased from 16.3 minutes to 20.2 minutes. The false alarm rate, meanwhile, has continued to drop and meets desired metrics, he says.

“The largely short-lived, low-end tornadoes do still remain a challenge, and statistics do show a relative plateau in both lead time and probability of detection for these,” Muccilli says.

There are naturally many more of the weaker, brief tornadoes, he says, and “every tornado is assumed to be life-threatening, even the ones that are hard to detect.”

But there are disagreements about how much lead time people need in advance of tornadoes, and whether earlier warnings are needed or even helpful.

Peer-reviewed research shows that the ideal tornado warning gives those in harm’s way 13 to 15 minutes to get to shelter, according to Mike Smith, a meteorologist who worked at Wichita’s NBC-TV affiliate for many years before leaving to establish WeatherData, a private forecasting service that has since been acquired by AccuWeather. Beyond 15 minutes, data shows, fatalities increase.

“That is counterintuitive,” Smith says. “But if you think about it, it only takes 30 seconds to gather up the kids and run into the basement. If you’ve got a storm shelter in your garage as some people do, or a safe room, that might take a-minute-and -a-half, two minutes. If you’re using a bathroom tub in the middle of the house, that may take three or four minutes to get everybody in the bathroom and a mattress into the bathroom. There’s really nothing that takes more than three, four minutes, if you’re home.”

Researchers are concerned current warnings don’t provide enough time for those who don’t have adequate sheltering options or have significant mobility issues. It could also include those who are picking their children up from school, Klockow-McClain says. Schools in Kansas commonly have tornado shelters, but that’s not always the case elsewhere.

“We know that there are some people – it tends to be the most vulnerable of our society – that lack that access to really good sheltering options,” Klockow-McClain says.

Current warning lead times aren’t sufficient for those vulnerable populations to get to proper shelter elsewhere, she says. She would like to see technology advance to where meteorologists could issue something in between a watch and vulnerable populations would have time to get somewhere safer.

Smith says he recoils at suggestions more layers are needed in the warning system, which he

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Photo by Jeff Tuttle

considers to already be too complicated and confusing – for meteorologists and the public alike.

“The whole purpose of the tornado watch is to give you advance notice so that you’ll be in a relatively good place when the tornadic thunderstorms arrive,” Smith says. “We have neither the science nor the technology to do accurate one-hour tornado warnings. That’s a fact. I don’t think we should try to get there. But if we wanted to try to get there, it would take a denser weather observation network than we have now.”

While the number of tornadoes and tornado days in Kansas and the Great Plains has declined over the past decade or so, Hutton and other officials aren’t ready to write Tornado Alley’s epitaph just yet.

“This sounds really, really familiar to a big old conversation that blew up around 1989 and 1990, that the central states are no longer Tornado Alley” because of a notable decrease in tornadoes over the previous several years, Korthals says. “Then, all of a sudden, we have the years of tornadoes, 1990 and 1991. ‘Oh, thank you, Mother Nature for clarifying that. We don’t know what we’re talking about.’”

Those two years saw a massive surge in tornadoes, including deadly EF5s that struck Hesston in 1990 and Andover in 1991.

This recent quiet spell for tornadoes may lure Kansans into a false sense of security, Hutton says.

DISCUSSION GUIDE

1. How could the declining number of tornadoes affect perceptions of severe weather threats? What might make this an adaptive challenge?

2. What threats concern you the most in your own context? How do you know which threats represent the biggest danger?

“We’re going to catch one of the really, really bad years that Wichita’s going to get hit or Hutchinson or Topeka,” he says. “Some big metropolitan area’s going to get nailed eventually.”

While significant tornado outbreaks have at times prompted concerns that “this is the new normal” because of climate change, Hutton and other weather officials say research has found no meaningful connection between global warming and tornado development.

“Regardless of if we have global warming or not, there’s no evidence whatsoever” of such a link, Hutton says. “You can’t prove that it’s increasing or decreasing.”

Perhaps the most significant reason for that, he says, is that climate is a big-picture view of the weather that typically spans 30 years at a minimum, he says – and the formation of tornadoes is dependent on conditions being just right at a particular moment in time. That’s why persistent stories claiming global warming is driving increases in the number and intensity of hurricanes and tornadoes make him want to pull his hair out, Hutton says.

“It’s the most frustrating thing I’ve dealt with in my 39 years of forecasting weather,” he says.

While some types of extreme weather, such as heavy rainfall or extreme heat, can be directly attributed to global warming, “the role of climate change in altering the frequency of the types of severe weather most typically associated with the southern Great Plains, such as severe local storms, hailstorms and tornadoes, remains difficult to quantify,” according to the Fourth National Climate Assessment report from 2018.

Data over the last 30 years indeed shows the number of violent tornadoes is decreasing. The number of outbreaks isn’t increasing, either. Yet, rather than consigning Tornado Alley to the dusty pages of history, Hutton says, Kansans should simply be grateful for this relatively quiet stretch. It won’t last – Tornado Alley will one day reawaken.

“It’s going to come back,” Hutton says. “There’s no reason why it won’t.”

April 26, 1991, turned out to be a deadly day in Kansas after supercells developed in Oklahoma and moved northeast. Altogether 55 tornadoes formed that day. The most devastating one churned through Haysville and McConnell Air Force Base before striking Andover, killing 17 people and leveling 300 residences. By the time the tornado reached the Golden Spur Mobile Home Park in Andover, it had reached the F5 level on the Fujita scale.

by Jeff Tuttle

Photos

MAKING a HOME with the HELP ofMANY HANDS

IN MANHATTAN, RESIDENTS WORK ACROSS FACTIONS TO WELCOME AFGHANS DISPLACED BY THE TALIBAN’S TAKEOVER OF THEIR COUNTRY. SPARKED BY A COLLABORATION BETWEEN TWO VETERANS, THE MANHATTAN AFGHAN RESETTLEMENT TEAM IS BRINGING TOGETHER CIVIC, RELIGIOUS AND NONPROFIT

LEADERS AROUND A COMMON PURPOSE – ASSISTING REFUGEES SEEKING RESETTLEMENT BY KEEPING A PROMISE MADE THROUGH UNIQUE BONDS FORGED IN WAR. BUT ADDRESSING LONG-TERM CHALLENGES, INCLUDING FINDING PERMANENT HOUSING FOR REFUGEES, WILL REQUIRE CONTINUED COLLABORATION.

BY: AJ DOME

For Fatima Jaghoori (at left), a former U.S. Army noncommissioned officer living in Manhattan, helping Afghan refugees such as Latifa Shakoory escape the horror of Taliban rule and settle in the United States brings immense satisfaction that is offset by the scope of refugee mission that she and others have undertaken. Photo by Jeff Tuttle

An early fall breeze stirred the lush Gardens at Kansas State University, where 13 Afghan women clad in traditional attire laughed and posed for selfies, utterly free to be themselves.

Fatima Jaghoori smiled as she watched the group roam the gardens, pleased to be among a group of Manhattan residents whose work had helped liberate these women from the horrors of Taliban oppression.

Now, more than a year after Afghanistan fell to the terrorist organization following two decades of American and allied military presence, members of the Manhattan Afghan Resettlement Team (MART) continue helping refugees remake their lives in eastern Kansas. Since October 2021, about 120 Afghans have successfully resettled in Manhattan, including five children who were born here. That number is expected to gradually climb in the coming months as more Afghans find their way to the Little Apple.

LED BY VETERANS

Jaghoori, an Afghan American, is a former U.S. Army medical sergeant and current K-State student who has been working since summer 2021

For Zohra Safa, Rohina Safa and Nasima Shakoory, the attention they receive from the people in Manhattan can take many forms. Some of it is altogether vital, such as housing assistance. But even a modest get-together to discuss upcoming events can be significant by providing emotional support. Photo

to bring her family members and other Afghans to the U.S. She says watching her home nation be overtaken by the Taliban, a foe that she and her fellow soldiers fought to try to prevent, greatly upset her.

But the fact that other agencies were trying to profit from the situation upset her even more.

“With some of the organizations I was working with (in 2021),it was a this-for-that situation. ‘If you can give us this much money, we can help move this person to Pakistan,’” Jaghoori says. “I was shocked. If you wanted your family member to be moved inside the Kabul airport, you had to pay $2,500 a head. This was happening. It was really, really sad.”

Jaghoori says there were several so-called aid organizations she interacted with that outright told her they had people paying the Taliban to allow Afghans to leave the country.

“They were also asking people for money to take them on military planes, which is already paid for,” Jaghoori says. “They’re just asking to push them in through the gate (at Kabul Airport), which to me, that meant they were already in cahoots with the Taliban. It also made me think of how many people were in danger but didn’t have the funds and were turned away. They were stranded because of greed.”

Afghans who once worked for or assisted U.S. and allied militaries along with their families continue to face torture and death by Taliban enforcers if discovered. Under Taliban rule, women in Afghanistan are beaten and raped if they are not fully clothed and accompanied in public by a male chaperone. Women are barred from attending school or voting. Young men who refuse to join the Taliban are often murdered or forcibly separated from their families.

Jaghoori says her mission to save family members who were in danger led her to contact the Flint Hills Veterans Coalition for any kind of assistance.

“They’re an amazing group of people who just want to make Manhattan and this area a better place,” Jaghoori says. “All these veterans got up and they said, ‘We don’t know how to help you, but we’re going to do something.’”

Through the coalition, Jaghoori was connected to Aaron Estabrook, a veteran who was making plans for a volunteer organization to assist incoming Afghans.

“Aaron reached out to me via Facebook,” Jaghoori says, “and he explained what he was trying to do and asked, ‘Do you want to come to a meeting?’ And I said, ‘sure.’ By then, they had a good group of community members trying to figure out resettlement options.”

Estabrook, a Dodge City native and former Manhattan city commissioner, served in Afghanistan in 2009 as a sergeant with a tank platoon. One of his responsibilities was to choose an interpreter for his platoon. From a room crowded with Afghan men seeking employment, he ultimately selected Matiullah Shinwari because he “looked the most authentic and genuine.” Estabrook credits Shinwari with saving his life and the lives of his fellow soldiers more than once during his yearlong deployment.

Shinwari and his family relocated to Manhattan in 2017 with help from Estabrook and government officials. The two remain close today. Salman Shinwari, Matiullah’s oldest son, celebrated his 9th birthday the same day his family arrived in the United States. He’s now an eighth grader at Eisenhower Middle School. He says the Afghan

children who’ve lived in the city awhile, like him, are helping newly relocated students adjust to school in America.

“Having new Afghans come is exciting,” Salman says. “I’m just looking forward to helping them out. We’ll support them. I think they’ll be capable of learning English pretty fast.”

Mirwais Shinwari, Matiullah’s cousin and a former member of the Afghan Special Forces, says he and his relatives appreciate the peacefulness of the Flint Hills. Speaking through a translator, Mirwais says the area has a “calm natural beauty” and “not too much traffic.”

by Jeff Tuttle

Aaron Estabrook, executive director of the Manhattan Housing Authority, got involved with the resettlement effort early. He and fellow Army veteran Fatima Jaghoori sketched out an outline for a volunteer organization that operates as a team. Here after sharing dinner, he washed up with the help of Salman Shinwari. Photo by Jeff Tuttle

‘HOPE FOR HUMANITY’

Estabrook and Jaghoori’s separate experiences navigating federal red tape to bring Afghan families and friends to the U.S. helped prepare them for a larger resettlement effort.

Estabrook said he received a phone call in August 2021 from an Afghan man who had ties to Afghan families already living in Riley County. The man told him about 60 Afghans had expressed a desire to resettle in Manhattan as they sought to flee their home country. The first family was due to arrive in Kansas by October.

“I remember asking the guy, ‘Did you say six or 60?’” Estabrook recalls. “He meant 60. That is a lot. It was very hard to help Matiullah (Shinwari) for one year with his family. … Thinking about trying to do 60 alone was not possible.”

That phone call led Estabrook to message Jaghoori, and from there Manhattan’s resettlement team began to take shape. The two veterans crafted an outline for a volunteer-based organization focused on resettling refugees and circulated it among leaders of various local agencies. People throughout the Manhattan area responded.

“It was our first Zoom call (Aug. 31), and I think we had over 100 people from various organizations within the Manhattan community that were ready to offer … help, and that was the most amazing thing,” Jaghoori says. “I genuinely thought I was by myself. It really gives you hope for humanity.”

Retired social sciences researcher Susan Adamchak says she was drawn to the resettlement team because she could foresee the challenges they might experience upon arrival. Adamchak belongs to the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Manhattan, and she says the then-president of the board, Judy Nickelson, volunteered them both to coordinate donations for arriving families.

“We were able to compile lists of what we thought people would need moving into a house, what kinds of food they might want,” Adamchak says. “We would Google ‘Afghan cuisine’ and then go find some of those ingredients.”

Adamchak said she’s “kind of losing track” of how many people she’s directly helped, but she estimated it must be getting close to 100. In other communities, she says Afghan resettlement is often supported by a church or faith organization that may adopt a particular family. On a national level, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is one of nine resettlement agencies, and the resettlement team works in conjunction with Catholic Charities of Northeast Kansas to organize refugee assistance.

VOLUNTEERS AND HOUSING

Manhattan’s resettlement effort also includes K-State administrators and faculty members, language arts teachers in the Manhattan-Ogden School District, career and technical educators at the Manhattan Area Technical College and drivers with the Flint Hills Area Transportation Agency. KansasWorks, Manhattan Christian College and the Islamic Center of Manhattan are also represented among the team’s volunteers.

Estabrook says that approach to diverse volunteerism was by design, so that when the first online meeting was held, all team members were on the same page. Estabrook says it was important to him to establish that it was indeed a team, and that “no one person was in charge.” He says he pulled that off by trusting in the talents and connections of individuals.

In his day job, Estabrook serves as executive director of the Manhattan Housing Authority, which gives him access to housing aid programs and other resources to help refugees. He says each of the housing authority’s board members not only brings a different set of skills but also a “different type of network” to the table. Estabrook said the volunteer agency is successful because it combines the doctrine of aiding refugees, as taught in numerous Christian and Islamic religions.

“Some of our board members are very closely tied to very conservative Christian organizations, or they are the president of the Islamic Center,” Estabrook says. “We’re just fortunate that when we put a request out, or when we seek help, it goes well beyond anything individually each of us could ever do.”

Elfadil Bashir is an interfaith leader at the Islamic Center. In his day job, he is a plant breeding and genetics postdoctoral researcher at K-State. Bashir was part of the group of volunteers and journalists that went to Kansas City International Airport in October 2021 to pick up the first Afghan family bound for Manhattan.

“The Islamic Center is like home for a lot of MART activities,” Bashir says. “One of the things we started doing was biweekly meetings for Afghan people to let them know what they actually need, how their daily life goes – and if there’s any shortage of something, we can cover it.”

Bashir says Afghans can talk openly about their needs and struggles in the meetings, which are held separately for men and women because of cultural practices.

“We also have language courses for Afghans, and all these things are free of charge at the Islamic Center for them to use,” he says.

One of the earliest and continuing challenges the team has faced is providing housing. K-State was quick to offer a solution for incoming Afghans, thanks in part to connections fostered with

K-State’s then-President Richard Myers and his wife, Mary Jo.

Myers is a retired Air Force four-star general and served as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2001 to 2005. Mary Jo Myers began her involvement in Afghan issues in 2001 and made her first trip to the country in 2002 as the leader of an organization that supports Afghan children who work to support their families. She also developed admiration and respect for the tenacity of Afghan women, telling the Manhattan Mercury in 2001 that they would risk their lives to receive an education or vote in an election.

The Myerses’ combined strengths aligned with the resettlement team’s goals and led to a partnership allowing Afghan families to live in the Jardine Apartments on the K-State campus for a few months. Scott Seel with Alliance Realty of Manhattan is a resettlement team volunteer working to secure longer term housing options. He said he’s utilized his network to ask people if they’re willing to donate facilities at a free or reduced rate.

“It's a lot to ask a property owner who can rent out their space to give it away,” Seel says. “Several

The Manhattan Housing Authority — where (from left) Ashiquallah Shinwari, Nasser Ahmad Nooristani, Salman Shinwari, Omer Khalil, Aaron Estabrook and Idrees Khalil gathered — provides a key role in the refugee resettlement process, offering a footing for self-sufficiency.

Photo by Jeff Tuttle

families are now in long-term housing solutions. We have a handful of individual unaccompanied people, and it’s proven more difficult to find housing for them.”

He says there are a lot of refugee families with small children, which creates another consideration to future space needs. Additionally, Seel says the number of individual Afghans coming to Manhattan has the potential to increase in the coming years, so the resettlement team needs to “figure something out on that front.”

“Most of the families have transitioned into public housing through the Manhattan Housing Authority,” Seel says. “But otherwise, I haven’t gotten much community support for long-term housing solutions from private owners.”

The nature of the Manhattan community is a transient one. A city of approximately 50,000, its population swells during the fall and spring as about 20,000 students flock to K-State. In summertime, the population declines slightly as those students depart. About 25,000 more people live and work at nearby Fort Riley, home of the Army’s 1st Infantry Division.

Adamchak and other volunteers agree that Manhattan is an excellent place for a grassroots resettlement initiative.

“Manhattan is just large enough to have a good base of social services,” Adamchak says, “and it’s small enough that people know each other and know how to play nice in the sandbox, if you will.”

‘BEST PRACTICE’

Arriving refugees typically have two immediate needs: learning English and landing a job. Emily Cherms, coordinator of USD 383’s English for Speakers of Other Languages, and her instructors work with Afghan children daily to help reduce the language barrier and acclimate them to the school system. Interpreters with the district assist families with enrolling children in school. In October 2021, Cherms told The Mercury that the district wanted to be “cultural brokers” as they helped Afghan families settle. The school district

also employs many Afghans in its transportation and facilities departments.

Marisa Larson was a volunteer case manager for one of the many families to settle locally, helping acquire Social Security cards and baby care items. She also has helped a family of seven children, five of whom are in school, adjust culturally. A Manhattan resident for the past 11 years, Larson works as a grant writer and editor at the Kansas State University Foundation. She hopes her skills will help the team’s mission.

“Hopefully I’ll be able to convey what the situation is like for (Afghan families) in a compelling manner, and that it inspires people to want to support MART

and our efforts to help families settle here.” Larson says the main challenge team members faced was learning on the fly.

“It was a lot of, ‘This family needs X, where do we find that?’” Larson says. “Thankfully in my life I’ve not needed to utilize the social safety net services our society has, but our Afghan families are eligible for them initially. Learning how to access those, and what the process is, has been a learning experience I think for all of us.”

Estabrook says people from similar agencies in other states have come to Manhattan to train resettlement team volunteers and been surprised by the group’s leadership structure. Leaders of federal agencies are also taking notice of the team’s work.

In November, team members had a virtual meeting with officials from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development about their involvement with the national resettlement effort, called Operation Allies Welcome. Michael Horvath, HUD’s Pittsburgh Field Office director, is overseeing agency activities relating to Operation Allies Welcome. He says the work of the Manhattan resettlement team has been wonderful to highlight as a best practice for communities that have welcomed Afghans.

“The MART group is effective because it is a collaborative local effort, ensuring communication and service delivery by local providers,” Horvath wrote in an email. Horvath stated that one key lesson learned from the Manhattan effort is the need to activate local resources to help resettling people, especially with housing. He said the group’s connection to the Manhattan Housing Authority by way of Estabrook leverages the knowledge and expertise of the local housing market and “ensures a long-term continuum of care” that promotes self-sufficiency.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, more than 88,000 Afghans had arrived in

Refugees like Madina Shakoory can only carry so much with them, but the creativity and talent that they possess are reminders that immigrants have much to contribute. Case in point: The beautiful, traditional dresses worn by Afghan women are hand-stitched by the wearers. Photo by Jeff Tuttle

the U.S. as of September 2022 as part of Operation Allies Welcome. Jaghoori says pressure needs to be maintained on federal agencies to make sure resettling Afghans, and those still awaiting asylum, get the help they need.

“I have a first sergeant who is retired, and he was in contact with one of his informants who was keeping tabs on one of the most dangerous terrorists in Afghanistan for the past 10 years,” Jaghoori says. “Because (the informant) wasn’t directly paid by the U.S. Army, this first sergeant paid him out-of-pocket, and now he wants to help get him out, and there’s no way to get him out. Since he wasn’t paid by the Army, he doesn’t qualify for a special immigrant visa. This sergeant, who is writing books about his time in the war, is absolutely ready to vouch for his friend (to resettle him), and it means nothing, you know?”

Estabrook says the majority of Afghans living in Manhattan arrived through a special immigrant visa. Others living in the Manhattan region may have performed similar work but aren’t eligible for the visa program.

“These challenges can be addressed in the Afghan Adjustment Act that Sen. Jerry Moran co-sponsored last year,” Estabrook says. “It has bipartisan support, and needs to be adopted in 2023, or these individuals would face the unthinkable (deportation).”

In December, the Kansas Republican wrote on his website that veterans of the war in Afghanistan are “calling for Congress to provide safety and certainty for their allies and friends who assisted them in battle.”

“We must answer that call and establish a pathway for our Afghan partners to begin a new life,” Moran wrote. “This legislation will put a program in place to protect our national security while also keeping our promise to those who risked their lives for America.”

In part, the proposed Afghan Adjustment Act would establish a task force that would develop a national strategy for supporting Afghans who are eligible for a special immigrant visa. It would also expand that visa program to include previously omitted groups, including the Female Tactical

Teams of Afghanistan, the Afghan National Army Special Operations Command, the Afghan Air Force and the Special Mission Wing of Afghanistan.

‘GOD’S WORK’

Meanwhile, the resettlement team’s mission continues. Jaghoori says financial donations are always accepted through the organization’s website, allieswelcome.com.

“If we do not receive vouchers for furniture or kitchen supplies are low at the local Kitchen Restore or if the Flint Hills Breadbasket is low on food or halal meats, we are able to help pay for those items without having to pay out of our pockets, which I know Aaron, Miss Judy and Miss Susan have done in the past.”

And more English teachers and translation services are needed. Manhattan Area Technical College instructors are teaching English to resettled adults, but Jaghoori says there are only two instructors at the college to handle multiple classes a week.

The school district is distributing donated supplies, such as toiletries and children’s clothing, through its FIT Closet, which was formed to provide household assistance to families experiencing homelessness or housing insecurity. School libraries in the district are now carrying bilingual books in English and Pashto, the official language of Afghanistan – although there are more than 40 individual dialects spoken within the country. The resettlement team has also partnered with the local Farm and Food Council to provide families with cooking supplies through its Kitchen Restore program.

“That level of collaboration and cooperation has just been remarkable,” Adamchak says. “In a way, a lot of the group is composed of leaders.”

That enthusiasm for local leadership has trickled down to resettled Afghans as well. Idrees Khalil was recruited by U.S. forces in 2021 as an interpreter and arrived in Manhattan in January 2022. An interpreter and legal representative by trade, Khalil evacuated his native Kabul and was

moved into a space provided by the Manhattan Housing Authority in late February. He received his Kansas driver’s license in April, opening up employment opportunities. In May, Khalil got a full-time job with Catholic Charities as a refugee support services case manager in Manhattan.

In July, Khalil was appointed by then-Mayor Linda Morse to serve as a commissioner on the Manhattan Housing Authority board, effectively making him one of Estabrook’s “bosses” within seven months of his arrival in America. Morse says that board needed a tenant position filled, and since Khalil was living in MHA housing, he was a perfect fit.

“It’s that tenant perspective that is so important for that board,” Morse says. “I’ve been really pleased with the effort that we’ve had in regard to Afghan resettlement here. This has been peaceful, and the community as a whole has come forward and been very supportive, and I think we can accept more immigrants here.”

Estabrook can imagine an Afghan-centric business district in Manhattan at some point, featuring shops and restaurants that celebrate Afghan culture. Khalil can envision the same thing, but it will take time. He says Afghans like him have experienced a 180-degree shift in every aspect of their lives, and that they previously worried about how they’d be perceived in a new American city.

“The good thing is, here in Manhattan, Kansas, we were warmly welcomed,” Khalil says, “and we have received warm support from the community, which is a good sign.”

Jaghoori thinks resettlement volunteers are “doing God’s work.”

“That’s the best way I can say it. These folks out here, they really do God’s work. It’s a good definition of the Midwest, and a good definition of how welcoming Kansas is and Kansans are. When it comes to conflict, they’re gung-freaking-ho about helping others.”

UNDERSTANDING DIFFERENT IMMIGRATION TERMS

REFUGEES

• Forced to flee their homes because of war, violence or persecution, often without warning, according to the International Rescue Committee.

• Can’t return home until conditions are safe again.

• A government or the United Nations Refugee Agency grants status based on well-founded fear.

According to the Council on Foreign Relations, the number of refugees admitted into the U.S. has declined from more than 200,000 in the 1980s to 25,000 in 2022. Last year, most refugees came from the Democratic Republic of Congo (7,810), Syria (4,556), Myanmar (2,156) and Sudan (1,669). Afghanistan ranked fifth (1,618).

ASYLUM SEEKERS

• Pursue international protection from dangers in their home countries.

• Their claims for refugee status haven’t been determined legally, according to the IRC.

• Must apply for protection in the country of destination, which means they must arrive at or cross the border to apply.

Nearly 18,000 people were granted asylum in the U.S. in 2021, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Most of those individuals were granted affirmative asylum, which means they had a visa or were already present in the U.S. But about 7,000 were granted the status through defensive asylum, meaning they had either no lawful means to enter the country or were apprehended as an unauthorized immigrant, requiring their case to be adjudicated in immigration court.

More than a third of asylees in 2021 accepted by the U.S. hailed from Venezuela, China and Turkey.

IMMIGRANTS

• Make a conscious decision to leave their home country and settle in a foreign country.

• Go through a lengthy vetting process to become legal permanent residents and eventually citizens.

• Free to return home when they choose.

More than 740,000 people obtained lawful permanent status in 2021, according to DHS. 813,000 became naturalized citizens that year. 85,000 petitions for naturalization were denied.

MIGRANTS

• Move from place to place (within a country or across borders) often for economic reasons, such as seasonal work.

• Leave by choice rather because of persecution or violence.

The U.S. processed more than 1.8 million admissions of temporary workers and their families in 2021, including 587,000 agricultural workers.

Becoming conversant in English is one of the most pressing needs for arriving refugees. Zamaruth Sharifi is learning the language at the Manhattan Area Technical College. Photo by Jeff Tuttle

DISCUSSION GUIDE

1. The effort to resettle Afghan refugees in Manhattan brings together people across several factions. What factors contribute to the development of a collective purpose?

2. What lessons from this story might inform your own efforts to inspire a collective purpose?

Clockwise from above left: A family dinner at the home of Matiullah Shinwari offers traditional Afghan cuisine served on a tablecloth arranged on the floor. After dinner, in a bit of brotherly horseplay, Salman Shinwari flipped Rehan. With the dishes cleared, Fawzia Shinwari cleaned the tablecloth. Tamana is the youngest of the Shinwari children. Photos by Jeff Tuttle

BY: MARK WIEBE

STANDING PROUD AND TURNING UP THE

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AS A GROWING LATINO POPULATION PUTS ITS STAMP ON THE ECONOMY AND CULTURAL LIFE OF WYANDOTTE COUNTY, QUESTIONS REMAIN ABOUT HOW TO FOSTER MORE CIVIC ENGAGEMENT AMONG COMMUNITY MEMBERS. DESPITE FUELING THE COUNTY’S POPULATION GROWTH, HISPANIC AND LATINO RESIDENTS OCCUPY JUST FIVE OF THE 46 SEATS ON THE COUNTY’S LARGEST GOVERNING BODIES, AND ATTITUDES ABOUT VOTING CAN VARY WIDELY. A SET OF SMALL EXPERIMENTS OFFERS HOPE FOR ENSURING LATINOS ARE BETTER REPRESENTED BOTH LOCALLY AND STATEWIDE, BUT A WILLINGNESS TO REACH OUT TO FRIENDS, FAMILY AND NEIGHBORS MIGHT BE KEY TO INCREASING CIVIC PARTICIPATION OVER THE LONG HAUL.

As Melissa Oropeza campaigned door to door last fall for a seat in the Kansas House of Representatives, she wanted to make sure she reached out to fellow Latino voters in Wyandotte County.

But like most candidates with modest campaigns, Oropeza, along with her daughter, knocked only on the doors of registered voters who had participated in recent elections. To do otherwise would be a waste of valuable time.

The result, against her best intentions: The vast majority of prospective constituents that her campaign contacted in the 37th District were white, even though nearly 4 in 10 residents of the district are Hispanic, according to Ballotpedia.

“I was surprised it was a small number, smaller than I would have liked to have seen,” Oropeza says of the Latino voters she spoke with. “It’s unfortunate that they’re not represented at the polls, or that I couldn’t knock on those doors because I had such a small campaign. But that is a goal of mine – to reach out to those who are unregistered or undecided.”

It turned out that Oropeza, a Democrat whose great-grandparents emigrated from Mexico, did not need a groundswell of Latino support. She easily won her race in the Democratic stronghold with nearly 60% of the vote, becoming the first Latina to represent Wyandotte County in Topeka. Nevertheless, Oropeza and other leaders are eager for more of Wyandotte County’s Latino residents to become engaged voters. Without their participation, they fear, the county’s surging Latino and Hispanic population risks being underrepresented in important policy matters such as taxation, law enforcement, immigration, health and housing.

“Your vote is your voice,” Oropeza says. “And if you don’t have your voice, then nobody will ever hear you.”

Voter outreach activists can provide ample anecdotal evidence that underscores experiences like Oropeza’s. But to determine exactly how many Hispanic and Latino residents are expressing that voice at the ballot box is difficult to measure –whether in the U.S., Kansas or Wyandotte County.

Voter registration applications do not ask for a person’s race or ethnicity, so analysts rely on

For several years now, the largest number of immigrants who have naturalized moved from Mexico. Last year, Armando Arevalo, a resident of Leavenworth and himself a Mexican immigrant, participated in the November naturalization ceremony at the Robert J. Dole U.S. Courthouse in Kansas City, Kansas. Photo by Jeff Tuttle

surveys and census data to make broad but imprecise observations about the voting habits of Hispanics and Latinos. Still, these analysts can detect trends and patterns. A Pew Research Center analysis of the 2018 midterm elections, for example, shows that 40% of eligible Hispanic or Latino voters in the United States cast a ballot that year – up from 27% in 2014. Despite that growth, Hispanic and Latino voting activity still lags behind the general population. According to the same Pew analysis, voting rates among eligible white and Black voters were more than 10 percentage points higher.

Several voter outreach activists told The Journal that Latino and Hispanic voting behaviors in Wyandotte County and Kansas likely mirror national trends. And all agreed that there remains a large pool of eligible Hispanic and Latino voters to tap. “We can tell when we go canvassing. We can tell when we poll,” says Aude Negrete, former executive director of the Kansas Hispanic and Latino American Affairs Commission. “When you go door to door, those precincts that have a high concentration of Latinos in Wyandotte County, we find that a lot of them are not registered and that there is a lack of engagement.”

While Latino Americans like Negrete and Oropeza are quick to say that one’s ethnicity cannot predict voting preferences, and that Latinos and Hispanics do not comprise a monolithic voting bloc, both believe that it is important to attract more Latino and Hispanic voters in order to elect candidates who understand their experiences and can address their unique needs. The very health of their communities, they say, depends on it.

“It’s not about just one person or one group. It’s about ensuring that everyone in a community has more prosperity or a better quality of life,” Negrete says. “It’s about having barriers addressed and targeted. It’s about engagement and communication that allows for a more prosperous community.”

FLEXING ECONOMIC MUSCLE

No story about Wyandotte County is complete without noting the radical political changes at the turn of this century that ushered in a new era of economic growth. Decades of population loss had cratered its tax base. Kansas City, Kansas, struggled to keep up with basic maintenance and services. Blight and crime increased. Then in 1997, voters approved the consolidation of the

Kansas City and Wyandotte County governments, a move credited with creating a healthier political environment that has attracted new development, such as Kansas Speedway, along with new residents. Indeed, over the last two decades the county has seen a modest 6.7% population growth.

But that story fails to tell how the county’s Hispanic and Latino residents have contributed to its growth. In fact, without their presence, it’s likely that in recent years Wyandotte County would have lost more residents and the taxes they generate. Since 2000, its number of Hispanic and Latino residents has doubled; at nearly 56,000, they represent roughly a third of the county’s total population. Meanwhile, in the last decade its white and Black populations have been noticeably dropping.

Despite their increased numbers, Hispanic and Latino residents occupy just five of the 46 seats on the county’s largest governing bodies: the Unified Government’s Board of Commissioners, the Kansas City, Kansas Board of Public Utilities, the Kansas City, Kansas School Board, the Kansas City Kansas Community College Board of Trustees, and the county’s 16 elected district court judges. That under-representation is echoed across Kansas: Although Latino and Hispanic residents make up 12.7% of the state’s population, they hold just six seats in the 125-member House of Representatives (two from Wyandotte) and none in the 40-seat Senate.

Political under-representation aside, Wyandotte County’s Latino communities are flexing their economic muscle. Consider the Central Avenue corridor in northeast KCK. Two decades ago the 13-block stretch of storefronts, apartments and churches was notorious for urban blight: a smattering of empty buildings, high crime and a gathering spot for prostitutes and drug dealers. In the 1990s and early 2000s, a number of buildings were razed, leaving large swaths of weedy vacant lots.

The area still wrestles with crime, but it is not rampant as it once was. Today, those empty storefronts are largely filled, most of them sporting signs in Spanish. Some of the vacant lots have finally been developed. Restaurants, bodegas, Mexican bakeries, tortillerias, law offices,

party supply venues and wedding shops line the street. Surrounding residential neighborhoods are bouncing back; property values are increasing.

“Central Avenue was a mess,” says Irene Caudillo, the outgoing president and CEO of El Centro Inc., a nonprofit organization that offers several services designed to improve the lives of Latino residents. “It was actually scary to drive through. Now I’m having lunch there at least once a week.”

A similar renaissance is occurring throughout the city’s urban core, especially along the commercial corridors of Kansas Avenue, 7th Street Trafficway, 18th Street, and Minnesota and State avenues. The county’s south of the border cuisine has even garnered national attention, thanks largely to a Taco Trail campaign launched by the Kansas City Kansas Convention and Visitors Bureau. The impact of this growth is significant. The Central Avenue Betterment Association, a nonprofit organization that promotes economic development and community engagement in the area, estimates that businesses within these urban corridors – 60% of them Latino-owned – employ 3,000 to 4,000 people. Grocers and restaurants alone are responsible for $8 million to $10 million in sales every month.

“There is not a single person who has generated any of that,” says Edgar Galicia, the Central Avenue Betterment Association’s executive director. “It’s the whole community, the residents of the area, and their will and ambition to improve their quality of life on their own.”

Perhaps the best expression of this economic growth is the city’s annual Dia De Muertos event – a daylong celebration on Central Avenue that’s held the first Saturday of November. Taking its cue from the joyous tradition of honoring the dead, the event features food tents, music stages, vendors and nonprofit booths. In between are dozens of “ofrendas,” altars that serve as offerings to the dead, often with the loved one’s photo surrounded by objects they cherished. The sidewalks come alive with women and girls in elegant dresses and bonnets of brightly colored flowers. They’ve painted their faces to look like that of a skeleton, signaling that they have taken on the guise of La Catrina, the doyenne of Dia De

State Rep. Melissa Oropeza is among leaders in Wyandotte County who would like to see more of the county's Latino and Hispanic residents become active voters. Otherwise, this growing population runs the risk of being under-represented at many levels of government. Photo by Jeff Tuttle

Muertos who comforts the living with the fact that death is the great equalizer, not something to fear.

The celebration reaches its climax with an afterdark parade that features Catrinas, floats and banda musicians making their way along Central Avenue. Some 20,000 people from across the Kansas City region cheer them on, nearly triple

the number who attended the event when the association launched it in 2016.

“The more positive activity generated, the less negative activity we get,” Galicia says. “That’s the philosophy behind all the festivals and all the business investment along Central Avenue. We generated quite a bit of strategies to promote that good. So people take notice and continue pushing and continue investing.”

Jose Rodriguez, board chair of the betterment association, believes that events like Dia De Muertos open conversations about the increasing influence that Wyandotte County’s Latino businesses and residents have on the broader community – and that the area’s politicians are paying attention.

“It’s an opportunity to engage with the mainstream,” Rodriguez said that day as he was about to announce the winner of the Dia De Muertos Catrina contest. “Our hope is to spark some type of interest, from citizens to elected officials.”

Rodriguez has lived in the United States for more than 30 years, after arriving with his parents when he was 6 years old. He couldn’t have known it at the time, but that marked the beginning of a decades-long journey to become a U.S. citizen. When he finally swore allegiance to the country he’s called home for nearly his entire life, he had the peace of mind that comes with knowing that no one could ever, for any reason, deport him. But more importantly, he felt a responsibility to vote, which he did for the first time in last August’s Kansas primary.

“To actually cast a vote and walk out, that was a big moment of pride,” says Rodriguez. “I thought of all those questions on the citizenship test. You know, all your rights and responsibilities. That was on my mind. I had to do it.”

So, too, for Fernanda Reyes Goldman. Last November, Goldman went to the Robert J. Dole Federal Courthouse in Kansas City, with more than 100 immigrants from 44 countries to participate in

the same naturalization ceremony that Rodriguez had just months earlier. In unison, they stood in the courtroom of U.S District Judge Holly L. Teeter, raised their right hands, and swore to protect the U.S. Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic.

The oath they took did not require them to vote, of course, but that newly acquired right was on Goldman’s mind. A Mexican immigrant who moved to the United States to marry her husband more than seven years ago, Goldman, like nearly everyone else in the courtroom, had endured years of paperwork, bureaucracy and waiting. But she had one more task ahead of her: register to vote. “It’s very important to have a voice,” she says. “Definitely, everyone needs to vote.”

And the data indicates that Goldman, like other naturalized citizens, will be more likely to vote than her U.S.-born counterparts with Central and South American ancestry. With an estimated

foreign-born population of more than 16%, the majority from Latin America, the path to greater civic engagement for many Latinos in Wyandotte County truly does begin with becoming a citizen. A national study of the 2018 midterm election by the Pew

‘A BIG MOMENT OF PRIDE’

To encourage newly naturalized Americans to take the next step on the road to civic participation, volunteer Brenda Shaw of the Daughters of the American Revolution handed out voting registration forms last November at the Robert J. Dole U.S. Courthouse. Photos by Jeff Tuttle

Kansas City, Kansas' annual Dia De Muertos is a daylong celebration on Central Avenue that’s held the first Saturday in November. Women like Jessica Carrillo paint their faces to look like a skeleton's, signaling that they have taken on the guise of La Catrina, the doyenne of the event. Photo by Dave Kaup

Research Center, for example, found that more than 44% of Hispanic naturalized citizens cast a ballot compared with 39% of their U.S.-born counterparts. But the barriers to becoming a citizen deter many foreign-born residents from even trying, whether they have a work permit, green card or are undocumented. The citizenship test, the cost, the possible need for legal representation, the long wait, the language test – these and other hurdles make it easier for some to just lie low.

Karla Juarez is intimately familiar with this barrier – both professionally and personally. As executive director of the nonprofit Advocates for Immigrant Rights and Reconciliation, she has participated in voter outreach efforts. As the daughter of immigrants, and an immigrant herself, Juarez embarked on a 10-year journey to become a citizen. First came the application for a work permit. Four years later she applied for a green card. Five years after that, she paid the $725 required for the citizenship application and secured a lawyer through a nonprofit organization because she didn’t want to leave anything to chance. Three times a week for a month, she studied for the civics and language test applicants must pass – 10 questions randomly selected from 100 she’d studied.

And it was worth it. When she learned she’d aced the test and that she would soon be sworn in as a U.S. citizen, she teared up. “My whole journey flashed before my eyes, how hard it had been, how long I had waited,” she recalls. “That was all I ever wanted, along with a college degree. This is my country. I grew up here. This is all I know. I couldn’t think of living in Mexico, even though I’m very happy to be a Mexican.” And when she finally cast a ballot in the August 2020 primary, it was a cause for celebration. “I posted it on my social media! First time voting!”

‘THE LOUDER YOU SCREAM’

Juarez and other activists in the Latino community are under no illusions about what it takes to spur more civic engagement. No one can suggest to a working mother to simply add “become a citizen” to her list of tasks for the day. And some immigrants are willing to live with work permits or green cards and the restrictions those documents carry, along with the risk of deportation if they commit a crime. Juarez says she’s tried, for example, to encourage her mother and stepfather to apply, but they’re reluctant. They’re nervous about the history, civics and language test, even though Juarez doesn’t think

they need to be. “I keep telling them that they should become citizens,” she says. “The voting piece. That’s huge.”

But as Latino and Hispanic activists in Wyandotte County know, not everyone appreciates “the voting piece” – at least not enough to cut through the many other barriers to voting they face. Some live in mixed households – documented and undocumented residents under the same roof –and don’t have voting role models. Others speak little English and don’t have a good grasp of the political environment because there remains a dearth of Spanish-language campaign literature (not to mention Spanish-speaking candidates). Some are politically apathetic. And some don’t want to draw attention to themselves, even if they are here legally.

“I’ve got people I’ve known for years who don’t give a damn about politics or what’s going on,” says Kansas Rep. Louis Ruiz, among the longest serving Latino members of the Kansas House. Ruiz was first elected to Wyandotte County’s 31st District in 2004 and is also the nominal head of the small, but slowly growing Latino Legislative Caucus, all House Democrats. (Oropeza’s election increased its size to six.)

“When I talk to these people about voting, they say, ‘That’s for others,’” Ruiz adds. “And it hits me more when I hear that from Latinos. For them to tell me they don’t want to be involved or don’t care, that bothers me more than when the average white guy says it. Because that’s my culture, and we have so much at stake.”

This apathy applies to not only immigration issues, but issues related to education, health care and taxes. All citizens need to raise their voices, Ruiz says, because “the louder you scream, the more you’re apt to get services or be listened to.” Despite his frustrations, he understands why many are reluctant to do that, especially recent immigrants. Ruiz recounted the story of his grandfather, who came to the United States in the first half of the 20th century. “He used to say, ‘Be reverent and respectful. No matter how they treat you, don’t draw attention to yourself.’ I said, ‘Yeah, right, that’s going to work.’ But that’s how he grew up. He knew his barriers and what he needed to do to survive.”

Indeed, fear can prevent many Latino citizens from making such a public gesture as voting. They may be here legally, but their relatives or even members of their own household may not. Irene Caudillo, of El Centro, is among those who say a climate of racism and xenophobia – along with politicians who exploit those prejudices – can be enough to keep someone from going to the polls. “When you get these kinds of swings where the rhetoric becomes very intense, we feel like we have to pull back, and it almost feels like we’re starting over,” Caudillo says. Young people of voting age, she adds, “may be reluctant to sign up and do anything that might jeopardize someone in their family. That includes registering to vote.”

THE POWER OF RELATIONSHIPS

Just as he spares no words when talking about apathetic voters, Ruiz is blunt about his party’s efforts to engage more Latinos. “The Republicans hit the Latino population harder than the Dems do,” he says. “Democrats take Blacks and Latinos for granted. I’ve seen that on the national level. They were very minimal in terms of what they’re nurturing.” This could change in Kansas, he says, with Juan Luengo recently named chair of the state Democratic Party’s Hispanic Caucus. “He’s working it hard and emphasizing outreach,” Ruiz adds.

But no matter who is doing the outreach – Democrats, Republicans or nonpartisan organizations – the effort to not only register new Latino voters but get them to the polls requires time, patience and resources. And a lot of knocking on doors – knocks that must happen during campaigns, but also outside the context of campaigns.

“You don’t just build a relationship on one knock,” Caudillo says. “You go and you go back. And you have to ask questions: ‘What candidates have come knocking? What information have you received from candidates? Would you be interested in joining a forum where you can hear these folks?”

At Advocates for Immigrant Rights and Reconciliation, Karla Juarez has received support and a model for outreach from The Voter Network, a Kansas nonprofit organization. The Voter Network promotes an approach called

Karla Juarez, the executive director of Advocates for Immigrant Rights and Reconciliation, is active in voter outreach efforts. But the naturalized American knows that not everyone is going to be interested in civic participation. Photo by Jeff Tuttle

“relational organizing” to increase voter turnout. The premise driving its work is simple: People are more likely to vote if they have a friend, relative or neighbor encouraging them. “We think our partners and the people who are living and working and breathing in their communities are the best people to talk to the folks around them about voting or politics,” says executive director Lindsay Ford. “That feels intuitive, but it’s not really been incorporated into retail politics.” (Full disclosure: The reporter of this story is friends with Ford and used to work for her.)

Juarez took this message to heart during the 2022 elections and created a team of voting ambassadors. These people know the specific barriers to voting that their friends and relatives may be facing even better than Juarez does. Aiding her efforts is a Voter Network program that features an app that makes it easy for people to build their own cadre of voters and helps them “adopt” other voters. Ford says that program, called Voter to Voter, recruited 88 volunteers in 2020 to reach out to more than 2,000 prospective Latino and Hispanic voters in Kansas. More than half of the people they contacted voted in the November election and had likely never cast a ballot before.

“It’s not about changing hearts and minds,” Ford says. “It’s about changing behavior. People don’t usually change their behavior because they get a postcard in the mail. Those work only on people who already vote, but have little impact on people who aren’t voting or not voting regularly.”

Just as it takes a high level of organization to bring Latino voters to the polls, cultivating new Latino political leaders requires similar efforts. Delia Garcia is among those making that effort. Garcia, who recently served as secretary of labor under Gov. Laura Kelly, was the first Latina elected to the Legislature in 2004. After leaving the Kelly administration, she started a Washington D.C.based consulting firm that focuses, in part, on promoting Latino and Hispanic leadership.

“We can’t wait for other people to save our communities,” Garcia says. To that end, in 2021, she and others used a $25,000 grant from the Kansas Health Foundation (which funds the Kansas

Leadership Center, publisher of The Journal) to start a nonpartisan pilot project aimed at training prospective Latino/Hispanic political candidates. Of the eight who received the training that year, four were elected to municipal offices in Liberal, Topeka and Overland Park. One candidate for the Kansas City, Kansas School Board lost her race.

The pilot proved to Garcia that a relatively small investment can make a difference. But much more will be required, both to train future political leaders and to register voters. “We’re going to have to do the work all year round, every year,” she says.

FOLLOWING THE ENGAGEMENT PATH

As Wyandotte County’s leaders lay the groundwork for greater Latino civic engagement, they have one demographic fact working in their favor: With nearly 28% of Wyandotte’s total population under 18, the county is among the youngest in Kansas, a statistic driven largely by Latinos. Nationally, according to the Pew Research Center, 32% of all Latinos are under 18; nearly 60% are 33 years old or younger. No other racial or ethnic group comes close to those shares. In Wyandotte County, the Kansas City, Kansas School District underscores this trend: More than half of its students are Latino.

Juarez, herself a millennial, says it will be crucial to engage those young Latinos, not just to encourage them to vote, but, as they get older, any children they may have. “It goes back to the subject of people not having good role models,” she says. Inspiring more young Latinos to become civically engaged increases the chances that they’ll pass that value down to their children.

Caudillo is a living example of how that works. “My parents took us all when they went to vote,” she says. “It was important to them. They showed it, shared it and expressed it. I have voted since I was 18 years old. When my kids turned 18, they voted.”

Organizers recognize that building relationships with the younger Latino generation will require delivering messages that resonate with them. Of course, those messages must be tailored to the

person, another example of how the relational organizing method can be so powerful. For Negrete, the motivation was all about chipping away at the barriers that make life challenging for so many Latino residents, especially recent immigrants.

“I can tell from being a first generation immigrant, the barriers you have are determined by pure luck,” she says. “I don’t think that’s fair. I don’t think it should be up to luck whether or not your kids have a good school or the needs of your community are being met. When I realized that civic engagement and communication and building bridges was a big path to justice and a more prosperous community, that’s when I became more engaged.”

DISCUSSION GUIDE

1. How would you diagnose the situation when it comes to Latino political representation? What aspects of the challenge are technical? Which are adaptive?

2. What does leadership look like in this situation?

The culmination of the naturalization process is the administration of the oath, here being taken last November by Overland Park resident Fernanda Reyes Goldman. According to the website for the Robert J. Dole U. S. Courthouse, about 2,500 people are naturalized in the state annually. Photo by Jeff Tuttle

THE LONGEST RIDE

IT TOOK TIME FOR EVERYTHING TO COME TOGETHER, BUT THE FUTURE LOOKS BRIGHT FOR THE 118-MILE FLINT HILLS TRAIL AND THE COMMUNITIES IT CONNECTS. ONCE CONTROVERSIAL, THE TRAIL NOW INSPIRES COLLECTIVE PURPOSE AMONG THE 11 TOWNS AND SEVEN HAMLETS ALONG THE ROUTE THAT ARE LOOKING FOR ANOTHER SOURCE OF ECONOMIC AND CULTURAL REJUVENATION.

BY: MICHAEL PEARCE

The Flint Hills Trail begins in Osawatomie, a town that's actually not in the Flint Hills. However, it does end in the grasslands. In between are 118 delightfully idyllic miles.

Photo by Michael Pearce

Whether it’s cycling the Scottish Highlands or the legendary wine country of France, Roz Newmark and John Roberson have pedaled famed trails throughout the world, including those in America.

“Cycle touring is what we do,” says Newmark, of Salt Lake City. “We’ll travel about anywhere to cycle the best trails.”

In October, just off Walnut Street in Council Grove, Newmark and Roberson began a bicycling adventure they think is good enough to bring cyclists from afar.

“It was truly a remarkable ride, all of it,” she says. “It was an experience I know we’ll never forget. It was some of the most fun we’ve gotten from a trail. We’ll be anxious to see it as it gets better and better.”

She’s talking about the Flint Hills Trail State Park, a linear park of 118 miles. After years of modest growth and improvements being hampered by contention and funding challenges, progress is now building speed like a downhill descent, thanks to changes in public opinion and the recent news of a $24.8 million federal grant.

The route of the trail was developed in the late 1800s as the Council Grove, Osage City and Ottawa Railroad. The Missouri Pacific Railroad owned the line when it carried its last train in 1995. Tracks and ties are gone. Inclines are gradual. The surface of packed, tiny rock chips is almost sidewalk smooth. Newmark labeled the conditions, “perfect.”

Their 90-mile ride crossed the legendary Flint Hills, alive with its best autumn colors. Clusters of neon red sumacs highlighted a landscape where every species of native grass and forb carried their own pastel colors. Newmark, raised in Lawrence, traversed the Flint Hills many times as a child. Seeing it while cycling the trail, she says, was by far the most spectacular experience.

Their two-day journey also took them past lush croplands and weathered farmsteads of stone. They cycled over clear streams, atop venerable steel railroad bridges and beneath miles of “tree tunnels,” with branches interwoven tightly above the trail. Hours passed without seeing another soul. Dealings with automobiles were minimal and safe at well-marked road crossings.

Yet it was a crowd of people near the end of the ride that brought the most excitement to Newmark’s recollections.

“We looked down the trail and there was this swarm of people cycling towards us. They were so warm and welcoming. They had so much pride in the trail and their community. It would be nearly impossible to not be swept up in that kind of excitement.”

TRAILS TO PROSPERITY

Newmark and Roberson’s welcoming committee was at the outskirts of Osawatomie, but they may have enjoyed a similar welcome had they spent more time in Council Grove, Ottawa or Osage City. Like the passenger and freight trains of old, civic leaders now hope cyclists, hikers and horseback riders bring prosperity to their small towns.

“A good trail is one of the best economic development engines you can have in your small town,” says Mike Scanlon, Osawatomie’s city manager. “Those people seem to stay a little longer in the community because they’re on bikes and not cars. They generally have plenty of disposable dollars. Anybody who buys a (quality) bike can certainly afford a nice dinner and a couple of beers along the way.” Scanlon saw the difference trails could make while holding similar jobs at small towns in the Colorado Rockies.

Community leaders also see the Flint Hills Trail as an important asset for the health of local citizens

The eastern portions of the Flint Hills Trail travel alongside the Marais Des Cygnes River, under towering, wooded bluffs and through rolling farmland.

Photo by Jeff Tuttle

and a great way to attract new residents. Wynndee Lee, Ottawa’s director of community development from 2002-2021, often sees residents of many ages where the trail bisects Ottawa. She says the city and Ottawa University include trail information when trying to recruit students or new residents.

“Quality of life opportunities have become a really big thing,” says Lee. “We get quite a few alumni coming back. A lot of them have cycled where they’ve lived near one of the coasts. It’s a plus.”

Never in the trail’s 17-year history has the mood been so upbeat.

“More and more people are getting involved,” says Jeff Carroll, owner of Ottawa Bike and Trail and one of the trail’s top promoters. “Towns have formed a coalition (the Kansas Association of Trail Towns), so they can work together. Some great things are in the works. We’re getting people cycling from all over the country. Word’s getting out. It’s exciting.”

Adding to the localized excitement was the recent announcement of that $24.8 million federal grant.

“That’s obviously going to make a big difference in so many ways,” says Trent McCown, manager of Flint Hills Trail and Prairie Spirit Trail state parks. “It should let us accomplish things we’ve wanted to do for years. We should finally be able to finish the trail going west from Council Grove.”

That will add another sizable town to the trail, one that’s more than ready to reap the trail’s many benefits.

“Most of our people know it’s coming, and are ready and excited,” says Branden Dross, Herington’s city manager. “We think it will really foster some economic growth. Herington was kind of getting ignored for so many years as they worked on other parts of the trail. We’re ready to be the official western end of a great rail trail.”

The completed Flint Hills Trail will pass through or near 11 incorporated towns and seven unincorporated hamlets.

The organized cooperation among the communities, and the windfall of funding, is coming when the trail is drawing increased attention from near and very far. McCown recently corresponded with a cyclist from Sweden. He says the Flint Hills Trail is a popular segment for those cycling across the nation.

The Ottawa Bike and Trail website and Facebook page are regularly accessed by thousands. Carroll says most cyclists are also heavily into social media, where they go to share as much to learn.

“Somebody comes, has a nice ride and by that night hundreds or thousands know about it,” Carroll says. “More and more people are hearing about things like the great Flint Hills ride from Bushong to Council Grove or the tree tunnels from Ottawa to Osawatomie. Think about it, people all over are hearing good things about even the smallest of towns, like Bushong as well as the others. How else does that happen?”

RAILS-TO-TRAILS

The Flint Hills Trail is one of over 25,000 rail trails in the U.S., says Brandi Horton, of the national Rails-to-Trails Conservancy. Horton’s group helps manage the combined 40,000 miles of rail trails. At 118 miles, the Flint Hills Trail is the eighth-longest in the nation.

Kansas’ other lengthy rail trails include Prairie Spirit Trail State Park, which opened in 1996 and runs 51 miles from Ottawa to Iola (an extension called the Southwind Trail takes cyclists 6.5 miles farther south to Humboldt) and the Landon Nature Trail, a work in progress from Topeka to Overbrook.

Jeff Carroll, owner of Ottawa Bike and Trail, says the Flint Hills Trail provided the impetus to open his shop, which sells and rents bikes, provides repairs and offers guided trail rides. In February, the shop catered to those with a literary bent, hosting author Anne Winkler-Morey, whose book "Allegiance to Winds and Waters" expounded on her 14-month, politically tinged bicycle tour of the United States. Photos by Jeff Tuttle

Horton says rail trails are popular because they allow cyclists to avoid the dangers of riding amid motorists for long periods of time. Many rail trails bisect spectacular wild country and have a dot-todot connection with small rural towns.

The national rail trail program began after the U.S. Congress passed the Rail Banking Act in 1983. The goal of the act was to create more recreational trails for Americans and to ensure that unused railroad rights of way weren’t developed in case trackage would again be needed to transport people and freight. Though rare, Horton says there have been cases where that has happened.

In most cases, the railroad simply transfers a corridor to a rail trail group rather than abandoning the property. If needed, lands are sometimes purchased at fair market rate. Horton’s records show the Missouri Pacific Railroad gave the land to her group in 1995. She says in 1997, the Kansas Horseman Foundation accepted control of the old railroad bed and agreed to develop a recreational trail. When progress stalled, a group of residents formed the Kanza Rail-Trails Conservancy and was given control of the trail.

After years of neglect, volunteers found themselves clearing fallen trees, repairing or replacing bridges, hauling in thousands of tons

of fine gravel chips and constantly looking for funding via grants or private donations. But those challenges were mild compared to the battle fought over public opinion and in courtrooms all the way to the Kansas Supreme Court.

That case began in 2006, when the Miami County Commission took legal action to force the conservancy to post a bond of over $76,000 to be used if the county sustained any trail-related costs. More than $60,000 of that was to be used to buy new fences for landowners along the trail. The commission also insisted all work stop on the trail until all legal proceedings were complete. Trail volunteers kept working.

In 2011, the Supreme Court lowered the bond to about $9,000. Miami County never accessed the bond money. Eventually, the conservancy used it to purchase the land needed to connect Osawatomie to the trail.

BATTLING PUBLIC OPINION

Doug Walker of Osawatomie was in the Kansas Senate from 1988 to 1996. He witnessed the struggles to get the Prairie Spirit Trail completed and much more heated opposition as the Flint Hills Trail project began. Agricultural groups and

many landowners, says Walker, thought the land should revert to bordering landowners. Bills were proposed, and some passed, to hamper progress as fears circulated locally that the trail would spur an increase in crimes such as burglary, vandalism, cattle rustling and poaching. Walker says his protrail position cost him at the polls, and he lost his try for reelection in 1996.

County commissions joined the fray, suing the Kanza Rail-Trails Conservancy, trying to halt development. Walker says there were instances in which grants were awarded to cities for trail development, then returned unspent when trail opponents subsequently got control of their city councils.

Things were rough at the other end of the trail too, says Scott Allen, a Council Grove business owner, avid cyclist and Kansas Rail-Trails Conservancy board member.

“I just mentioned the trail at a Morris County economic development meeting and a county commissioner just jumped all over me about how it was stealing private property and would encourage crime,” says Allen. “I had more than a few people tell me I was crazy to get involved in such a project. I didn’t see how I could not get involved in making the trail because of its potential.”

As debate wore on, some volunteers kept plugging away, logging hundreds of hours moving from town to hamlet, doing development work. Eventually, Walker says, “Times changed; it became easier.”

TIMES CHANGED

Government support and the public mood began to change when an unlikely trail champion got involved.

“I’m a strong Democrat, and I don’t have much good to say about Sam Brownback,” says Walker,

“but he was very vocal about supporting the trail and did a lot of good things.”

It was Brownback, Kansas’ governor from 2011 through 2018, who started the movement to eventually make the trail a state park. Unlike lakebased parks, no fees or permits are required to use the Flint Hills or Prairie Spirit trails.

Moods mellowed, Walker says, when the public learned the land hadn’t been “stolen” from anyone. Problems were few, usually minor and quickly solved.

“It took awhile, but people finally realized nobody is going to ride a bicycle up to their house and steal a television,” says Walker. “You can talk to the sheriffs’ departments. … There are very, very few problems related to the trail and serious crime. The (state park staff members) do a great job of staying on top of things.”

Word also spread of success stories like the 240-mile Katy Trail in Missouri, which generated an estimated $29.2 million in added revenue for communities along the route in 2022. Closer to home, Emporia’s Unbound Gravel road race has been bringing upward of 4,000 riders from dozens of countries to its annual event with little conflict and lots of economic benefits.

Walker and others say personal exposure to the trail, and those who use it, has also soothed many who once saw it as a negative.

“Locals see people parking downtown, and then the groups going out on the trail, and they think it’s good because people are having so much fun,” says Lee. “They see people coming from (Carroll’s) bike shop and start to think maybe they should give it a try. We have a lot of people who hadn’t ridden a bike through most of their lives buying one and now use the trail all the time.”

Riders from in and around Osawatomie get together on a weekly basis, weather permitting, to pedal away from Mile Zero with the goal of ending their journey at sunset. Photo by Jeff Tuttle

Special events, Lee says, also paint the trail in a positive light. In August, Carroll’s Moonrise Ride, a back-packing, camping, concert and prime rib feast, drew more than 225 riders who cycled from Ottawa to Pomona State Park and back the next day.

The COVID lockdowns gave the Flint Hills Trail a huge boost as people turned to the outdoors for recreation and social distancing.

“The Flint Hills Trail saved my sanity during the pandemic,” says Jeff Dorsett, of Osawatomie. “There wasn’t anything else to do, I had to get out, so I went there as much as two to three times a day.”

McCown says trail usage increased dramatically as the pandemic wore on and remains stronger than pre-pandemic.

Carroll’s business increased exponentially in 2020. Incoming bikes were spoken for well before arrival. He thinks that the current lack of used bikes for sale indicates many who started riding during the pandemic plan to continue cycling.

TOWNS BUYING IN, COOPERATING

Now all key towns have bought into promoting and improving the trail.

Lee says the city leaders of Ottawa were always on board, based largely on experiences with the Prairie Spirit Trail. They were quick to help Carroll, from Lenexa, find a place to start his shop just a few yards from the intersection of the two trails. Private donations came quickly to build the $4plus million Legacy Square, a 20,000-square-foot green space, where the trails intersect downtown. The square has a large, covered parking area, public restrooms and a pavilion. Several special events that incorporate music and cycling have been held. The city has installed signage to the trail and amenities such as bicycle repair stations equipped with basic tools and an air pump.

After years of opposition from within the Osage City government, the community has done an about-face. In 2011 a newly elected city council stopped accepting any state funding and

involvement with the Flint Hills Trail. Five years later, residents elected a pro-trail council that remains so.

Rod Willis, the town’s city manager, says in 2020 the city received a $1 million Kansas Department of Transportation grant to improve the trail so users don’t have to utilize a confusing detour on public roads in Osage City.

For years, Osawatomie was probably the trail’s most obstinate town. That was a frustration for trail proponents because the trail’s eastern trailhead was within a mile of the town. Osawatomie is also a short drive from the 2 million-plus potential trail users in the Kansas City metro area.

Today, Osawatomie may be the trail’s biggest cheerleader. The city has built a connector trail three-quarters of a mile long linking the Flint Hills Trail to the western side of town. The Mile Zero arch marks the trail’s beginning. A large kiosk offers trail and town information in addition to a restroom and a large parking area. Osawatomie also has an active and official trails committee.

Dorsett and his wife, Sarah, recently retired physicians, are two of several people who’ve stepped up to promote Osawatomie’s involvement with the trail. They’ve opened a bicycle repair shop, Freedom’s FrontTire. In addition to keeping trail riders rolling, the Dorsetts accept donated bikes in disrepair, fix them, then sell them to residents at cheap prices.

“We have a lot of $25 bikes pedaling around town. It’s a great way to get people on the trail,” says Dorsett.

Bikes that can’t be repaired are turned into yard art as a way to promote cycling. Over two dozen such pieces are displayed around Osawatomie to remind people of the trail. Most carry a bright color theme. The town also has a mural partially dedicated to the trail, banners and signage. During

warm weather months, the Dorsetts lead group bike rides for locals or visitors. Rides often end with a meal.

TRAIL-BASED BUSINESSES

Several entrepreneurs are investing in the trail’s future.

Carroll’s full-line bicycle shop was the first, when it came to Ottawa in 2018. Sales of new bikes, related gear, rentals and repairs keep him and a small staff busy. A dedicated promoter, Carroll holds many events designed to help his business and bring more people to Ottawa and the trail.

Examples include Saturday morning waffle and coffee breakfasts at the shop before an organized ride. He also leads weekly treks that involve cycling, and recovery time at a downtown brewery.

At Osage City, about halfway between Council Grove and Ottawa, a native Kansan with rental properties near his home in Washington, D. C., noticed an absence of overnight options when he visited his parents.

“It’s the largest town in Kansas without a motel. There’s basically no place to stay, and we have that trail going through town,” says Nathan Willis, the city manager’s son. “It seemed such an obvious investment. We talked about creating some Airbnbs, then we found this building downtown was going up for tax auction. It’s 8,000 square feet and the trail literally runs right behind the building.”

Willis is trying to maintain the character of the structure, built in 1883, by preserving its pressed tin ceilings and octagonal skylights. Once remodeled, he’s hoping for a building with several apartments for overnight guests and two retail spaces. One would be a coffee shop that could serve meals, with a back patio that borders the trail.

OVERLEAF: Jeff and Sarah Dorsett have a bike repair shop in their Osawatomie garage. Bicycles that are too far gone to be ridden are salvaged, decorated and placed around town as yard art. Photo by Jeff Tuttle

Some days in Osawatomie, the bikes get carried, as Jeff Dorsett does here with another piece of yard art. But most days, the bikes help carry Osawatomie. Townspeople initially were cool to the concept of the trail, but times and attitudes change. The town landed funding a few years ago that helped build a connecting link and establish a trailhead. Now the trail is seen as the primary tourist destination in Miami County. Photo by Jeff Tuttle

“I think we’ll be able to get people along the trail to stop,” says Willis, an avid cyclist. “Osage City needed some investment. We’re hopeful it will get others to build downtown too.”

Darius Riley and Amy Noller’s investment along the Flint Hills Trail is far simpler than Willis’. It’s basically a patch of prairie at the edge of the tiny town of Allen. Riley, of Shawnee, says he and Noller had just returned from biking Missouri’s Katy Trail when they decided they needed some property where they could stay in their teardrop camper and cycle on weekends.

The unimproved property in Allen, known now as Basecamp Flint Hills, put them within a few yards of the trail, and close to some of the many miles of gravel roads used in the Emporia cycle races. The campground is dotted with small shade trees, and is perfect for tent camping.

In 2022 they had more than 200 reservations for the campground. They have two RV pads with electricity and water. The remaining sites are just places with shade, water and a portable toilet nearby. Riley says their campground helps promote the Flint Hills Trail as much as the Flint Hills Trail promotes their campground.

“A lot of our people are coming to use the trail and find us,” he says. “There are also people traveling through Kansas who prefer primitive camping. They find out about us, come and end up using the trail. We think there’s a lot of room for growth.”

CONNECTING TO OTHER TRAILS

Everyone interviewed for this article expects more trail-based businesses to be established and existing businesses to do more to cater to cyclists, hikers and horseback riders.

Work to put the grant money to use improving and finishing the trail should begin this year, according

to McCown. But the trail’s completion will also be a beginning in many ways.

“One of our main goals is to have (the Flint Hills Trail) be a main artery to connect all of these communities,” says McCown. “Once we connect them, they can create small trails throughout their communities.”

City managers Scanlon and Dross tell of plans to create and promote trails that lead visitors from the Flint Hills Trail to local attractions such as museums, historic sites and business areas. Scanlon thinks it’s a great way to get people to explore Osawatomie’s sites dedicated to remembering the Bleeding Kansas era that preceded the Civil War.

Dross has placed a priority on creating trail access to two city-owned lakes a mile west of Herington that offer good fishing and camping. He can envision the lakes eventually becoming key stops for those accessing or leaving the trail. Many, he says, would probably cycle into town for supplies, to do laundry or eat meals.

“We’re not just thinking of this process being done when the trail is finished,” says Dross. “We’re looking 10, 15 and 20 years down the line of what we can do utilizing the trail.”

And eventually, those promoting the Flint Hills Trail want it to connect to other rail trails. Carroll says many who use the Flint Hills Trail also head south from Ottawa on the Prairie Spirit Trail, which takes cyclists to Princeton, Garnett and Iola, among other towns.

The Kanza Rail-Trails Conservancy is now focusing on completing the 40-mile Landon Trail. It will eventually give Flint Hills Trail users easy access into Topeka and its Brown vs. Board of Education National Historic Site, museums and the many nearby lakes, reservoirs and small towns.

The ultimate goal is to connect the Flint Hills Trail to Missouri’s 240-mile-long Katy Trail and its 500,000 annual visitors. Osawatomie’s Scanlon talks of several small towns along that trail, with vibrant, trail-based economies, as prime examples of what could happen in Kansas.

Dorsett thinks such a connection would easily draw cyclists from around the world. The two trails, with the ones needed to connect them, would total over 400 miles of quality riding.

“That will be an amazing opportunity when it happens,” says Dorsett, who’s seen many such successes in his three decades of riding rail trails. “The trails are so much alike, yet so different as per landscapes. People can cycle across the Ozarks and across the Flint Hills on one long ride. I’m really looking forward to when people will be able to do that.”

Melanie Robinson-Smith, Missouri State Parks deputy regional director, says she’s heard from

DISCUSSION GUIDE

1. How would you describe the ways in which views about the Flint Hills Trail have changed over time? What do you think drove those shifts?

2. When you think about your own difficult challenges, how might the stories people tell about that situation change over time?

many Katy Trail regulars who are anxiously awaiting the opportunity to combine the two great trails.

The expected increase in cycling traffic should give Kansans increased reasons to be proud of their communities and what they’ve created. Many already are.

Dorsett sees locals picking up rare bits of trash they see along the trail. Some landowners work continually to improve the look of their frontage lands along the trail. Some, he says, go to the trail just to watch happy people pass by. Walker says he is one of such locals near Osawatomie.

“It’s been a heck of a lot of work, especially early on, but things are better. But every time I see somebody on the trail and enjoying it as much as we’d hoped, it just validates all that we did. We all have good reason to be proud of our trail.”

Bicycles are generally the conveyance of choice on the trail. But horses are welcome and people afoot too. This year the first trail race was scheduled for April. Participants could choose a distance — 50 kilometers, 20 miles or 10 miles — out and back from Osawatomie.

Photo by Jeff Tuttle

BY: BECCY TANNER

BUCKLING DOWN

AMID CHANGE

AFTER THE PANDEMIC STOPPED THE FLOW OF TOURISM, ABILENE’S TOURISM DIRECTOR THOUGHT BIG ABOUT AN ATTRACTION THAT COULD HELP RESECURE THE COMMUNITY’S

PLACE IN THE TRAVEL LANDSCAPE. THUS, THE WORLD’S LARGEST BELT BUCKLE.

Kansans have a knack for thinking big – world’s largest type of big.

Consider, in the pantheon of Kansas big, Cawker City’s ball of twine. Wichita’s acrylic mural on a grain elevator. Goodland’s Van Gogh painting on a mammoth easel, Muscotah’s baseball, Mineral City’s Big Brutus, Wilson’s big Czech egg. And Garden City’s monster hairball.

Now comes a giant belt buckle.

Not just any belt buckle – a purported world’s largest belt buckle – at 19 feet and 10.5 inches wide and 13 feet and 11.25 inches high.

It’s pull-off-the-highway-and-snap-a-selfie type of big.

And it’s a curative for a pandemic that for two years nearly stopped the flow of tourists everywhere, and left a central Kansas tourism director all but alone with time to dream big.

“During COVID, we cut all additional staff, and for two years, I worked at an office of one,” says Julie Roller Weeks, director of the Abilene Convention and Visitors Bureau. “The pandemic greatly affected tourism organizations around the world. … Without overnight stays, the CVB (convention and visitors bureau) didn’t have funding. The staff cuts, paired with reserve funds, allowed us to continue our marketing efforts – but it was tough and depressing.”

But Roller Weeks never stopped thinking. When there were occasional gatherings around Abilene,

In the world of cowboys and cowgirls, a belt buckle is more than something that keeps their pants from falling down. It's wearable art, proof of an achievement, a glimpse into their lives. A unique buckle can draw admiring, even covetous, looks. Building on that, Julie Roller Weeks of the Abilene Convention and Visitors Bureau rode herd on the notion of crafting the world largest buckle as a tourist attraction for her town.

Photo by Jeff Tuttle

she’d throw out her dinner party question as only a tourism director can do – if you built the “world’s largest,” what would it be?

DARING TO ASK THE BIGGEST QUESTION

Because of its legacy as a Kansas cowtown, Roller Weeks thought her town’s World’s Largest Whatever should have a Western theme.

Abilene holds a distinctive spot in the history of Kansas and the West. For four years starting in 1867, it was the rail head of the Kansas Pacific Railway and the end of the fabled Chisholm Trail. Its hastily built cattle pens and shipping yards provided Texas cattlemen with a place to sell their herds and ship them eastward.

But Abilene is also known for another tourism draw – home of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum.

Adding another significant attraction could represent a leadership challenge of sorts. Would it be possible to create another tourist draw without siphoning visitors from established attractions?

“Some say we’re a 50-50 town, but it’s true,” Roller Weeks says. “Half are enthusiastic about Abilene’s Wild West Days; the other half identify with and celebrate Eisenhower. We must balance these two dynamic stories, so we do not alienate the other half.”

Other big attempts Abilene has made in telling the Old West story have included a Big Spur.

From 2002 to 2016, Abilene was home to the World’s Largest Cowboy Spur – at 28 feet tall. But then, Lampasas, Texas, stepped in with a spur that’s 35 feet tall and 20 feet wide.

Roller Weeks kept researching big titles and claims.

• Seattle claims the World’s Largest Cowboy Hat at 44 feet wide and 19 feet high.

• San Antonio claims the World’s Largest Boots, a pair of colossal fake ostrich-and-calfskin cowboy boots 35 feet tall and 33 feet long.

• Dallas formerly claimed the World’s Largest Belt Buckle at 10 feet tall and 14.4 feet wide until Abilene super-sized it.

• Prior to Dallas’ buckle, Uranus, Missouri, had buckle bragging rights with a buckle 10 feet tall and 13 feet wide.

What if Kansas out-bragged Texas?

“At the time, the World’s Largest Belt Buckle was in Missouri. It moved to Texas during our building process. Then we built it,” Roller Weeks says. “Belt buckles are walking community billboards, making it the perfect tourism-oriented/promotional world’s-largest project. Looking back, I see the buckle as a symbol of our community surviving the pandemic and moving forward in a big way.”

But how well would this Dickinson County town of 6,400 residents buy in to her idea?

HOMETOWN ROOTS

It helped that Roller Weeks is a known entity around town.

She grew up in Dickinson County, was a 4-Her and returned to Abilene in 2016 to accept the tourism director’s position.

“Abilene has a longstanding reputation as a tourist community. The organization was ready for a refresh,” Roller Weeks says. “When I returned, I didn’t immediately change things. That’s a recipe for a short-term career in town, and I don’t want to be a job hopper. I want to be part of building something. … The 4-H motto comes to mind, ‘To make the best, better.’ So, I asked a lot of questions.

“And listened.”

She also followed a philosophy she picked up from the Kansas Sampler Foundation, a nonprofit that works to preserve and sustain rural culture, about “Successful Integration Into Small Communities.” (Full disclosure: The co-director of the foundation, Sarah Green, is married to The Journal’s executive editor, Chris Green.)

“If I had done this (the largest belt buckle) the first year I was back here, it would not have worked,” she says.

Timing is everything.

It’s also about making incremental changes that bring about positive change.

And that is where the pandemic played a role in creating the belt buckle bonanza.

“I needed something happy to get excited about, and I looked around to see if there were some largest things we could beat and if we had the local talent to build it.”

She began looking for ways she could positively make changes within the community.

“I started celebrating the positives both through work and personal channels.”

#AbileneProud became her go-to catchphrase. “Money and manpower gravitate to positivity,” she says.

Abilene, at the time, had gone through some leadership changes, especially at City Hall.

“Constant change makes projects and risks challenging,” she says. “Every time there is a leadership change in a small, rural community, you start over. Residents and businesses tire of change and are slow to accept new people. But the only way we will accomplish great things is with stable leadership.”

Roller Weeks became administrator of a grant program that enabled the city to purchase new trash cans and benches, and buy at auction a one-of-a-kind piece of local history: a hand-carved wooden bull’s head sporting real horns 40 inches

Abilene's Cowboy Boots project pays homage to T.C. McInerney’s Drovers Boot Store from the 1870s. Eleven oversized, decorated cowboy boots are displayed prominently around town. Photo by Jeff Tuttle

across that in the 19th century had hung in the Bull’s Head Saloon, owned by local character “Shotgun Ben” Thompson.

Thompson’s saloon was one of several in town that catered to the cowboys who herded cattle from Texas to Kansas during the late 1860s and 1870s. Nearly 80 people donated $200 each to bring the historic bull’s head home to Old Abilene Town.

In addition, several murals were added downtown proclaiming the town’s Old West heritage and the hometown of the nation’s 34th president.

“People are philanthropic for things that they want to be philanthropic to – it has to be something they care about,” Roller Weeks says.

Like a snowball gaining momentum, Roller Weeks says, she witnessed a renewed enthusiasm and spirit in Abilene.

It comes from a can-do spirit. It also comes from tapping people locally to help tell the town’s story. When people believe in a project, Roller Weeks says, “they will give everything for it. I think my genuine excitement about it (helped). People

gave before they had an idea what the design was. They did it to support the project and to support the community. They gave to support me. And, I really appreciate that – and that’s not something I would want to jeopardize or take lightly. I saw it as a vote of confidence. They knew we would get the job done.”

To move the buckle project forward, she needed an artisan.

And that was Jason Lahr at Fluters Creek Metal Works.

“His bread and butter is welding – cattle panels and stair rails and all those things,” Roller Weeks says. “But he is also a really, really good artist. He would never tell you that, but he is. And I came up with this crazy idea. I told him I’d need to write a grant. He gave me a number. I came back a few months later and said, ‘I have the money.’ He said, ‘Let’s get going.’”

A FARMER’S EYE

Lahr was already well-known around Abilene for a piece of artwork he co-created with Donnie

Knauss: the Abilene Cowboy, a sculpture that stands more than 15 feet high and weighs a ton.

“I am always up for a challenge,” Lahr says. “(The buckle) just seemed like something that might be interesting.”

A sixth generation Kansan, Lahr lives on what once was his grandparents’ farm.

“My dad and my son both farm and I help as much as I can on the farm. But I’ve never been considered an artist. In fact, I’m sure when I was in seventh grade it seems my art teacher told me I’d be better off in home ec than art class.”

Back in the early 1990s, Lahr began constructing metal buildings –machine sheds for farmers around the area. He’s built handrails and benches, and is willing to apply his welding skills to most any project.

“I’m just dumb enough to try these kinds of things,” he says.

“Sometimes I speak before I think. And so, when she (Roller Weeks) asked, I said, ‘Sure.’ Then, you step back and scratch your head and you go, ‘What have I done?’”

It’s what farmers do, Lahr says. They make things.

And he comes from a family that makes things. A great-grandfather, Harry Ausherman, held several patents and invented a rasp bar for grain threshing cylinders and a chain tightening means for self-propelled combines.

“He and his brother came up with a self-serve gas pump, which I believe was in Industry, Kansas, which is just north of Abilene about 20 miles or so,” Lahr says. “So, when it comes to a creative mind, I think it might be a little bit of heredity.”

The bulk of the six-month buckle project was paid for with a $22,000 Attraction Development Grant

from Kansas Tourism. In addition, 100 donors bought replica belt buckles at $200 each, affording them the honor of having their names placed on the back of the big buckle.

“Honestly, it could have been done quicker, but I started on it and then I had several buildings to do. So, I did that and then got back to the buckle.”

Lahr designed it using four pieces of sheet metal and incorporating symbols the town is identified with – a C.W. Parker carousel pony, representative of the company’s presence in town at the turn of the 20th century; a likeness of Eisenhower; a steam engine of the Abilene & Smoky Valley Railroad excursion line; a longhorn for the town’s turn as a cowtown; the historic Seelye Mansion; a greyhound recognizing Abilene as the Greyhound Capital of the World; a vintage telephone symbolizing C.L. Brown’s Telephone Company, which evolved into Sprint Corp.; and, of course, Old West legend “Wild Bill” Hickok.

And it can be added to, if needed, Lahr says.

“I was actually going to kind of make it like a leaf table to where you could just pull it out – but then, there was kind of a limited budget,” he says. “I wanted to make it to where we can just unbolt the pieces and slide another chunk in there.”

In addition, Lahr designed and made the circular staircase that winds its way up to a platform in the Central Kansas Free Fairgrounds in Eisenhower Park, where visitors can get a good view of Abilene and have pictures taken of themselves “wearing” the big buckle.

The buckle was unveiled last December, just days before Christmas.

To help boost the buckle’s status, Roller Weeks created a video featuring Jefferson White, an

Jason Lahr of Fluters Creek Metal Works, a local welder and artisan, designed and built the big buckle over a period of six months, fitting it into his work schedule as best he could. "Honestly, it could have been done quicker, but I had several buildings to do." he says.

Photo by Jeff Tuttle

actor from the TV series “Yellowstone,” who plays Jimmy Hurdstram.

The video was the single-most popular video ever shared by Abilene’s tourism center.

“Howdy friends, how you doing?” White says, looking directly into the camera. “Listen, you know that I would risk my life for a good belt buckle, and I’m so excited that my friends in Abilene, Kansas, which was named a True West Town of the Year and Best Historic Small Town, are building the World’s Largest Belt Buckle. … The buckle is huge. … You can contact my friends at Visit Abilene to learn more. Their office is in the train station downtown. So, this one time, go to the train station, you all.” train station downtown.

And indeed, the buckle has proven its worth as an attraction.

Erika Nelson, creator of the World’s Largest Collection of the World’s Smallest Versions of the World’s Largest Things in Lucas, strategically bought the 100th belt buckle. Hers is the first name you see climbing up the buckle’s stairs.

“It was made by a welder who didn’t call himself an artist and who let his art come through because he knew in his head what it was supposed to look like,” Nelson says. “It’s like the perfect kind of community art – where it brings people together to create something. And that is what art should be.”

ROOM TO GROW

But is it really the world’s largest?

Really?

It won’t be certified.

“Did you know Guinness charges for certifying World’s Largest Things for commercial projects?” says Roller Weeks, who indicates the potential fee was in the $20,000 range. “After consulting with a World’s Largest Things expert, we were advised not to pay the astronomical fee – not that we could anyway – and just ‘claim it.’

“But anyone with a smartphone ruler app, tape measurer, can measure and see we are the world’s largest. So, we bought the domain www. worldslargestbeltbuckle.com and are promoting it as such.”

And that, she says, is invaluable.

“The WLBB has been featured on every Kansas TV station, in newspapers, radio stories and magazines,” Roller Weeks says. “And then there’s social media. Everyone who takes a photo with the WLBB shares it with their audience and promotes Abilene. We could not buy this level of publicity –especially since the pandemic significantly limited our budget.”

THE COMMUNITY BACKING

Elizabeth Weese, director of the Dickinson County Community Foundation, says she attributes much of the success of the buckle project to Roller Weeks and her contagious enthusiasm.

“She really did it,” Weese says. “We have the right people in the right position. It’s been teamwork. A lot of people are working together and partnering together. Truthfully, when we work together there is nothing we can’t accomplish.

“It means bringing all your tools to the table, and maybe taking on a challenge that’s not necessarily in your lane or wheelhouse – but you are willing to

step up and do it. That’s what has been beneficial to our community. We are all willing to say whatever it takes to move our community forward.”

The community has also supported a Cowboy Boots project, which pays homage to T.C. McInerney’s Drovers Boot Store from the 1870s by placing 11 decorated cowboy boots throughout Abilene – similar to how Lindsborg is identified with Dala horses.

The payoff has been huge.

Here are some of the rewards Abilene has received in the past two years:

• Finalist, Best Historic Small Town by USA Today.

• Best Promotion of a Historic Place by True West Magazine.

• Destination of the Year by Midwest Travel Network.

• Favorite U.S Small Town by TravelAwaits.

• #1 Favorite U.S. Small Town

“Other towns would love to have just one of these awards in a lifetime career; ours keep multiplying,” Roller Weeks says. “It’s incredible! We literally shout the news from the rooftops with over-the street banners, press releases and social media campaigns.”

DISCUSSION GUIDE

1. What leadership ideas do you see playing out in this story?

2. Is thinking big encouraged in your community? Why or why not?

Visitors who pull off Interstate 70 can make the trip to the Central Kansas Free Fairgrounds in Eisenhower Park for their closeup with the big buckle. Those who climb the circular staircase can then pose for photos "wearing" the artwork.

Photo by Jeff Tuttle

The promise –and challenges –of building a workplace

Where everyone leads

BY: CHRIS GREEN

NEARLY FIVE YEARS AGO, A COMMUNITY MENTAL HEALTH CENTER IN SOUTHEAST KANSAS EXPLORED OFFERING EMPLOYEES LEADERSHIP TRAINING AS A WAY OF PREPARING FOR AN ERA OF CHANGE. LITTLE DID THEY KNOW, THEY’D SOON BE FACING A TRIPLE WHAMMY OF DAUNTING CHALLENGES. ALL INDICATIONS ARE THAT FOUR COUNTY MENTAL HEALTH CENTER HAS COME OUT STRONGER, EVEN IF THE PROCESS OF BECOMING A PLACE WHERE EVERYONE LEADS REMAINS A WORK IN PROGRESS.

At the Four County Mental Health Center, change arrives in many forms. One of them is employee turnover. As a part of the center's orientation for new hires, Executive Director Greg Hennen provides a monthly lunch at a local restaurant. Photo by Jeff Tuttle

Facing just one big change can be enough to tax the leadership capacity of many organizations. But in 2020, Four County Mental Health Center found itself in the midst of what might be called a triple whammy.

Already transitioning in how it served patients and utilized electronic health records, the COVID-19 pandemic forced employees of the southeast Kansas provider to grapple with another major adaptive challenge.

If there was a bright spot, officials at Four County, one of 26 community mental health centers scattered across the state, knew years before the pandemic that big changes were coming their way. They were also aware that staff members would need to be well-prepared to respond to change as they continued to serve some 6,000 patients at nine different locations scattered across five counties. (Yes, the scope of the center’s work transcends even its name.)

Rewind to the summer of 2018, in the pandemic Before Times. Greg Hennen, the executive director, with a tenure at the center spanning three decades, began discussing with his team a strategy that might help the organization deal with change: leadership training.

Specifically, training at the Kansas Leadership Center through a grant program that would allow his employees to attend without paying tuition. The sessions would serve not just his employees, but would also enroll representatives of other organizations who had received similar grants.

Compared with other training opportunities, the KLC offerings were unique in that they taught participants to embrace leadership as an activity that anyone could do, and that employees could lead beyond their positional authority with a style that engages others in solving the toughest problems. (The Kansas Leadership Center also publishes The Journal, although this story was produced independently of other parts of the organization.)

Hennen had seen more than his fair share of changes in the mental health field over the years. He started out at Four County as a therapist in 1989 as the 26th employee on the roster. He rose to become the executive director in 2010, and now Four County employs close to 400 people.

A state policy shift in the 1990s toward providing mental health services at the community level, instead of at state hospitals, drove much of Four County’s growth. But the organization found itself in the midst of another of the field’s sea changes. Providers like Four County were shifting from being paid for the services they offered to the outcomes they produced for patients.

For patients, the changes offered the promise of longer, healthier lives. Individuals with severe and persistent mental illness, Hennen says, live on average 25 years less than the general population, dying in their 50s rather than their late 70s. Serving people with mental health challenges holistically meant helping them manage other aspects of their health, from ensuring regular visits to a primary care physician to managing high cholesterol or diabetes to seeing a dentist.

For a system that had long been rewarded for providing a narrower range of traditional mental health services – therapy, case management –the transition would require shifts in how the center operated.

Hennen knew Four County had to evolve. But he didn’t want to lose the core of what made Four County the place he had invested his career in.

“It’s a culture that I want to preserve,” Hennen says. “But at the same time … we were going to be going through a large transformation. I wanted to do something to help people kind of envision what the transformation was going to be and to help shape it. That way, they could be on board and not feel like we’re such a different organization.”

‘THE STORY IS THE TRANSFORMATION’

In the years that followed, 235 employees at Four County attended at least one leadership training experience through KLC, and at least 85 have attended multiple programs, according to Melissa Lunsford, Four County’s grant project manager and a member of the core team that oversees the center’s engagement with KLC and its curriculum.

As a result, Four County not only has had large numbers of its workforce trained, it’s reached

a point where more workers have been trained than not, achieving a level of saturation with the training concepts that is rare among the organizations that KLC has worked with.

At times, you can hear the difference it has made. It’s increasingly common for employees to talk to each other differently, Lunsford says, with more utilizing the phrasing in what KLC calls its framework to discuss their work and the challenges they face.

“You’ll hear it in just a normal conversation in the hallway,” Lunsford says. “You’ll hear it in a meeting format. Not all the time. But it’s just those hints of, ‘OK, somebody’s looking at something a little differently than they were before.’”

Four County’s commitment to training so many people to exercise leadership makes it a particularly interesting testing ground for KLC’s ideas about leadership, which were recently spelled out in a national best-selling book called “When Everyone Leads: How Tough Challenges Get Seen and Solved.” Ed O’Malley, KLC’s founding executive who now heads its largest funder, the Kansas Health Foundation, and Julia Fabris McBride, KLC’s chief leadership development officer, authored the book.

If ever there was a proving ground for the idea that everyone in an organization can lead, it would be Four County. And the mental health center has, indeed, achieved key goals. Not only did it weather the pandemic, but it fully integrated the use of electronic health records and, with help from a federal expansion grant that sped up its rate of change, became the first center in Kansas to resemble a certified community behavioral health clinic.

After lawmakers passed sweeping legislation in 2021 aimed at transforming the community mental health system, Four County became one of the first six certified community behavioral clinics in Kansas, a designation signifying it as a state leader in the transition to a model aimed at providing higher quality, comprehensive services to patients.

Kendra Alford works with 6-year-old patient Robert Thomure, the son of Ashley Thomure, at the Four County Mental Health Center's Independence facility.

Photo by Jeff Tuttle

“To me, the story is the transformation, and that the transformation happened in some really challenging times with so much happening,” says Steve Denny, Four County’s deputy director. “Everyone knows what COVID was like. But to think about (electronic health records), that grant, and all those things happened at once. We were able to emerge from that as a leader.”

At a time when just holding steady might have represented success for many organizations, Four County pivoted into embracing major changes, shifts that Denny says are helping the Kansas mental health system avoid plunging into a severe crisis.

“We’ll look back 10 years from now and be like, ‘Wow, that was a huge moment in the transformation of our mental health system.’”

BEYOND JUST GETTING IT DONE

But despite those successes, the process of Four County becoming a place where everyone can lead remains a work in progress. For one thing, it’s unlikely there will ever be a day where every single employee has been trained in using leadership ideas.

Turnover remains a major challenge among mental health providers. Four County, for instance, brings on 60 to 75 new hires every year, Lunsford says. Even among the 235 employees that have received training, at least 25 of those have moved on. And when employees do get trained, participation has to be structured and staggered so that any absences get covered.

“Just for workflow, we can’t have 50 people gone at any given time for a three-day training,” Lunsford says. “That’s just not functional.”

Such dynamics raise questions about how organizations can manage the “hamster wheel,” as Lunsford terms it, and keep the leadership ideas front and center as the composition of their workforce changes.

Even embracing the idea of training large numbers of people raises questions about competing values

between immediate responsibilities and building capacity for the future. As Lunsford puts it:

“I don’t know if this is true to every industry on the planet or not. But I have literally never held a job in my lifetime, especially within social services, where you didn’t have too much on your plate. That just sheer volume of workload keeps people out of that more creative mindset … Because they are just trying to get it done.”

And being able to get it done matters. Gena Kastler, a case manager based in Independence, works across five counties with individuals with mental or physical disabilities who are homeless or precariously housed and helps process disability claims. While her daily duties include interviews and paperwork, when her clients call for assistance, they become her priority.

“We see people in their environments,” Kastler says. “We see what their living room looks like. We see if they’ve bathed in the last few days. We see their facial expressions, probably once, twice, maybe three times a week. So, we are on the ground.”

Still, Kastler says participation in the training is strongly encouraged at Four County, so she signed up. She liked the introductory program, but she felt lost during a second, more intense program, which she felt like required more selfdirection. Despite that, she’s signed up for a third this summer.

“KLC is kind of like algebra,” Kastler says. “It’s a way of thinking. It’s a higher-level process. Most of it is pretty simple. I mean, it’s not anything new. But it’s a different way to put it. And a different way to think about things.”

However, she says she has found it helpful in her approach to client relationships. “On a lot of

different levels, we help individuals learn how to regulate their emotions. When to say something. When not to say something. And how to take leadership of their lives.”

Yet there’s little doubt that even among the workers who do get trained, there are varying reactions to the training experiences and the content. While many if not most workers find immediate value in leadership training, others are a harder sell.

“We’ve really had the whole gamut,” Lunsford says. “We had a few people that were almost rolling their eyes like, ‘This is not new. This is not earth shattering. Thanks for wasting three days in my life.’

“Other people were so energized that when they came back, it was like a religious revival. They’re like, ‘OK, let’s do things differently. Let’s figure out how to be more interactive with everybody and listen to things in a different way,’ so they could make changes on the challenges they were enduring. And we had a bulk of people that were just kind of like, ‘OK, I can do that, if that’s what you want me to do.’ They can take it or leave it.”

LANGUAGE THAT BRINGS PEOPLE TOGETHER

Even small differences in the experiences of participants can prove polarizing, says Andrea Hinkle, an outpatient therapist at Four County’s Cowley County location. As part of their training experience, Four County employees spend part of their time learning in small groups with individuals from other organizations scattered across the state, and sometimes beyond it. Hinkle says she found such interactions energizing.

“For me, I enjoyed being able to interact with other people throughout the state but are in different roles,” Hinkle says. “It was interesting to get other people’s interpretations, to get other people’s ideas on some of the challenges that we have within our agency. They would kind of get up on that balcony and look at things a bit differently.”

But some of her co-workers didn’t have similarly great experiences with their groups, which can be conducted virtually or in-person, depending on the program.

Steve Denny, Four County Mental Health Center’s deputy director, notes with pride the ability of the facility to emerge from a confluence of changes in recent years by embracing transformation.

Photo by Jeff Tuttle

“They had people that ate, didn’t show up, had their screens blacked out, and didn’t want to participate, things like that,” Hinkle says. “That left a bad taste in their mouths about the training.”

Still, Hinkle says, she’s encouraged those who did have bad experiences to try to move beyond them and to try to see the benefits of using the ideas at Four County. For her, the leadership concepts were empowering, especially in her interactions with management.

The framework gave her a way to more effectively communicate concerns about work schedule flexibility and benefits, which led to changes that felt like progress to her. In the past, the organization hadn’t seemed quite so responsive.

“It kind of sometimes felt like we were just a piece of the machine that’s moving,” Hinkle says. But the leadership framework gave the organization a way to talk about challenges in ways that people with different perspectives can understand. “It felt like we actually had a chance to have a voice and to speak up,” Hinkle says. “I felt like the executive team would really hear us out. And since then, we’ve had some incredible changes happen.”

The idea that everybody could and should lead made more people responsible for shaping the organization. Employees such as Hinkle knew they had to speak up if they wanted to see changes, and managers, having invited more people into the conversation, felt obligated to listen and respond. Because workers and managers shared a common leadership language, Hinkle says, “I felt like I could bring this up in a way that I wouldn’t get ignored.”

For managers, the framework has given them a method to communicate changes, which have been

significant over the course of the shift to the certified community behavioral health clinic designation.

To provide care to patients under that model, Four County employees have had to expand the scope of their work to make sure that whatever the patient needs gets provided to them, even if it’s not a service that the center provides on its own.

For more than a quarter-century, Hennen says, Four County could operate with a more targeted approach: “We’re going to deliver behavioral health care, and if it doesn’t have to do with therapy and if it doesn’t have to do with case management, we don’t touch it.

“The transition that our organization needed to make is to say, ‘I’m not going to say we don’t do windows.’ We do everything. We’re going to do whatever the patient needs, and we may not be the service provider for it, but we’re going to coordinate it to make sure it happens on behalf of that patient.”

But as promising as that seems in theory, in practice it means employees have to operate in areas outside their comfort zones, whether it’s asking to measure a patient’s waist to calculate their body-mass index or assessing someone’s risk for diabetes.

“The struggle I can see us having is people taking on that much greater scope,” Hennen says. “It can feel like it’s a little bit intrusive as opposed to beneficial,” to patients and even employees.

Communicating changes related to the transitions can be challenging. Ian Cizerle-Brown, a Four County therapist based in Independence, is a part of a change management committee that has sought to carefully think through changes and how they’re talked about to keep them from becoming too stressful or disruptive.

“With Four County in the past, I’ve seen them implement big changes, or things have come and it’s just been like, ‘Deal with it,’” says Brown, who has worked for Four County for nearly 14 years. “This group has been a really good breath of fresh air. It’s being facilitated by a person (Eric Valle, director of Four County's transportation program and project development manager) who really uses these ideas.

“He’s asking, ‘What voices do we need to implement it?’ He’s constantly taking the temperature, trying to raise the heat on issues. If it’s a quiet meeting, he’ll point out, ‘Hey, I see we’re pretty low energy today. What’s going on? How can we fire up on these issues? Where do we need to focus?’ Things like that. It’s been a very huge change for the organization and that’s been a very powerful use of the leadership dimensions.”

Registered nurse Natasha Esquivel of the Four County Mental Health Center administers a monthly booster to client Tony Clubine of Independence. Photo by Jeff Tuttle

Melissa Lunsford, Four County Mental Health Center’s grant project manager, says individual employees react differently to KLC training. “We had a few people that were almost rolling their eyes like, ‘This is not new.' … Other people were so energized that when they came back, it was like a religious revival.” Photo by Jeff Tuttle

A WORK IN PROGRESS WITH TANGIBLE WINS

Denny, the deputy director, says he sees the application of the leadership framework leading to transformations that are creating tangible progress. The center couldn’t have achieved its goal of serving significantly more veterans – 120 a quarter, a 27% increase from the previous year – without navigating the adaptive challenges of building partnerships with the local Veterans of Foreign Wars post and the Veteran Affairs system.

In hopes of better serving patients at their time of greatest need, the center worked collaboratively across three locations to change long-established procedures, a process that required engaging, listening and responding to voices across the system, Denny says.

87% of admissions now occur on the same day they are requested. 91% of admissions occur within 10 business days, with an average wait

time of three business days. The number of clients being served went up 5% from the previous year.

Employee departures are on the wane, too, with the turnover rate dropping from nearly 21% in 2020 to just under 19% the past two years.

And the center’s services are making a difference in people’s lives. 82% of children and 85% of adults showed functional stabilization or improvement. Readmissions to inpatient psychiatric care within 90 days are at 2%, a drop from 7% the previous year. Higher risk patients are largely kept out of the state hospital system and avoid homelessness. 65% avoided incarceration incidents.

Despite the center’s achievements, changing an organization’s culture is not something that happens quickly, Hennen notes. Becoming a workplace where everyone can lead is a multiyear process. He mentions the concept of a flywheel,

which is discussed in “Good to Great,” a management book by Jim Collins that describes how companies build momentum in a variety of areas over time, which leads to selfperpetuating success.

Hennen notes that at one point, a new employee was visibly anxious or nervous to speak with him. He suspects she had past experience in environments where those in authority retaliated against people who spoke out.

“I’m not an ominous guy. I don’t think I look that threatening. But the position that I hold was.”

But over the course of six to eight months, the employee – a member of the core team that interacts with KLC – reached a point where she could provide candid feedback to authority. It’s something that he hopes becomes widespread in the years to come.

“My fantasy is that every employee in our organization would feel as comfortable as she does to be able to say, ‘Hey, I’ve got a different idea.’ And ‘What is this?’ And, ‘Man, here’s what I’m hearing in the hallway. I think we really goofed that one up.’ My hope is that eventually we get to the point that people do that in a constructive and respectful manner. Then I’ll know we’ve got the momentum on that flywheel really moving.”

DISCUSSION GUIDE

1. What are the key characteristics of an organization where everyone leads?

2. What barriers do you think prevent organizations from having leadership at more levels?

The Monarch Club in Coffeyville is one of the nine campuses maintained by the Four County Mental Health Center. Below, from left: At a February gettogether, attendant care worker Grace Jordan engages in discussion with patient Madison Miller. In the kitchen, patient Ashley Cole makes chicken salad. The occasion on this day was to discuss activities for 2023.

Photos by Jeff Tuttle

Loran Osborne (at right), case manager/ veterans service provider at Four County Mental Health Center, helps Vietnam War veteran David Ward (center) deal with the paperwork and hurdles that can accompany enrollment in VA programs. Persian Gulf War veteran and former Montgomery County Commissioner Ryan York (at left) has been working with veterans and lending his expertise on such matters for years. Photo by Jeff Tuttle

How do you decide a neighborhood’s future?

BY: KYLIE CAMERON

FAIRMOUNT SPRANG UP IN THE LATE 1890S, WITH CLOSE TIES TO ITS COLLEGE NEIGHBOR, NOW KNOWN AS WICHITA STATE UNIVERSITY. OVER A SERIES OF TRANSITIONS, WHICH INCLUDED FAIRMOUNT BECOMING A LARGELY BLACK NEIGHBORHOOD, THEIR RELATIONSHIP CHANGED. NOW DEVELOPERS WHO HOPE TO SERVE A GROWING STUDENT BODY ARE REMAKING FAIRMOUNT’S NORTHERN EDGE WITH HIGH-END STUDENT APARTMENTS. IS THERE A WAY TO RESOLVE STAKEHOLDERS’ COMPETING VISIONS FOR THE FUTURE?

When Jim Maloney, 84, moved to Wichita’s Fairmount neighborhood in 1968, he was one of the first Black residents to live in the residential area, located directly south of Wichita State University’s campus.

There was only one other Black family on the block when he moved to 15th Street and Fairmount Avenue, on the western edge of an area that stretches from Hillside Street to Oliver Avenue between 13th and 17th streets in the city’s northcentral core. They moved soon after.

“It was predominantly white,” he says.

That soon changed. Efforts to desegregate housing and schools, and the phenomenon of white flight, resulted in more Black residents moving into the neighborhood and whites moving out, not only in Fairmount but in older urban neighborhoods across the country.

Today the largest percentage of residents in the neighborhood are Black.

These days, Maloney is watching another transformation unfold, the latest in a series of transitions that have continually remade Fairmount since its establishment in the late 1800s. In its beginnings, the neighborhood was directly tied to Wichita State, then known as Fairmount College. Several homes in Fairmount served as residence halls or housing for professors.

The changing eras can be seen in Fairmount’s varied housing styles. Sprawling Victorian mansions pepper every few blocks with dozens of ranch-style homes in between.

Now, to the dismay of some residents – and the delight of others – developers are remaking the northern edge of Fairmount from low-income housing into luxury student apartments. For his part, Maloney says the changes represent an improvement.

“I like the change,” Maloney says. “I mean, it’s for the better, and it looks good.”

But the rate of change in the neighborhood is increasing, touching such pillars of the community as the Fairmount Congregational Church, which was once connected to the university.

The church served as a beacon to the community until 2019 when its congregation decided to move due to dwindling attendance numbers and structural issues with the building. It was one of the first churches to regularly broadcast religious messages over the radio. It was also one of the first in the nation to serve as a polling location, according to Wichita State’s special collections.

its history and leaves room for homeowners, developers and the student population.

“People living in Fairmount may or may not always connect to Wichita State,” WSU history professor Jay Price says. “So Fairmount had been intertwined with the college for so many decades; now, those are two different communities.”

MULTIPLE STAKEHOLDERS, DIFFERENT VISIONS

Statistically, Fairmount is a diverse neighborhood, where 43% of residents are Black and 25% are white, according to the latest census figures. But the populations aren’t evenly dispersed. Most white residents live along 17th Street, directly across the street from Wichita State’s campus. The connection between the neighborhood and the college, while clear in the beginning, is now cloudy, in part because of the many stakeholders who own property directly south of the campus.

They have their own visions for what they want to see in the neighborhood, and differing ideas on how to accomplish it.

“So we started off fixing properties … one at a time. Duplex here, or four-unit building there, and 12 units and 25,” developer Mark Farha says.

A developer bought the church in 2020 and is turning it into an event venue – almost a metaphor for what is happening to the entire historical neighborhood.

Student housing, mostly high-end student apartments not associated with the university, now lines 17th Street. Before those apartments went up, modest brick quadplexes and other lower-density housing for students served as the north entrance to the neighborhood.

There’s a sense of uncertainty in the neighborhood, with historical boundaries, such as limiting development south of 16th, seemingly less permanent than they were a few years ago. That raises questions about how there can be a shared vision for the future of Fairmount that preserves

“Then here we are some 18 years later. … We’re nearing about 300 doors and plan to build several hundred more over the next few years.”

Farha began buying and developing properties in the neighborhood with his partners in the early 2000s because of the land’s proximity to campus. The group saw an opportunity in developing the area for student housing and renovating already existing properties.

Jim Maloney, 84, one of the first Black residents to move into Wichita’s Fairmount neighborhood, has lived in the area for more than 50 years. He's seen his share of change over that time and is unperturbed by what's taking place currently. "I like the change," he says. "I mean, it's for the better, and it looks good." Photo by Jeff Tuttle

“Wichita State is attracting more students, and they’re on the map more and more every year,” Farha says.

But other developers are ushering in more sweeping changes. High Plains Development includes Todd Farha, who is Mark’s cousin, and other developers. The group recently demolished a cul-de-sac of quadplexes that were built decades ago.

Those quadplexes served as housing for international students and low-income residents. Multiple residents allege that after High Plains bought the properties, it let them go into disrepair.

Then residents were given 60-day notices to vacate so the group could build student apartments.

“I don’t think it’s a bad thing to … develop more and make nicer places,” Roosevelt Court resident Jacob Tollefson said last year, “but I feel like they probably could have been a bit more open about what they were planning on doing.”

Demolition began soon after residents vacated, and construction is well underway.

Now rents are rising in the area. In 2019, a two-bedroom apartment nearby went for less

than $600 a month. Now, that same apartment, with some upgrades, is listed for $750 a month, according to Zillow data.

High Plains didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.

RESIDENT PUSH BACK

In the normally quiet residential neighborhood, it’s hard to ignore the ongoing construction.

In Fairmount Park, which sits in the middle of the neighborhood and spans several blocks, construction noise echoes from a few streets over.

Decades ago, residents raised alarms about developers beginning to buy property between 17th and 16th streets, and began to worry about displacement, according to City Council member Brandon Johnson, whose district includes Fairmount.

“I get less – probably because people are displaced now – but I get less concern of displacement than I used to,” he says. But back then, residents thought it was the university buying property.

Right: Lonnie Barnes, who owns this residential property on Fairmount Avenue, is surrounded on all sides by development, including the University Village envisioned on property owned by Wichita State University to the north. He’s concerned that what’s underway isn’t reflective of the community. Photo by Jeff Tuttle

Developer Mark Farha, here seated on the steps of the Fairmount Cottage, and his partners have been buying property in the neighborhood for about 20 years. His company does renovation work, and its properties cater to the Wichita State student population. The Fairmount Cottage, thought to be designed by the prominent local firm of Proudfoot and Bird, is built in the Queen Anne style and was constructed in 1888.

Photo by Jeff Tuttle

“That fear wasn’t unfounded by the neighborhood,” Johnson says, “but that it wasn’t WSU, it was these developers that saw an opportunity adjacent to WSU.”

Jimmy Guinn lives at the corner of 16th and Fountain streets and says he’s lived in the neighborhood going on 40 years.

In a conversation with another Fairmount resident, Darryl Carrington, Guinn expressed his concerns about the university owning and developing property south of 16th Street, but Carrington quickly corrected him.

Still, Guinn is dissatisfied with the development.

“I don’t know who owns it, but whoever it is, they don’t care,” Guinn says.

“I bet they don’t stay here in this neighborhood.”

Property owners who don’t live in the area are also dissatisfied with the development.

On all sides of his residential property on Fairmount Avenue, Lonnie Barnes is surrounded by developments and now the proposed University Village project to the north. The

University Village development is envisioned for property owned by WSU along 16th and 17th streets between Hillside and Oliver. The university owns about two dozen parcels south of 17th, but none south of 16th.

(Full disclosure: Kaye Monk-Morgan, KLC president and CEO, oversaw University Village in her previous role at Wichita State. She had no involvement in the assignment or development of this story.)

Barnes says the development that’s happening in the neighborhood isn’t reflective of the wider community.

“(The) community can’t afford them or even utilize them,” Barnes says. “They can’t afford office space in none of this. … It’s just kind of monopolizing and isolating the community.”

He’d like to see opportunities for residents and minority-owned businesses in upcoming development projects.

“I have more of a vested interest in bringing some things in here that our community could use as well and give us opportunities,” he says.

It’s still too early to tell what businesses University Village will attract.

Barnes also says developers and residential investors coming to the neighborhood and buying homes has contributed to blight.

“Back in the ’80s and ’90s in here, these were homeowners and well-kept, well-maintained houses,” Barnes says. “You drive through here now, you’ll see that a lot of these here are deteriorating.” As for the rental homes in the area owned by Mark Farha, he says most of the properties he owns have been rentals for years, meaning developers aren’t driving a transition away from homeownship.

“This neighborhood is 95% rental inventory to begin with,” Farha says. “So most of the houses and the land and buildings that we’ve bought, we’ve bought from other landlords.”

Many residents of the neighborhood have also made it clear they want 16th Street to serve as a dividing line between the neighborhood and new development.

In a recent zoning case, Mark Farha wanted to build multifamily townhouses at 16th Street and Vassar Avenue. After residents expressed their dissatisfaction with the plans, Mark Farha agreed to not seek rezoning of the area south of 16th Street.

“I still am hopeful that one day, we can design something that the neighborhood would feel is an improvement over the properties that you see here currently,” he says.

SEEING GOOD AND BAD IN DEVELOPMENT

Maloney, who’s been in the neighborhood since 1968, lives two streets down from Barnes’ property, farther away from the construction. But he sees development in the area as beneficial.

“It was a college atmosphere in the first place,” he says. “Now everything is just college students, that’s the biggest change.”

With the development in the area, investors have taken notice and regularly send letters to residents offering to buy their homes.

Maloney just throws the letters in the trash, though.

With new student housing, students also need a space nearby to hang out, shop and eat – which is what the University Village project aims to provide.

The proposed site for the mixed retail and office building sits across Holyoke Avenue from Kirby’s Beer Store – a “hole-in-the-wall” bar and music venue that’s been in the area for decades.

The university owns the land and has contracted with Lane4, a commercial real estate firm based in Kansas City, Missouri, to develop it. The project also brings another group with a vision for the area.

“It’s kind of a big ask, though, to ask for anyone to come in and put up their own money and take on all the risk of developing something without any type of guarantee by the university,” WSU general counsel Stacia Boden says.

“We’re not guaranteeing or even promising that we’re going to lease anything from them.”

Businesses along 17th Street see the change and influx of new residents in the area as beneficial. Fairmount Coffee sits next to High Plains’ new development, where Roosevelt Court once was. While a coffee shop for students, staff and those who find themselves in the area, it also serves as a Lutheran ministry.

“It’s kind of crazy now to see what has happened around us with the development,” says Paige Edgington, Fairmount’s director of outreach. “I think it’s very exciting from the aspect of what it means for the opportunity to reach out and engage more people.

“It is a lot of change – and change can be scary, too.”

People looking for business opportunities have also taken notice of the new development and the subsequent increase in traffic in the area. Hussain Alghanem is hoping to open a new convenience store in the same building as Kirby’s Beer Store by early spring.

Alghanem says his store will offer some food and drinks, cigarettes and possibly expand to coffee, juice and slushies.

Darryl Carrington was hired in the early 2010s to facilitate relations between Wichita State University and the Fairmount neighborhood. He's still making an effort to bring town and gown together, even though his job ended awhile back.

Photo by Jacinda Hall/ The Sunflower

“It will be good business,” he says, “and then I see a lot of traffic, a lot of cars here.”

BLENDING CULTURES

Darryl Carrington has walked the Fairmount neighborhood on a regular basis since 2005, when he moved from Compton, California.

On a crisp winter afternoon, Carrington points to homes on every block and has a story to tell about the homes and the people who used to live there.

Anyone who happens to be standing in their yard or driveway as he walks by is greeted and soon finds themselves engaged in conversation.

Crisscrossing the neighborhood through Fairmount Park, Carrington also picks up trash.

Through his advocacy and his work, it’s clear Carrington cares about the neighborhood –especially when it comes to getting Fairmount residents and the university to come together.

“The neighborhood and the communities are blending,” Carrington says. “The culture is blending.”

Carrington was once employed by the university to build community relations between the neighborhood and WSU.

His position was funded by a grant from the Kansas Health Foundation to create community engagement with Fairmount after the 2014 rape and murder of Letitia Davis in Fairmount Park.

(Full disclosure: The Kansas Health Foundation is the largest funder of the Kansas Leadership Center, which publishes The Journal.)

The grant for what the university called the Enough is Enough campaign ended in 2018. Carrington still continues that work on his own time, taking meetings with university administrators to bridge gaps between the neighborhood and the campus.

“17th Street is actually our longest border with a neighbor … and is our most impactful border,“ Carrington says.

With dwindling homeownership, though, it’s hard to get residents engaged like Carrington is, making it even more challenging for long-term residents to have a voice in Fairmount’s future.

“I think as people distrust government or feel like we’re going to do what we’re going to do anyway, you have less property owners or less homeowners there who really, truly are invested in the neighborhood,” Johnson says.

“And you have some renters that just say, ‘Well, if it gets too bad, I can move.’ ”

It’s a trend seen elsewhere in Wichita, as well. Membership in neighborhood associations has declined, which can lead to less engagement with local governments.

Many people who were once active in neighborhood associations have gotten older, which is apparent in the Fairmount neighborhood, with most homeowners well into retirement age.

“I don’t know what we’ll do when we leave the home,” says Maloney, whose wife has dementia. “I’m leaving it up to our kids. … They got their own home. … I’ll let them handle that.”

Guinn, who lives on the opposite side of Fairmount from Maloney, has also left the ownership of his home up to his daughter.

“I hope and pray that she doesn’t sell.”

The aging population of the neighborhood is also clear in narratives told by Carrington. Some houses he points at, he’ll note that the owner has

passed away, moved into an assisted living facility or simply moved away.

“Those days are gone,” Carrington says, reminiscing about relationships those homeowners had with each other. “But the work still continues.”

DISCUSSION GUIDE

1. Who are the factions in this story? What do they value? What do they stand to gain or lose?

2. What would working across factions look like in this situation? And whose work is it to do?

The Fairmount neighborhood has had a long and significant history, but it's also a complicated one. As the once graceful old faculty homes were clearly losing their luster, a horrifying crime brought attention to the area. Now with real estate investment and gentrification on the rise, the community may be poised to pivot — a prospect that is seen by residents and observers as both unsettling and beneficial. Photos by Jeff Tuttle

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Sixty years is a long time. And not enough.

By: MARK MCCORMICK

The most common occurrence in our lives continues to fascinate – the passage of time. Each second, each hour, each day, time sprints, then walks, then sits.

This year will mark the 60-year milestone for a slew of iconic moments from 1963. I once had a boss who hated anniversary stories, but I love them. They offer us moments to catch our breath and to reflect on how much has changed, and how much hasn’t.

In April 1963, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. sat in a Birmingham, Alabama, jail cell writing a letter responding to criticism from moderate clergy about his nonviolent direct-action campaign being untimely and his efforts, the work of “outsiders.”

King explained that he was there because injustice was there and that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Continuing, King wrote: “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

Conversely, later that year, during a speech at the University of California, Berkeley, Malcolm X argued for racial separatism.

“Today, our people can see that integrated housing has not solved our problems,” he said. “At best, it was only a temporary solution, one in which only the wealthy, hand-picked Negroes found temporary benefit. After the 1954 Supreme Court desegregation decision, the same thing happened when our people tried to integrate the schools. All the white students disappeared into the suburbs.”

Only the nation’s political tumult could top its racial conflicts.

The Nov. 22 assassination of President John F. Kennedy shocked the nation, and the country received a second shock when Jack Ruby shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin, on live television, closing an important avenue of determining the scope of what had happened.

A podcast for Kansans about Kansans.

History.com reports that of the available assassination files – roughly 5 million pages – about 88% have been open to the public since the late 1990s. An additional 11% had been released but in redacted form, with sensitive portions excised.

Sixty years feels like a long time. A lot should have changed. A lot has not.

Today, the children and grandchildren of the “white moderates” King admonished have taken a more confrontational stance, earning them the derisive moniker, “woke.” A new generation of journalists and academics has explored Malcolm X’s observations about desegregation’s failures in efforts such as critical race theory and later, the 1619 Project. Many school districts remain just as segregated today as they were when Malcolm X observed the pattern of white flight.

Today, we aren’t much closer to learning what led up to JFK’s assassination. His election, the first for a Catholic, has led to only one more, Joe Biden.

We’re still entangled with Russians. Political polarization yet abounds. There remain efforts to suppress Black voting rights.

There was more in ’63. The March on Washington and King’s iconic speech. The 16th Street Baptist church bombing that killed four little girls in Birmingham. Fights over voting rights and housing segregation.

Sixty years is a lot of time, in some respects, but in terms of some of our most protracted challenges, it’s sadly not enough.

Mark McCormick previously served as editor of The Journal.