Summer Journal 2023

Becoming

one

JOURNAL THE out of many

Ten Kansans outline a vision for bringing our communities together amid the challenges of immigration and demographic change. Now, they’re inviting you to join the conversation.

JOURNAL THE

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.

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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

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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

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EXECUTIVE EDITOR

Chris Green

316.712.4945

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Maren Berblinger

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Stefania Lugli

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WHEN EVERYONE LEADS PODCAST

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

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Sam Smith, Director of Communications

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CIVIC ENGAGEMENT

Shaun Rojas, Senior Director

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Chris Harris, Senior Director

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

AJ Dome, Stan Finger, P.J. Griekspoor, Kim Gronniger, Jerry LaMartina, Joel Mathis, Mark McCormick, Amanda Vega-Mavec, Dawn Bormann Novascone, Michael Pearce, Barbara Shelly, Monica Springer, Beccy Tanner, Keith Tatum, Claudia Yaujar-Amaro, Mark Wiebe

COPY EDITORS

Bruce Janssen, Shannon Littlejohn, Laura Roddy

CHRIS GREEN Executive Editor

Chris began overseeing the publication of The Journal’s print magazine in 2012. Since then, it has won state and national awards and expanded to multiple platforms.

In recent years, Chris has worked to confront a national crisis in journalism through collaboration and experimentation. His work with the Solutions Journalism Network includes joining the inaugural cohort of Complicating the Narratives Fellows over the past year.

Chris lives in Wichita with his wife, Sarah, and son, Calvin. He’s nearly halfway through a quest to visit all 50 State Capitol buildings.

STEFANIA LUGLI Civic Engagement Reporter

Stefania is KLC’s first-ever full-time staff reporter and provides news coverage for the Latino community in collaboration with Planeta Venus, a Spanish-language newsroom based in Wichita.

Prior to The Journal, Stefania worked for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, pursuing investigations into mental health and housing issues. She has also provided coverage for The Wichita Beacon, The Boston Globe and the Boston-based GBH News Center for Investigative Reporting.

She lives in Wichita with her dog-son Kenji. In her leisure time, Stefania enjoys reading (no genre limits), pilates and buying plants to forget to water.

2. The Joy of Embracing Complexity

LEARNING FROM EXPLORING THE UNKNOWN.

BY: CHRIS GREEN

4.

Becoming One, Out of Many KANSANS GENERATE A ROADMAP FOR DEALING WITH IMMIGRATION AND DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGE.

BY: CHRIS GREEN (On Behalf of the Complicating the Narratives Thought Partners)

16.

How Thought Partners Sought to Complicate the Narrative

A former editor of The Journal, Mark is a New York Times best-selling author with over 20 years of experience as a reporter, editor and columnist. A collection of his columns, “Some Were Paupers, Some were Kings: Dispatches from Kansas” was published in 2017. He served as executive director of The Kansas AfricanAmerican Museum in Wichita before becoming director of strategic communications for the ACLU of Kansas in 2018.

DEEPENING THE CONVERSATION ON DIVISIVE

MARK MCCORMICK Columnist

The joys of embracing complexity

AWASH IN A SEA OF INFORMATION, WE CAN LEARN MORE BY CHALLENGING OUR ASSUMPTIONS AND EXPLORING THE UNKNOWN.

Nothing quite captures the contradictions of life in 2023 for me like ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence wizard that has dropped jaws since it debuted last fall.

Playing with the interface is like talking with someone who has the internet memorized and is more than happy to impress you with their vast knowledge and cleverness.

For fun, I asked it to write a resume for Bandit Heeler, the father from the Australian children’s TV show “Bluey,” a favorite of my son’s. It came up with bullet points like: “Instilled a strong work ethic and problem-solving skills through creative challenges, such as building forts, organizing treasure hunts, and solving puzzles.”

That I’ve found no better use for such powerful technology than pursuing amusing novelties (leadership Christmas carols, anyone?) is telling: I am out of my depth. Whenever I talk with people about ChatGPT, they almost always seem in awe of its power and have almost no sense of how to use it well.

ChatGPT is merely the latest example of the information age scrambling my brain. Overload has been on my mind as I’ve read Ezra Klein’s book “Why We Are Polarized,” which contends our nation’s political divides go beyond ideological differences or personal animosity. In one section, Klein explores how, far from changing our minds, information reinforces existing beliefs. Complexity is threatening.

Over the past six months, though, I’ve experienced another side, working with the Complicating the Narratives Thought Partners, a diverse group of 10 Kansans that has been helping The Journal with its coverage of immigration and demographic change. An essay that I’ve authored capturing their insights is the cover story for our Summer 2023 edition.

CHRIS GREEN EXECUTIVE EDITOR

We chose these 10 from about 125 applicants, with a specific emphasis on finding people predisposed to thoughtfully disagree. About half of the group voted for President Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election, while the other half

voted for former President Donald Trump. (One person didn’t want to say who they voted for.)

The partners also represent a mix of urban centers and rural areas, different racial and ethnic identities, and different connections to immigration. They weren’t necessarily the biggest Journal fans. Most cared because of the topic, and a few were chosen, in part, because they were willing to critique The Journal’s past coverage decisions or journalists in general.

If this sounds like a setup that had all the makings of a disaster, it was an experience that was anything but. The group found a surprising rapport during our six hours of conversations.

One of the most meaningful moments came when we had the partners interview each other using questions and techniques I learned from a Complicating the Narratives Fellowship with the Solutions Journalism Network. Our approach sprang from the work of Amanda Ripley, who has called on journalists to cover controversial problems differently, and her colleague, Hélène Biandudi Hofer.

I taught the thought partners to use a skill called looping, which involves reflecting back on what’s heard in conversation to test our comprehension and go deeper. We also chose questions from a list of queries that were designed to complicate the conversation.

Listening back to the recordings, I am struck by their beauty. In each dialogue, you get a window into the humanity of the partners that transcends any label.

Delving into complexity takes time, which is why we can’t do it too often. But when the going gets tough or confusing, we’d be wise to embrace it. It allows us to experience moments of transcendent connection that remind us of our shared humanity.

In a time when excess information offers a false promise of wisdom, it might be the only dependable path to learning and growth that is available to us.

Becoming one, out of many

A DIVERSE GROUP OF 10 KANSANS FROM ACROSS THE STATE STARTED DISCUSSING THE TOPICS OF IMMIGRATION AND DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGE LATE LAST YEAR. THEY CAME AT THE TOPIC FROM DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES. ABOUT HALF HAD VOTED FOR BIDEN AND HALF FOR TRUMP IN THE 2020 ELECTION. BUT AS THEY WORKED TO COMPLICATE THE NARRATIVE ON TWO POLARIZING TOPICS, THEY FOUND SURPRISING AREAS OF COMMON GROUND. NOW THEY’RE CALLING ON OTHERS TO JOIN THEIR CONVERSATION AND MAKE THE MOST OF OUR CHANGING COMMUNITIES RIGHT NOW.

About the Article: This essay represents the combined thinking of the Complicating the Narratives Thought Partners, a diverse group of 10 Kansans convened by The Journal and the Kansas Leadership Center through funding from the Solutions Journalism Network. It does not reflect the views of any one individual or organization. It is an effort by the group to call for healthier dialogue with a single voice despite our differences and unique experiences.

About the partners: The Complicating the Narratives Thought Partners were chosen from a group of about 125 applicants to assist The Journal in developing its coverage of immigration and demographic change.

They are: Alba Gutierrez-Ortiz, Dodge City; Clemente Bobadilla-Reyes, Wichita; David Sotelo, Hutchinson; Inas Younis, Overland Park; Jim Terrones, Olathe; Josey Hammer, Courtland; Mark Lowry, Stockton; Marty Hillard, Topeka; Peggy Ruebke, Nickerson; and Reynaldo Mesa, Garden City.

BY: CHRIS GREEN, ON BEHALF OF THE COMPLICATING THE NARRATIVES THOUGHT PARTNERS

ILLUSTRATIONS BY: ANTHONY RUSSO

The debate over immigration and demographic change in this state, not to mention this country, too often feels adversarial and fruitless.

A generation of us, at least, has known immigration only as an issue that faces gridlock. Politicians come and go but the conflict never ends, and the baseline of what we’re discussing rarely advances past stale talking points and bromides.

A recent case-in-point: the enactment of House Bill 2350 in the Kansas Legislature this past session. Many lawmakers and law enforcement professionals saw it as an uncontroversial piece of legislation that would crack down on the crime of human smuggling. Many prominent advocates for Latino immigrants seemed caught off-guard by the measure and see vague language that might be used to target immigrants and lead to discrimination against Latinos.

It might be hard for either side to see reality through the other’s eyes. Especially now that support or opposition to legislation is being filtered through partisan lenses that push us to view a wide array of issues through red-blue dichotomies.

In raw numbers, the U.S. is among the world’s most generous countries when it comes to immigration, as The New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins reported recently, welcoming some 800,000 new citizens every year and giving temporary residency to millions more. Since 1980, the U.S. has also accepted more refugees – about 3 million – than any other country, according to the Pew Research Center. (Our country’s standing, however, falls markedly when immigration is calculated relative to a percentage of the overall population.)

Immigration is part of our country’s story, but our willingness to let people in is still not enough to satisfy the demand, which prompts hundreds of thousands of people, if not more, to attempt to enter the country illegally every year.

Now, a record influx of migrants at the southern U.S. border is overwhelming our immigration systems and testing our political will to fix them. Growing numbers of people seeking asylum,

meaning they immigrate to seek protection from persecution or harm, are a big reason why.

President Joe Biden’s administration contends that the increase is being driven by political and economic turmoil that migrants face in their home countries, especially in Central and South America. But the administration’s critics, which include conservatives and immigration skeptics but also some fellow Democrats, argue that it’s being driven by more lenient immigration policies and rhetoric that encourages immigration. More than 2.5 million people – close to the population of the entire state of Kansas – were allowed in during the first half of Biden’s term.

In any event, strains are being felt across the country, from border towns tasked with initially managing influxes of people to large cities – New York City, Miami, Chicago – that have to help house, clothe and feed them. Filkins, The New Yorker writer, paints a picture of a country with too few agents to patrol the border, too little space to house migrants as they await adjudication, a backlogged court system that takes years to navigate and demoralizes immigrants, profitseekers who aim to make money circumventing border controls and a political system paralyzed by hostility between Democrats and Republicans.

There’s nothing particularly special about the polarization around a measure such as HB 2350 in Kansas. That’s just the way things are. But over the past six months, our small group of Kansans has been experimenting with creating a different kind of conversation around the topics of immigration and demographic change by going deeper.

It’s a conversation that we’ve found challenging, rewarding and enlightening. And if you’re one of those people who is fed up with the status quo, we invite you to join us in this conversation. Because we believe that now is the time for us to act in service of making the most of our changing communities here in Kansas.

BECOMING ‘THOUGHT PARTNERS’

It all started last fall, when we came together for the first time on a Zoom. We were 10 Kansans of

different backgrounds hailing from very different parts of the state. Some of us live in small cities in rural northern Kansas, such as Courtland and Stockton.

Others joined from regional hubs in the central and southwest, namely Hutchinson, Dodge City and Garden City. Urban areas such as Wichita, Olathe, Overland Park and Topeka are represented as well.

With the help of a stipend from the Solutions Journalism Network’s Complicating the Narratives Fellowship, The Journal, the Kansas Leadership Center’s civic issues magazine, brought us together to be “thought partners” in informing the coverage of the topics of immigration and demographic change in the heartland.

Geography wasn’t the only thing separating us. About half of us voted for former President Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election. The other half voted for President Joe Biden. (One of us prefers not to say.) But our political differences rarely came up.

A third of us are immigrants. Another third have had close family members who were immigrants. And we all generally care about immigration because of how it affects our families, friends and communities.

Instead of being divided by immigration, we found ourselves bound together by common concerns. We found that despite our differences, we shared a desire for healthier dialogue on a very polarizing topic –discussions that we hope can lead to progress.

Over the course of four meetings facilitated by Journal and Kansas Leadership Center staff, we introduced ourselves to one another, formulated ideas for shaping civic dialogue on immigration and heard from experts on what makes the topic challenging to deal with.

our stories about immigration and demographic change, and hearing the stories of others.

You can’t understand much at all about people’s experiences with immigration and demographic change unless you talk with them. In conversations just 60 minutes long with one of our peers, we heard impactful tales of connection and passion. Personal experiences add depth, nuance and complexity to dialogue, and once we hear them, it’s hard not to leave with a stronger appreciation for the complexity of a difficult issue.

Through our process, we also, perhaps unexpectedly, found ourselves sharing some common ground that we believe can be a foundation on which a healthier conversation about immigration and demographic change can be built.

WHAT WE’VE LEARNED

Our journey hasn’t always been easy. Even this article became the subject of debate. But the discoveries we made by talking to one another and considering ways our group can be impactful have been meaningful.

Our current political stalemate over immigration hurts immigrants, our communities and our country as a whole.

More recently, we interviewed each other in pairs about our views and experiences related to immigration and listened to recordings of the conversations that other pairs had. Some of us left those engagements deeply moved by the stories our partners told. We’re including key portions of these conversations alongside this essay in hopes that you will get to know us better.

If you take nothing else from this article, we hope it will be about the importance of sharing

Here is a list of things we think we know about making the conversations about immigration and demographic change healthier in Kansas, the heartland and in the country as a whole.

1. Our current political stalemate over immigration hurts immigrants, our communities and our country.

We need to create a new reality for immigration in our country because the way things work currently is unnecessarily inhumane, arbitrary and time-consuming for immigrants, and it deprives communities of workers and residents. We don’t have the safe and secure border we deserve. We need our system to more fully acknowledge the reality that many people want to live in this country and that having them here adds value to our economies and communities. But it’s also clear that not everyone who wants to live here can, and there needs to be a clear, fair, realistic and consistent process to determine who does get to live here. We need rules that make sense and

are equitably enforced and truly sustainable for both individuals who come here and the nation.

2. Our representatives use the topic of immigration to inflame our passions. We need them to lead on solutions.

Immigration is skillfully and cynically exploited by both major political parties, especially since Democrats and Republicans are very far apart on what they value the most when it comes to policy. It’s a wedge issue that can be used to stoke our emotions and get us to vote for the party that will protect us from what we don’t want.

Our group is united in calling on elected officials to prioritize making progress on this topic, not simply pushing their talking points or ducking from the fray. We know that this is risky, and that any change will upset many people. But the status quo is unsustainable.

We believe that most Americans to a large degree want the same things:

• Increased border security.

• A way for children who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children to remain here.

• Consistent, equitable enforcement of immigration laws, such as deportations.

• Acceptance of refugees trying to escape violence and war.

• A way for immigrants here illegally to stay legally.

• Easier ways to sponsor family members to immigrate to the U.S.

The recent passage of the debt ceiling bill in Congress shows how a system that has been steered in a dysfunctional direction can still work when the pressure is on. For the good of the country, Republicans and Democrats must prioritize this issue and carve out the fair compromises necessary to move our country to a new era of immigration policy. If that pressure can’t materialize by itself, then more of us need to do the leadership work necessary to create it.

3. Let’s look toward the borders in our backyard first.

Yes, immigration is an international phenomenon and regulated by the federal government. We

Let’s look toward the borders in our backyard first.

certainly face constraints in what we can do in our state and communities in relation to this issue. And we mostly agree that it’s probably not a great idea for state or local governments to get too involved in being immigration enforcers or turn a blind eye to immigration laws.

Kansas is home to more than 5,000 Dreamers, undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. at a young age and have grown up here and are now covered under an immigration policy called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. These are people who live in our communities, who are Americans in all but the official sense. Our country shouldn’t continue to leave them in legal limbo.

We can’t directly control the laws of our land except through the democratic process. But we can change our own attitudes and behaviors. We should celebrate the contributions these individuals make to our communities, lift them up and make sure they know we believe they belong here. They are our friends, colleagues and people we respect for their contributions, such as Ernestor De La Rosa, the chief diversity, equity and inclusion officer for the city of Topeka.

Indeed, when it comes to immigration and demographic change, Kansas communities are leading in ways that the rest of our state and country can learn from. Garden City is deservedly celebrated for the ways in which city government, law enforcement, schools and churches have made proactive efforts to be inclusive of immigrant populations.

Collaborative efforts in Manhattan to resettle refugees from Afghanistan were the subject of a story in a recent edition of this magazine. In Emporia, a small group of English-speaking residents is working to make the community more cohesive and welcoming to Spanish-speakers and immigrants by learning the native tongue of newcomers.

The Dodge City School District has created a one-of-a-kind program to serve refugee teens who move into the district with little or no prior education, and is a leader in moving the needle on high school graduation rates for its students despite unique challenges.

And when a woman’s husband was murdered in a hate crime in Olathe a few years ago, the mayor

(Michael Copeland, who died in 2020) publicly condemned the act, and elected officials in Kansas – Republicans, to be clear – rallied to help her secure legal permanent resident status and a chance at citizenship. Copeland also played a role in the start of the Olathe Latino Coalition, which helped the city prepare for a growing and changing population. It’s since evolved to become Bienvenidos KC.

No matter what happens at the physical border, our opportunities for leadership here know few bounds, and we should follow the lead of those who aren’t sitting around and waiting for someone else to do the work.

4. No wall will stop the changes unfolding in many of our communities. We have to adapt, learn from and lean on one another.

Those of us who were born before the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 grew up in a different era of immigration for this country, one that bears little resemblance to the present and our legendary Ellis Island past. That law “ended immigration-admissions based on race and ethnicity and gave rise to the large-scale immigration, both legal and unauthorized.”

But the Kansas of today is actually somewhere between the great diversity of its early years, when 14% of the population was foreign born, and the Kansas of 1970, when only 1% of residents were foreign born, as Matthew Sanderson, the Randall C. Hill Professor of Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work and professor of geography and geospatial sciences at Kansas State University, has shared with audiences around the state in recent years.

A state that became more homogenous throughout many decades of the 20th century has grown more diverse again. And that diversity is less tied to immigration. Even if immigration stopped today, our communities would grow more diverse in the years to come. Sometime in the next 30some years, no single racial or ethnic classification will describe a majority of Kansas residents.

Such changes can be the source of fear, either consciously or subconsciously, particularly

among some white residents who are used to a more homogenous state. But we have shown remarkable ability in the past to bring people of different backgrounds together to become loyal Kansans, and we are demonstrating that again readily in communities across the state.

5. Many of our communities need newcomers and the energy they bring. Without them, they’ll die.

The truth is that many parts of Kansas need immigrants. Most of our counties are losing people, and they need people to perform crucial jobs, pay taxes and infuse energy. The future of many of our small, rural communities may rest on being able to welcome immigrants and other newcomers, because without them, they risk their existence.

Our state as a whole isn’t growing either. If we can’t be a place where more people want to live, we risk losing clout relative to other states and diminish our ability to ensure that our shared values as Kansans shape the future of the country.

While Kansas grew in population between the 2010 and 2020 census, that was mainly because we had more births in the state than deaths. In terms of net migration, we lost nearly 26,000 people, which isn’t a big percentage. But it’s the equivalent of the entire city of Derby or Gardner emptying out over the course of a decade.

Kansas is an area of land that many of us love, but it is the people who make life here sustainable and enjoyable. We can’t close the doors to future Kansans without costing ourselves dearly in the long term.

6. Even as we change, we should listen to and learn from skeptics and critics of immigration and its effects on the country.

Even though our politics vary widely, our group tends to view immigration as generally a good thing. We might disagree on the details, but none of us really think there should be no immigration. And while that unites us, it’s also a blind spot. Critics of immigration have a story they tell about the costs of letting more people into the country, both authorized and unauthorized.

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They see costs being imposed on health and social services. Competition for jobs with the people who are already here. Strains on our classrooms, housing infrastructure and even natural resources. Others have expressed concern that immigration could fragment our nation’s shared culture and language. There can be a sense that we should be doing more for those already here before we let more people in.

Bringing in more workers from other countries could have consequences for jobholders. The current tight labor market has been a boon for hourly workers, who have gained financial security because of the high demand for their services.

Black Americans have done remarkably well in the post-pandemic economy, with their unemployment rates reaching record lows and

But we know that adaptive change brings loss, so we must work harder to see and acknowledge the costs of immigration and engage in a good faith dialogue about them with those who point out the downsides. It will be hard to move toward a better future for this state and country unless a broad swath of Kansans believes their concerns have been considered and addressed.

We should remain mindful that, even as we reduce the harm it causes, we build an immigration system that rewards respect for the law, loyalty to this country and its traditions, and is fair to people waiting to become Americans as well as those already here. The rules should make sense, they should be followed, and they should matter.

higher levels of immigration than we have now. We aren’t starting anything we haven’t handled before.

But history should also be a warning that we can’t build shared culture and values in the same manner that we have in the past. The costs of being a part of the one were steep for many. Black people wanting to live in Kansas faced racist acts of violence. Hispanic, Asian and immigrants of other nationalities have experienced discrimination. Native Americans were dispossessed of their land. The costs that people experienced to become recognized as part of one were not shared equally. Some of us gave up far more than others to be called Kansans and Americans.

to come to. We should be proud of that, but also see it as an obligation.

Merging different cultures and nationalities is hard. But we’ve done it before. Yet, this time will likely look different.

their wages rising at their fastest pace ever. They now have an outsized presence in the labor force, and the gap between Black and white unemployment is the smallest it has ever been. But when recessions hit, Black workers tend to suffer first. There are good reasons to think carefully about decisions that could impact the labor market, and make sure that non-immigrants who might be affected have a seat at the table in those choices.

There might be a tendency among those who share our vantage point to dismiss or delegitimize arguments that focus on the costs of immigration. We can be all be too quick to contend that racism or xenophobia, as real as they are, animates those who disagree with us.

This challenge won’t be solved by any one faction, but by enough liberals, moderates and conservatives finding a common purpose they can rally around. After all, Kansas is the state that elected Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat, and Attorney General Kris Kobach, a Republican, in the same election last year. Our views as a people are complex, and we must embrace complexity in our personal interactions.

However, we also need to ensure that our discussion remains based in facts. And those facts are usually complicated. For instance, U.S.born children in immigrant-headed households can receive public benefits, but non-citizens themselves are generally ineligible for them.

We tend to use facts to serve our arguments and conveniently ignore the ones that contradict them. Most of us don’t have a great understanding of the immigration process. We should be wary of anyone painting a simple picture on the topic of immigration.

7. Merging different cultures and nationalities is hard. But we’ve done it before. Yet, this time will likely look different.

History should give us a reason to be optimistic about the future. The motto of the U.S. is e pluribus unum, “out of the many, one,” and our state has embodied that ideal. We’ve shaped a cohesive state culture out of a wealth of many different groups and figured out how to handle far

We can’t remake the past, but we can shape the future. And in this future, we can build a shared culture strong enough to hold multiple overlapping identities. We can share an ethnic or racial identity with a set of values and beliefs that binds us together as Kansans and Americans. Ideals such as freedom, hard work, selfreliance, family, equality under the law and civic responsibility can unite us across cultures and backgrounds even as we celebrate the qualities that make us unique.

But it means that some of us might have to let go of the idea that an American looks a certain way or talks a certain way. What matters is that they work to adhere to these values we all share.

8. We believe that America is exceptional. And we all have a role in building on that.

We share a view that America, for whatever flaws it has, is still the greatest country in the world. This is the place that, the world over, people want

We’ve inherited a house that has been tended well enough to sustain us, and we have the responsibility to maintain what’s great about it, attempt to address its defects and leave it in the best shape we can for the generations that will inhabit it next. But every house requires maintenance or even renovation over time to remain habitable. We can’t in good conscience reap the benefits of living in the house if we don’t put in the “sweat equity” to ensure it doesn’t get sullied and remains a good home for future residents.

Kansans and this country have the ability to tackle the challenges and opportunities of immigration and demographic change head-on. And we have the obligation. That’s what Americans do when they are at their very best. They go out and address the unsolvable, whether it’s creating a government directed by the people, ending the practice of slavery, defeating fascism and totalitarianism abroad, going to the moon or making civil rights the law of the land.

We believe that America is exceptional. And we all have a role in building on that.

DISCUSSING OUR CHANGING COMMUNITIES

Now we’ve reached the point where we ask you to join us in our conversations. Over the next few months, The Journal will be hosting Journal Talks: Bringing Together Our Changing Communities, a series of community conversations about immigration and demographic change.

The dialogue will kick off Aug.17, with an inperson conversation at the Kansas Leadership Center. (Participants will also be able to join virtually.) In the weeks afterward, we plan to take the conversation to 10 to 15 communities around the state, with organizations like community leadership programs serving as conveners and facilitators.

We’re asking residents of these communities to not just talk, but take on an assignment, one that’s small but significant. We want you to gather in a group for 60 or 90 minutes and answer the following questions:

• How are the demographics of your community changing and what does it mean for you?

• How might immigration affect the future of your community?

• What values do you think should bind us together as Americans?

• What should your community be doing to be both welcoming, cohesive and connected?

We want you to come to a broad consensus on your answers, put some stakes in the ground and tell the rest of Kansas what you decided. Participating communities will send back a 300word statement capturing your community’s answers and we’ll print them in The Journal. At the end of the process, we might have evidence of progress toward a collective purpose on these difficult topics. Or we might not.

But what matters the most is we’ll be talking with one another about how to make our communities better places to live.

DISCUSSION GUIDE

1. What interpretations about the current immigration system did the thought partners explore?

2. How can dialogue between the proponents and skeptics of immigration lead to a more comprehensive understanding of the topic?

3. What loss(es) might need to be addressed related to immigration and demographic change?

- By Maren Berblinger

How thought partners sought to complicate the narrative

THE JOURNAL RECRUITED 10 KANSANS FROM DIVERSE BACKGROUNDS TO INFORM ITS COVERAGE OF IMMIGRATION AND DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGE. THEY MET FOR SIX HOURS OVER THE COURSE OF FOUR MEETINGS THAT BEGAN THIS PAST DECEMBER.

BY: CHRIS GREEN, ILLUSTRATIONS BY: ANTHONY RUSSO

As part of their experience, the partners were paired up to interview each other about the topic of immigration. They were asked to use a skill called looping, which involves reflecting back on what is heard in conversation to test our comprehension and go deeper. They were tasked with asking a set of questions specifically designed to make the conversation more complex and nuanced.

HERE ARE THE QUESTIONS THEY ASKED:

Why is the topic of immigration important to you? Tell us about how your experiences have shaped your views on this topic.

What do you think is dividing us on this issue? Are there areas where you feel misunderstood?

What’s the question nobody is asking? How would life be better for you if this issue was resolved?

I learned both the looping technique and interview questions over the past year through a Complicating the Narratives Fellowship with the Solutions Journalism Network.

Here are excerpts of what the thought partners talked about during their interviews.

Inas Younis, an Overland Park writer who is an immigrant born in Iraq, in conversation with Reynaldo Mesa, Garden City

Why is the topic of immigration important to you?

The American experiment is all about the idea that people with wildly varying demographics, points of views, religions, can coexist peacefully, in a shared space, and become a community.

We’re proving something to the world. We’re proving the importance of a system bringing people together in a peaceful way. You don’t see that anywhere else on the planet. And in part, we don’t

As part of their experience, the partners were paired up to interview each other about the topic of immigration. They were asked to use a skill called looping, which involves reflecting back on what is heard in conversation to test our comprehension and go deeper. They were tasked with asking a set of questions specifically designed to make

Why is the topic of immigration important to you?

Tell us about how your experiences have shaped your views on this topic.

What do you think is dividing us on this issue? Are there areas where you feel misunderstood?

How would life be better for you if this issue was resolved?

Journal Executive Editor learned both the looping technique and interview questions over the past year through a Complicating the Narratives Fellowship with the Solutions

Here are excerpts of what the thought partners talked about during their interviews.

Inas Younis

Reynaldo Mesa

see that because the system is rigged to pit people against each other. Right? There’s no objectivity in any other system on this Earth, not in the way that the United States was able to build. The ideas of individual rights and objective law are really kind of new — new concepts, historically speaking, that we take for granted. But they are the reason that we, a diverse group of people, can live together in peace. Immigration is so much more than just who we let in, who we don’t let in. It’s a philosophical triumph of the American story.

friend, who wants to inquire about their friend’s immigration status. I get a call constantly about, “How do we help this person?” Usually it is framed as: “I know a straight-A student heavily involved in our school or heavily involved in our church. Just an ideal citizen that we need to keep helping. They are undocumented. Is there anything we can do?” I usually will connect them to lawyers. But I know what the answer is, most of the time. I have to say, well, they can either get married or just hope for a miracle. Right?

Josey Hammer, a photographer, videographer and marketer in Courtland, in conversation with Dave Sotelo, Hutchinson

Why is the topic of immigration important to you?

I feel like it’s such a hot topic, and it’s such a deep topic, that I don’t feel like it’s something people are ever going to agree on. But I feel like the only way to get people to even come to that middle place to understand each other is that everybody gets to hear the same goods and the bads of all of it. And I think that that has to come from personal experiences, because I feel like that’s the only thing that people are actually going to believe at this point.

What’s the question nobody’s asking?

What if some of the things that people say as far as the downside to letting a lot of immigrants in, what if some of those things are true? That’s not what anybody wants to talk about. We want it to be positive, and we want good things to happen. I want people to be able to come, but what if some of those things that people are saying, not all of them necessarily even, but what if just some of them are true?

Sotelo who fled Mexico as a child because of death threats against his family, in conversation with Hammer

Why is the topic of immigration important to you?

Beyond just my personal experience and the experience of my family, I get a call about six times a year from a teacher or a pastor, or just a caring

I always say, I didn’t get up one day and think, when I was 13 years old, let’s go to J.C. Penney or let’s go shopping in an American mall. I really want to eat a hamburger at Burger King in Hutchinson, Kansas. That was never something that crossed my mind. I loved where I lived. I loved my community, my school, my friends, my family

Clemente Bobadilla-Reyes, Wichita, in conversation with Mark Lowry, a small business owner in Stockton

Why is the topic of immigration important to you?

Being an immigrant myself, immigration is very important to me. Because I lived through it. I watched my parents live through it. I’ve watched other family members go through it. And it’s important to me, because it’s a lot different being on both sides of it.

I was lucky enough that when I was growing up, I didn’t know I was an immigrant. I didn’t know I was illegal until I was much older and I kind of understood the process. But I think nowadays, it’s a lot more polarized. You get villainized a little bit more when you’re an immigrant.

What do you think is dividing us on this issue? Are there areas where you feel misunderstood?

Something that’s kind of my biggest struggle right now is trying to get people to not be so far on either side. I don’t believe in amnesty either. I feel like you should go through the process if you want to be here. I don’t think you should be automatically given something. It could just be the fact that I wasn’t given anything. I don’t believe in handouts

Alba Gutierrez-Ortiz

David Sotelo Josey Hammer

Clemente Bobadilla-Reyes

I try to remain very neutral in the middle, but for some reason nowadays, it’s hard to be in the middle, because you are told you have to be on one side or the other.

Lowry in conversation with Bobadilla-Reyes

Why is the topic of immigration important to you?

I’m not an immigrant but I do have an adopted daughter. My wife and I adopted a young lady that is an American citizen. Her mother came to California when she was expecting and had her daughter in California. Then after she was born and a United States citizen, they went back to Mexico. She lived most of her youthful life in Mexico.

Due to some family situations there and some conditions, she ended up with some family members from Kansas and ended up in the foster care system. So we adopted a teenager that is an American citizen but really struggled with a lot of the same challenges that probably most immigrants have if they come to the United States.

For someone with my background, I’m just a white male. I’ve never experienced discrimination on those levels and what that feels like. That’s kind of heartbreaking to me when people don’t understand. Because she couldn’t speak English very well, they didn’t give her much of a chance or treated her differently because of who she was.

It’s important to give others a chance. I think this country is built on diversity. That’s what makes us great is the idea that we have different people from different places all coming together and sharing ideas and sharing resources and how we can live together in peace.

Jim Terrones, retired corrections administrator who lives in Olathe, in conversation with Marty Hillard, Topeka

How would life be better for you if this issue was resolved?

I was brought up in Newton, Kansas. It’s a railroad community north of Wichita. My grandparents immigrated to the United States from Mexico. Back then, they did their paperwork, and they came because they saw the employment opportunity in America. My grandparents lived in housing next to the railroad, because that’s all they could afford. That’s what the railroad community provided for them until they were able to save enough income to get a home. And both my parents were born in the United States.

My great grandmother, my great grandparents didn’t see (immigration reform). My parents didn’t see it. I would like my brothers and sisters to see it. A lot of my uncles and aunts are now gone. It would be nice if my granddaughter, my nieces and nephews would see some sort of immigration reform, because it’s going to be better for the friends and the colleagues that I know. They’re Dreamers, they’re business owners, they’re paying their taxes, they’re raising their families. They just want to be part of the American dream, if you will. I just think that it would be better. Because when we work together, good things can happen in this country.

Peggy Ruebke

Mark Lowry

Marty Hillard

Jim Terrones

JEOPARDY IN

AS OLDER LAWYERS RETIRE, RURAL COMMUNITIES ACROSS KANSAS FIND IT INCREASINGLY DIFFICULT TO ATTRACT YOUNG REPLACEMENTS. NOW RESIDENTS ARE GOING WITHOUT ATTORNEYS FOR COMPLICATED LEGAL MATTERS OR TRAVELING LONG DISTANCES FOR COUNSEL. AND THAT DOESN’T TAKE INTO ACCOUNT THE VOID THAT A LACK OF ATTORNEYS LEAVES IN A COMMUNITY’S CIVIC LIFE. EFFORTS ARE UNDERWAY TO TURN THE TIDE.

BY: JOEL MATHIS

Courtney Ress grew up in Colby and as a teen thought she would make her mark somewhere other than Thomas County. But college and a teaching job provided some perspective, and she's returned, becoming an associate in the John D. Gatz law firm. One of her job's perks is handling cases at the impressive local courthouse — more than a century old and on the National Register of Historic Places — where the "Spirit of the Prairie" statue greets passersby.

by Jeff Tuttle

Photo

Bob Brookens wants to retire. But he can’t.

Not quite yet.

The 73-year-old has been practicing law in the small central Kansas town of Marion for more than four decades. He’s done a little bit of everything – “domestic work, adoptions, estate planning, quiet titles, other land disputes, oh, my goodness, you name it” – but he doesn’t do quite as much as he used to.

“If you write a will, they expect you’re going to be around here” to execute it when the client dies, he says. “So I’m getting to tell people now that at 73, I’m likely to not be here by the time this will goes into use. Hopefully not, anyway.”

The problem? Marion, with a population of roughly 1,900 residents, has no younger lawyer to take his place.

“The door is open,” he says. “There’s plenty of work to do.”

Whether Brookens will be able to find a replacement is an open question. But his challenge isn’t unusual: Rural communities across Kansas are finding it increasingly difficult to attract young attorneys.

The trend is leaving the Kansas legal profession smaller, grayer and in crisis.

Marla Luckert, chief justice of the Kansas Supreme Court, spelled out the terms of that crisis in the annual State of the Judiciary Report earlier this year. Eighty percent of the state’s nearly 8,000 practicing lawyers live and work in just six counties: Douglas, Johnson, Leavenworth, Sedgwick, Shawnee and Wyandotte.

That leaves just fewer than 1,600 attorneys to serve more than 1.2 million residents in the other 99 counties of Kansas.

“Left unaddressed,” she wrote, “this problem will only worsen as trends suggest younger attorneys are moving to our state’s urban centers while the attorney population in rural Kansas continues to dwindle.”

That shortage has profound ramifications for small Kansas towns.

Residents sometimes decide to go without attorneys for complicated legal matters, like child custody and real estate transactions. Others find themselves paying a rural time tax of sorts, spending hours on the road to and from their attorneys in bigger towns.

But the effects go beyond mere legal matters, observers say. Lawyers and other professionals often provide the leadership – on local boards, in various civic roles and in many more informal

ways – that can help small communities thrive. And some businesses might not choose to locate in small towns if they can’t hire a local attorney who understands the community.

“It’s not just an access-to-justice issue,” says Kansas Supreme Court Justice Keynen “K.J.” Wall Jr. There is an “economic and community impact.”

LEGAL DESERTS

Rural Kansas has been losing people for more than a century: Many counties saw their population peak back in 1890. That trend is nothing new, and it’s not confined to Kansas. The entire country is increasingly sorted along political and educational lines – young people with college degrees tend to trend more liberal and head to urban areas, while Americans who don’t attend or finish college tend to be more rural and conservative. The result is a

brain drain that small town leaders have lamented for decades.

For most of that time, however, many of those towns were still able to attract doctors and teachers and, yes, attorneys to serve the residents who remained. Those rural communities might not have been growing, but they were often still able to retain a professional sector.

In recent years that has started to change.

“It’s one of those things that starts with a slow trickle,” says Wall, who chairs the Rural Justice Initiative Committee, a 35-member board appointed by Luckert in December to examine the attorney shortage and suggest possible solutions.

“Traditionally in most of these counties, the young attorney would come out, and they would become a county attorney,” says Shawn Leisinger,

Bob Brookens has been doing legal work for clients in Marion for more than 40 years, and, truth is, he'd like to turn the reins over to someone else. His situation is all too typical throughout rural Kansas: The ranks of attorneys are graying, and replacements are hard to find.

Photo by Jeff Tuttle

associate dean for centers and external programs at Washburn University School of Law in Topeka. (He also serves on the Rural Justice Initiative Committee.) “They serve their time and then when the judge retired, they would apply and they would get selected and they’d move up to be judge. … And this has been for years, just kind of a normal sort of routine thing.”

Now, however, there aren’t always enough up-andcoming attorneys even to apply for judgeships.

“There are multiple counties that may only have one or none practicing attorneys still there,” Leisinger says.

Instead, small towns are losing out on new attorneys for the same reasons that many of their own young people leave for bigger towns and cities: Opportunities, professional and otherwise.

“They want to date,” Leisinger says. “They want to go to events. They want to see concerts. They want to have the ease of driving to whatever they want to do.”

The cumulative impact of all those individual decisions is taking a toll on local justice systems. In the six largest Kansas counties, there are two active lawyers available for every 535 residents and their median age is 40. In rural Kansas there is just one lawyer for every 808 residents, and their median age is 54. (The national median age for attorneys is 46.5.)

That’s a legal desert, Wall says.

The shortage especially shows up on the criminal docket, he said. Judges around the state report there aren’t enough qualified lawyers to appoint to felony cases – you can’t appoint a rookie to defend somebody accused of sex crimes or death penalty cases. “You have to be certified for that,” Wall says. Similarly, he said, there is a real struggle to find attorneys who can handle child-in-need-ofcare matters.

For other kinds of cases, rural Kansans often “have to go farther now if they choose to go to an attorney,” says District Judge Kevin Berens, chief of the state’s 15th judicial district in Colby, a town of 5,500 people in northwest Kansas.

Some decide to forego an attorney entirely. “We definitely see a lot more self-represented litigants – people who take it upon themselves to file their own actions,” he says. And there are often resources for such folks, downloadable forms to guide litigants who for whatever reason can’t or won’t find a lawyer.

But “there are some complications to each one of those things,” Berens says. “If kids are involved, real estate or business, whatever else a person might have, it can be quite complicated.”

He added: “You go to somebody who studied the law for a reason.”

‘I CAN’T DO IT ALL’

Wall says that in many small towns, the attorneys who remain report they are turning clients away, facing too much work with too few hours in the day. Many would like to retire but don’t think they can.

“They’re holding on out of a sense of duty to their communities,” Wall says.

That certainly describes Brookens. Until this year, he kept two offices – one in Marion, the other in Hillsboro 10 miles to the west. In February, though, he closed the Hillsboro office, leaving that town completely without a lawyer.

“It came down to a reality check. I can’t do it all,” Brookens told the Hillsboro Free Press.

Hillsboro is already feeling the loss, says Mayor Lou Thurston. His personal attorney is located in Newton, about a half-hour’s drive away. As for City Hall: Hillsboro once had a local city attorney, but he moved away. Those legal services are now provided by a lawyer at Triplett Woolf Garretson, a firm located an hour away in Wichita.

That’s not always convenient.

“Of course we have video conferencing and a lot of other things that we didn’t have years ago, so you can do some (virtual meetings), but ultimately it’s a matter of time and access,” Thurston says,

adding that the new city attorney, Andrew Kovar, has “really guided us through some rocks and shoals and kept us out of trouble.”

“And so I’m very appreciative of that,” Thurston says, “but obviously we have to go 50 miles to get that representation.”

Those kinds of stories are becoming familiar to Berens. Back in Colby, he sees lawyers travel in from significant distances – from Hays, about 100 miles away, or even from Salina, which is nearly twice that far. For matters where remote video conferences are possible, attorneys from Wichita and Topeka sometimes make appearances.

“You have fewer lawyers trying to meet the demand of the communities they’re in ... trying to do as much work as when there were more attorneys,” he says. “It’s a stressful job.”

BUILDING FOR THE FUTURE

While growing up in Colby, what Courtney Ress wanted was to get out and stay out.

“I know that I was very much like other kids from western Kansas who leave their hometowns to go off to college,” she says. “And at that time, for me, at 18 years old, the attitude was certainly, ‘I’m leaving this town in my rearview window. I would not like to come back.’”

She is back, though, aided by a program that connects young law students to rural communities in the hope they’ll like what they find and eventually settle down.

The program, a partnership between Washburn Law and the Dane G. Hansen Foundation in Logan, provides first-year law students with a $5,000 stipend for an externship at northwest Kansas firms, learning about the day-to-day practice of law in rural communities – and giving them a chance to, it’s hoped, discover the charms of small-town life.

“If they don’t know somebody from there, if they haven’t been there, if they don’t kind of

Courtney Ress is one of about 60 first-year law students who have participated in an externship program that pays first-year law students $5,000 to try northwest Kansas on for size. The program is sponsored by the Washburn University School of Law in Topeka and the Dane G. Hansen Foundation in Logan.

Photo by Jeff Tuttle

understand what it is to live in a more rural area, it’s all those unknown sort of factors that keep them from saying, ‘OK, I’m going to try this,’” says Leisinger, who oversees the program. The externship is designed to bridge that gap. Roughly 60 students have gone through the program in its first five years, he says. Of those, 45 have graduated and 15 have returned to rural Kansas to start their legal careers.

Ress, at least, didn’t have to be persuaded to return to Colby: After college at Kansas State and a few years of teaching, she knew that she wanted to return. “Colby is a great community where people do know each other, and they know each other back for generations, and I didn’t experience that in the same way in eastern Kansas,” she says. “So that was a very strong draw for me to return to my hometown.”

A legal career, Ress decided, was the best way back.

“I had seen that path work for other folks before, and so I knew that if I wanted to be here and really have a shot at a fulfilling career, law was a pretty good option for me,” she says. The externship at a Colby law firm validated that belief. “I was pretty set on my path, so I don’t know how much confirmation I needed, but it certainly helped me figure out where I was going to land.”

Leisinger says law grads who choose careers in urban settings often find themselves climbing the career ladder from the lowest rungs, working long hours at big firms in expensive locations.

The rural externships help some aspiring attorneys realize, “‘Hey, I can make a decent living here, and I can have a life,’” he says. “I can work a reasonable amount of hours. I can be involved in the community. I can be on the softball team. I can serve on the library board.”

Berens agrees. “Generally most rural communities are very welcoming. If you want a sense of belonging and a nice quality of life, there’s plenty of work,” he says. “Plus it doesn’t take long to get to work.”

SOLUTIONS

Listen to Wall talk, and you get the impression that one task of his committee is to fight back against the narrative of inevitable rural decline.

“We’re not going to get to the point where there are only two large metropolitan communities in the state,” he says. “We have to buck against the notion that we can’t push against this rising tide. These communities are going to be around decades and centuries from now.”

Bringing lawyers back to small Kansas towns will probably require more than exposure to the charms of rural life, however.

Colby managed to bring Ress back to town, after all, but to a dwindling legal community. “My boss remembers a time where Colby had 16, 20-plus attorneys 50 years ago, perhaps,” she says. “And we just don’t have that kind of legal climate today.” State statistics say Thomas County, where Colby is the county seat, has 10 practicing attorneys today.

“I think that some folks are getting the (legal) services they need, and some folks are going without,” Ress added. “I think particularly in terms of folks who need divorces.”

Reversing the trend will take hard work and creative ideas.

“It’s not going to be solved in a day,” says Leisinger. “It’s got to be multiple approaches, including a look at loan forgiveness programs and housing assistance and those sorts of things to get students to be able to get out and get in these communities. The same thing that’s been done with dentists and doctors and nurses and everything else.”

Indeed, Wall pointed out that other professions – doctors, nurses, teachers – are also in short supply across rural Kansas. A multidisciplinary approach to those problems might be needed, he says, one that looks at common problems like child care access, but which also lets the different professions pass along good ideas to one another.

“There are larger systemic issues that need to be addressed,” he says.

The Rural Justice Initiative Committee will be looking to other states and other professions to fix the problem, he says. South Dakota, for example, has a “2+2” program that lets students complete their undergraduate and veterinary work together in just four years – part of a program to solve a vet shortage there. Nebraska has a similar “3+3” program that helps students go through college and law school in just six years. North Dakota is offering incentive payments of $45,000 for attorneys who promise to work full-time in rural communities for five years.

Ideas like those may make it into the committee’s final report, due next year.

In the meantime, Brookens is still searching for a successor. He is willing to pass along his office building and all the equipment in it to a young lawyer to come in and partner with him for a few years before he finally retires. “We need an attorney that does domestic work that can step

into what I also do,” he says. “Ideally, we need not just an attorney, but a couple.”

His pitch? “There isn’t a better place on the planet than Marion, Kansas,” he says. “There just isn’t.

“You see your neighbors, you can go to church with your neighbors, your kids will know their classmates and they’ll be able to walk to their houses,” he says. “I cannot think of a better place to raise children than right here. It’s just a wonderful community.”

Wall, a native of Scott City, agrees. Attorneys in small communities, he says, have an opportunity to be part of the fabric of a community – to serve on hospital boards and promote development projects and, ultimately, to make a difference.

“Somebody who wants to have that sense of belonging, that opportunity awaits,” he says. “I think we just focus on the positives.”

DISCUSSION GUIDE

1. How does the rural lawyer shortage impact small communities?

2. What interpretations can be made about young attorneys practicing in urban areas over rural communities?

3. What experiments would you recommend the Rural Justice Initiative Committee explore to bolster the supply of rural attorneys?

- By Maren Berblinger

Breaking new ground by renewing the old

BY: P.J. GRIEKSPOOR

THREE FARMERS WITH DIFFERENT APPROACHES TO TENDING THEIR LAND HAVE ONE THING IN COMMON: ALL ARE EXPERIMENTING WITH REGENERATIVE AGRICULTURE. THEY INCLUDE A YOUNG FARMER WHO STARTED OUT COMMITTED TO THE FULL RANGE OF PRACTICES, A RETIREMENT-AGE FARMER WHO SUPPLEMENTS HIS FARM INCOME WITH A COUPLE OF SIDE BUSINESSES AND WANTS TO LEAVE HIS SON BETTER SOIL, AND A RETIREE WHO IS SIMPLY COMMITTED TO IMPROVING HIS GROUND. THESE ARE THEIR STORIES.

As week after week of no rain in the winter of 2022 turned into month after month of no rain in the spring of 2023, Austin Schweizer watched his oncepromising fields of wheat grow more and more stressed, until by early May he was facing the reality that there might not be a wheat harvest.

“I have three pallets of cover crop seed sitting in the storage building. When it finally does rain, I’m going to bring out the air seeder and I’m going to plant every open acre to cover crops,” he says. “We need cattle feed.”

More than Schweizer’s bottom line is on the line. That’s because Schweizer’s fields are a testing ground for what the future of Kansas agriculture could look like, including being a resource in the fight against climate change. It’s an experiment that is, in many ways, working, even if the weather doesn’t always cooperate.

Schweizer is one of 21 farmers in south-central Kansas who are participating in a General Mills pilot project to encourage the adoption of regenerative agriculture practices. In 2019, General Mills

committed to advancing regenerative agriculture on a million acres of farmland by 2030, and in 2020, the cereal giant committed to spending $3 million by 2030 to achieve its corporate goal of reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 30% in the same time frame and to net zero by 2050.

Schweizer committed to regenerative ag at the beginning of his farming career. His dad and uncle are partners in a much larger conventional farming operation. This year, he says, his dad asked him to order cover crop seed for him.

Schweizer farms about 700 acres in 80-acre strips. He rotates dryland soybeans, dryland milo, sunflowers and a cover crop mix that includes rye or triticale with peas. This spring, in the midst of ongoing exceptional drought, the worst category on the U.S. Drought Monitor, he took a deep breath and planted his cash crops into cover crop residue.

On May 15, it rained. Not just a few drops in the dust, but a real 2.75-inch rain.

Schweizer will harvest wheat. “It won’t be very good, but I am amazed that it’s still alive,” he says. “But I’ll have a harvest.”

After four weeks of catching some rain, he says he has subsoil moisture and he expects cover crops

Austin Schweizer broke from convention when he started farming, choosing the path of regenerative ag. One regenerative practice is sowing crops such as wheat, growing on the left, into ground where a cover crop, on the right, will be incorporated. Photo by Jeff Tuttle

he just planted to flourish and is excited to be planting soybeans, milo and sunflowers.

Statewide, wheat experts are predicting that Kansas will have its worst wheat harvest since 1957. In spite of recent rains, much of southcentral Kansas remains in exceptional drought. With a thick mat of cover crop mulch on the top of the soil, every precious drop of rain soaks deep into the soil and crops can hold on longer between rains.

In 2022, Schweizer had a good soybean harvest in a year when his dad and uncle had to chop their corn for silage and bale their withered soybeans to salvage what cattle feed they could, a testament to the power of regenerative agriculture.

“I grazed 60 cows on my soybean strip for 81 days,” he says. “I moved them every couple of days in small increments across the field. The combination of grazing and trampling gave me that great mat of mulch to plant into. And that mulch protected the field from drying out and helped the beans hang on long enough to benefit when the rain finally came.”

The mulch from cover crops is just one regenerative ag practice that helps plants gain those vital days. Keeping living roots in the ground also keeps microbial life in the soil alive and active. Those microbes break down organic matter to make nutrients available to the next crop. The constant canopy from cover crops and

heavy mulch keeps weed seeds from germinating, and the deposits of manure and urine from livestock add natural fertilizer.

Another of regenerative agriculture’s benefits is drawing more participants, increasing the amount of carbon that is stored in the soil amid a growing interest in measuring carbon sequestration and selling credits to increase farm profitability.

“I didn’t have to add any fertilizer to those beans,” Schweizer says. “And weeds haven’t been a problem. Not having to add chemicals is not only better for the soil, but cheaper for me. And I get the added revenue from the cattle.”

OPPORTUNITY IN CARBON

General Mills chose south-central Kansas for part of that pilot because it’s the region from which much of the hard red winter wheat it buys is sourced. The company has similar projects in the Northern Plains region, where it sources oats, and a dairy pilot in the Great Lakes region.

The 21 farmers chosen for the Kansas project were among 150 participants in two Soil Health Academy two-day workshops. Most of those farmers are also members of the Cheney Lake Watershed conservation group, which was formed in 1994 to address water quality at Cheney Reservoir, which provides 70% of the drinking water for the 400,000 residents of Wichita.

“I wanted to be in that project because I’m really interested in being able to quantify what regenerative agriculture brings to the health of the soil,” Schweizer says. “And of course, I’m interested in gaining another revenue stream from carbon credits.

“I made the decision to go fully regenerative when I started farming in 2015,” he says. His 700 acres near Sterling are very sandy soils. “I came into my senior year of college convinced that I would embrace full tillage and lots of fertilizer, just like my dad and uncle.

“Then I went to the No-Till on the Plains Conference, and I changed my mind. The more I studied the work of people like Gabe Brown and Ray Archuleta (two of the earliest and best-known advocates for regenerative ag), the more I realized that we’d been doing it all wrong.”

He is looking forward to learning more during his participation in the General Mills project, which has partnered with Understanding Ag, a regenerative agriculture consulting firm, to provide consultants to each participant to help them in their efforts to improve their soil health practices. Brown is a founding partner in Understanding Ag.

Schweizer says he started out with very depleted soil after years of conventional tillage and heavy chemical and fertilizer use. It took only a couple of seasons of regenerative practices to start seeing an improvement in soil health.

“My dad and his brother farm a lot more acres than I do, and they’ve begun adopting no-till after seeing my results. They haven’t gotten to full regenerative, but they are moving that direction,” he says.

It is easy to spot the results of conventional tillage in road ditches, where the soil looks more like beach sand than soil. Left uncovered, the sand dries out. The famous Kansas winds pick it up, leaving swirls and eddies across the parched landscape. The surface heats quickly, evaporating whatever stored moisture is beneath.

Schweizer says the first thing he noticed after only a year of regenerative farming was that the soil, while still sandy, was noticeably darker.

“That’s stored carbon,” he says. Scooping up a handful for soil, he sifts through it, leaving a handful of tiny clumps. “These aggregates started appearing after a few years. That’s organic matter, and it holds a lot of water.”

The wheat on Austin Schweizer's land got a crop-saving rain in late spring, as did a big swath of Kansas. Nevertheless, the reputation of the Wheat State has taken a serious beating in recent years as drought shriveled yields. Photo by Jeff Tuttle

LEAVING IT BETTER FOR NEXT GENERATION

A few miles away from Schweizer’s farm, Kingman County farmer and businessman Dave Stucky has postponed retirement from his 275acre farm and supplemental business ventures.

“We kind of changed job descriptions and kept going,” he says.

He plants both spring and fall mixtures of cover crops. Five years ago, he made a deal with a neighbor who has cattle to utilize his cover crops for grazing.

“We’re running bred heifers on three plots of cover crop, moving them all the time. We love it and the cattle do really, really well,” he says. “I really enjoy working with the cattle. They get used to being moved and just start moving when they see me coming.”

He also has a couple of 55-acre wheat plots and, after getting four inches of rain during May, he plans to plant milo after harvesting the wheat. “It’ll be a poor harvest – maybe 15 bushels to the acre. But it’ll make enough to be worth harvesting, especially with prices up. And with the new weather pattern we seem to be getting into, I’m really hopeful the milo will do well.”

He sees regenerative agriculture as a way to leave his farm in better shape when his son Kelly eventually takes over, than it was when he inherited it.

In addition to his five 55-acre tracts of farmland, Stucky operates the Champion Ridge Inn Bed and Breakfast, a charming guest house created by a renovation of a dairy barn that was actively used when his parents farmed there, and the Champion Ridge RV Park.

Both of those businesses are flourishing, he says Guests at the B&B get a chance to learn about the history of the building and the farm, just by studying the artwork that decorates the walls – pictures from the days when it was a working dairy.

A 30-foot pollinator strip that surrounds the property, planted to a mix of alfalfa, sunflowers and perennial plants, provides a beautiful background for guests at both the B&B and the RV Park.

“I got some help from EQIP (the USDA’s Environmental Quality Incentives Program) to plant that strip,” he says.

Stucky says he feels like he is leaving his son in good shape to take over the farming

Much has changed since wheat took hold as Kansas' go-to crop in the 19th century. But good soil health remains the foundation of farming. Last summer, Jamie Funke got a firsthand demonstration of one of the benefits of his no-till practices: A consultant's soil probe showed his ground was 40 degrees cooler than a nearby, conventionally tilled field. Photo by Jeff Tuttle

operation. He and his wife, Nancy, have another son, Nate, who is a student at Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey, and a daughter, Kara, who is married to a farmer in Nebraska who farms land planted to a corn and soybean rotation and irrigated with 36 center pivots.

DOING IT FOR THE LAND

Jamie and Chris Funke decided to flee the urban life and move to the farm in 1990. They have a quartersection of land in Reno County that belonged to his grandfather and father and another quarter-section that was the homeplace where she grew up, near the Reno County town of Partridge.

They are teachers by profession and were working in Wichita when the lure of raising their children, then 6 and 3, in a rural environment proved irresistible.

“Chris grew up on the farm so she knew something about farming. She knew how to drive a tractor and operate machinery,” Jamie says. “But for me it was a learning experience, figuring out how to farm while working around a teaching job.”

Jamie and Chris started farming the way her parents and his dad had done it – mostly tilled, continuous wheat because that’s what got the most favorable government subsidies. It freed up time for him to teach students in a building trades vocational program in McPherson. And it allowed Chris to continue a teaching career as gifted facilitator for the Reno County Education Cooperative.

Chris’s sister and her husband, Lisa and Jim French, farm nearby. They are active in the Cheney Lake Watershed conservation group, where Lisa served as project coordinator until she retired in the fall of 2022. Like all members of the group, they converted their entire farming operation to no-till. They continue to experiment with soil health practices, adding cover crops and grazing cattle on them. They too are enrolled in the General Mills project.

“They got us into the regenerative agriculture mode,” Jamie says. “I have zero acres under irrigation, so in droughts like we’ve seen in 2022 and 2023, I’m getting by with crop insurance. But

that help is limited. The amount of insurance is based on the 10-year average of harvests. When you get a couple or three years of zero, it really cuts into that.”

In April of 2023, he was watching a wheat crop struggle and trying to coax his beds of iris flowers into blooming in time for a flower show on April 13.

“The flowers are behind because of the cold spring,” he says.

Besides the flowers, he says, they are getting into growing vegetables, and he’s working on building cabinets for their greenhouses.

Jamie says his General Mills project acres yielded about 25 bushels to the acre in 2022 – right at the township average. He expects a better harvest in 2023 after getting rain in early April.

“In ideal conditions, this township brings in 70- to 75-bushel wheat,” he says. “Last year, nobody had that kind of wheat. Last year would have been a good year to have irrigation on wheat acres. Getting 60 to 70 bushels with the price around $12 a bushel would be a windfall, even with the cost of pumping water.”

He knows his land would benefit from adding cattle to graze cover crops, but he lacks the infrastructure – fences and water sources – to do that and building it would be expensive.

“If I do decide to add cattle, I’ll probably just lease my cover crop farms to somebody who needs forage,” he says. “I don’t think I’ll get into owning cattle.”

Even without cattle, he says he is reaping significant soil benefits from the practices he has added. When his Understanding Ag consultant used a soil probe to measure soil temperatures in the hot July of 2022, his soil, covered by growing crops, was 40 degrees cooler than a nearby conventionally tilled field. He knows that means a lot less evaporation.

He says he expected to make less profit from the farm with the conversion but is committed to leaving the land in better shape than when he started.

“Both Chris and I have retirement pay from our

On Dave Stucky's farm near Kingman, he's taking the long view in regard to soil health. He's particular because he wants his dirt to be in better shape when his son takes over than when he started. Part of his technique involves grazing a neighbor's cattle on his cover crops. Photos by Jeff Tuttle

teaching careers,” he says. “We don’t have to make a living from the farm. I don’t want to lose any money, but I can afford to break even or a little bit better and still keep going.”

He understands why some of his conventional farming neighbors are reluctant to try making a change.

“If it’s your entire livelihood, harvesting those bushels is everything,” he says. “However, I think that over time, they will come to understand that getting more bushels equals spending more money on inputs and more money on fuel.”

He’s finding that he just might have underestimated the profit potential of changing practices. He has saved money on inputs, using legumes in his cover crop mix to add enough nitrogen that he could reduce his synthetic fertilizer application by half.

“The money I save on fertilizer helps the bottom line, especially in a year when prices have shot up. That’s what this program is about in a nutshell – improving the bottom line while improving the soil. It’s about profit per acre more than bushels per acre. If I’m making more money, I don’t care if I’m harvesting fewer bushels.”

Last year, he also got a surprise in the form of a nice-sized check for the pounds of carbon that was sequestered after converting to regenerative agriculture.

“The better we get at measuring the amount of sequestration, the more that check will be an incentive for more farmers to farm this way,” he says.

He lauds the expertise of the coaches that come with participation in the General Mills project.

“Their coaches are just awesome,” he says. “They have taught me so much about which cover crops bring the most benefit to the subsequent grain crop and how to crimp cover crop residue to provide mulch that covers the ground and helps conserve moisture.”

Funke is concerned that climate change is going to bring more of what he has seen lately: long stretches of high heat and low water interspaced with big rain events. That lends additional urgency to adopting regenerative practices.

“If you look back, what’s happening is a trend that goes back several years,” he says. “It’s going to become more and more important to be able to capture and hold the water when the rains do come. The way to do that is to have a soil structure that can absorb and hold that heavy rain. And the way to get that structure is to keep growing root systems in the ground all the time.”

For 2023, he’s sticking to the advice his Understanding Ag consultant gave him – stick with the rotation. That means planting cover crops along with soybeans, milo and wheat this year.

“So far, sticking to the program seems to be mostly working,” he says. “And we’re beginning to see that bushels per acre is not nearly as important at the end of the day as profits per acre. And this program seems to be giving us better profits per acre.”

DISCUSSION GUIDE

1. What are the similarities and differences between the farmers in this article?

2. What losses seem to be preventing more farmers from committing to regenerative farming?

3. What new voices might General Mills or these farmers consider engaging to make more progress on this challenge?

- By Jaryth Barten

In recent years, many Kansas farmers have endured long dry stretches interspersed with a few heavy rains. That less-than-desirable weather pattern helped put Jamie Funke on a mission to improve soil structure — keeping root systems in the ground — so the land can better absorb water in the case of downpours.

Photos by Jeff Tuttle

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BY: STEFANIA LUGLI

A ‘PLACE of perhaps too forgotten

MINISTRY,’

THE SOUTH WICHITA NEIGHBORHOOD OF OAKLAWN WAS BUILT DURING THE KOREAN WAR TO PROVIDE EMERGENCY DEFENSE HOUSING, PARTICULARLY FOR BOEING WORKERS. IT HAS PERSISTED AS A DIVERSE ENCLAVE THAT HAS OFFERED CHEAP HOUSING AND EASY ACCESS TO JOBS. PRESENT-DAY RESIDENTS, INCLUDING A GROWING NUMBER OF LATINOS, RECEIVE GOVERNMENT SERVICES FROM A PATCHWORK OF PROVIDERS THAT ONLY SCRATCH THE SURFACE OF THEIR NEEDS.

Andree Sisco’s entry into public service came about when she couldn’t find anyone willing to mow the grass.

Sisco moved to Oaklawn, an unincorporated community sandwiched between Wichita and Derby, in 1981. Nestled between the Arkansas River and K-15, Oaklawn sits on 260 acres, a neighborhood hastily built as a quick solution to a wartime housing shortage in 1952.

Once “one of the largest housing construction projects in the history of Kansas,” Oaklawn is not recognized as a municipality by the state of Kansas. It has also often lacked other clear markers of community recognition. At the time of her arrival, Sisco says residents were still assigned phone numbers associated with Haysville, a Wichita suburb nearly six miles to the west.

Her kids played baseball for the now-defunct South Riverside Youth Club when the spark for her first dip into civic engagement ignited: finding someone to manage the tall weeds and flooded ditches surrounding the field.

“I got ate up by mosquitoes. I called around to see whose responsibility it was to take care of it,” Sisco says. “I never could get anybody to cut the grass. I would call Riverside Township and they’d say ‘it’s the (Oaklawn) Improvement District’s (issue).’ I’d call the improvement district and they’d say, ‘No, it’s not ours.’”

Exasperated by the lack of accountability from any local agency, Sisco decided to run for a position on the board of the Oaklawn Improvement District, where she’s been the treasurer for 34 years.

She’s one of three elected officials who oversee the quasi-governmental entity that provides limited services to residents. (In the eyes of the U.S. Census, Oaklawn shares its population count of about 3,000 residents with Sunview, a smaller, neighboring community overseen by a similar but separate improvement district.)

The Oaklawn district’s role includes park upkeep, senior services, nuisance abatements and state Department for Children and Families services. The rest of what the community gets comes from a patchwork of regional providers.

Oklahoma native and Air Force veteran Melvin Mewborn, 80, moved to Oaklawn in 1980. Although dilapidated homes pockmark the neighborhood, his home – which he owns free and clear –is not among them. In fact, he's grown used to fending off agents' offers.

Photo by Jeff Tuttle

The other board members are Don Winston, the president, and Nichole Heird, the secretary. There’s also an office manager and community/ senior director listed on the website.

Despite its proximity and historic links to Wichita, aside from water, Oaklawn receives minimal services from the city of Wichita. Road upkeep falls to Riverside Township. Oaklawn kids attend Derby Public Schools. The Derby Recreation Commission runs the Oaklawn Activity Center. Policing, fire protection, limited bus service (with an extension promised) and health services are provided by Sedgwick County.

As a result, Oaklawn occupies a curious, categorybusting space in the local civic landscape. It’s a neighborhood that looks like a suburb but is governed similarly to a sparsely populated rural area. A place where you can buy milk at Dollar General and legally practice target shooting in your backyard.

With a median household income of about $37,000, about three-fifths of the county’s average, it’s a place that’s mostly known for its poverty – if it’s known for anything at all. But it also provides opportunity for an increasingly diversifying population, including Latinos – many of them Spanish speakers – along with Vietnamese and other Asians.

While driving through Oaklawn, it’s not unusual to spot a dilapidated home next door to a renovated one, a sign that the area remains attractive for those who want to buy a cheap home to fix or flip.

But Oaklawn’s haphazard access to governance, which gives the community limited options to address its great needs, remains a hindrance to improving the quality of life.

Research out of the University of California, Berkeley School of Social Welfare found that a community’s lack of incorporation status is a “structural determinant of health.” In other words, the lack of local government representation leads to political exclusion and a diminished access to resources, especially for low-income residents of color.

Oaklawn resident Tonya Vidales moved to the area with her husband 15 years ago. She sees a community that doesn’t get much in the way of help, so it simply chooses to make do with what it has.

“The problem I have seen … is the services people need to better their circumstances are limited or are too expensive,” she says. “People are content with the bare minimum we have out here because we’re limited.”

IS OAKLAWN TOO EXPENSIVE TO BE ANNEXED?

The challenge of providing affordable housing is an issue just about everywhere, and certainly in Wichita, as the costs of home buying and renting have exploded in recent years. Oaklawn’s origins lie in the housing challenges of another era.

In 1951, a plat was submitted to Wichita’s planning department for a development of 1,100 single-family units to confront a housing shortage correlated with the Boeing Military Airplane Company’s employment needs during the Korean War.

The Defense Production Administration declared Wichita as a critical area, immediately authorizing emergency defense housing, despite opposition from the Wichita Real Estate Board, which cited a lack of financing for private builders.

A 260-acre tract southeast of Wichita was purchased for $271,000 then immediately flipped into an $11 million development, with four subsidiary companies splitting the cost: 1,034 units in Oaklawn and 190 units in Sunview Heights, immediately to the north.

By June 1952, the first units were ready. The idea was that the community would be “mostly selfsufficient,” according to the Derby Historical Society and Museum, with its own water and sewer utilities and rental rates that included trash service.

“The flurry of construction near Boeing created concerns for leaders in nearby Derby,” who worried Wichita’s growth could swallow their town, according to historical society records. But officials in Derby’s school district saw it as an

expansion opportunity by consolidating with several rural districts to serve Oaklawn and other areas near Boeing and the Wichita Municipal Airport.

That boom eventually went bust. Boeing cut back production in 1959, sparking an exodus from the neighborhood.

The abandonment in the community reached staggering proportions, with a 1964 survey from the Wichita Association of Homebuilders showing that 688 of the community’s 1,405 houses were vacant. As the years passed, the area developed a blighted reputation but eventually stabilized with a mix of homeowners and renters drawn there by two key factors – cheap housing and access to nearby jobs.

Sedgwick County Commissioner Jim Howell lived in Oaklawn for about a year when he was a kid. Now it’s within the district he represents. And there don’t appear to be easy answers for addressing Oaklawn’s problems.

He doubts there’s much interest in Wichita extending a hand to the neighborhood. “Would Wichita be interested in annexing Oaklawn? Well,

the quick answer is no,” he says. “They don’t want to have to provide services (for Oaklawn).”

When asked for comment on Howell’s statement, Megan Lovely, communications manager for the City of Wichita, directed this reporter to a state statute, stating that no city can annex land within an improvement district. The Oaklawn Improvement District would have to dissolve for its land to be open for annexation.

“As the City of Wichita cannot annex Oaklawn because of the Oaklawn improvement district, it would be the purview of Sedgwick County to provide other resources to this community,” Lovely wrote in an email.

Howell summarizes Oaklawn’s pains through taxes and mill levies – the tax rate applied to the assessed value of a home.

“Every taxing jurisdiction has people who have the ability to pay taxes, and people who use more government. … Every taxing jurisdiction has both,” Howell says. “So, we think about the state of Kansas. Wichita is a net. We pay more taxes to the state than we get back from the state. Where are

Andree Sisco (right) has lived in Oaklawn for more than 40 years and is a longtime member of the board of the Oaklawn Improvement District. The district's offices, where she and Matty Santibanez were preparing lunch on a recent day, serve as a neighborhood hub.

Photo by Jeff Tuttle

those taxes going? Western Kansas. That’s taxing jurisdiction.”

In his district, District 5, Howell says people rely on county services more, painting a picture of an impoverished socioeconomic reality: single-parent families, minimum wage workers, the unemployed and those with lower education levels.

“You’ll see a community that, overall, is struggling with life. That’s the problem. So what do we do?” Howell says. “I look at this as a place of ministry. There’s a lot of great needs there.”

namely mending conditions that interfere with residents’ use or enjoyment of the community.

The biggest concern? It’s often a cleanup.

“Every time I get a new county commissioner, I sucker them into doing a cleanup for us,” Sisco says. But those cleanups “end up being a nightmare. Every time,” Sisco says. “I don’t know if we hoard (our trash) or what.”

Howell and Sisco both recall a county-sponsored community clean up in 2015, organized jointly by Howell and the improvement district. Residents were invited to drop off items – from filled trash bags to old mattresses – over the course of two days.

The demand was so massive, the cleanup filled more than 100 dumpsters. Mattresses showed up by the hundreds, Howell says. Bulldozers from public works were reportedly called to help.

Howell speculates that some of the trash wasn’t from the average resident, but landlords emptying out their properties. Sisco thinks that people from nearby communities heard of the cleanup and decided to take advantage too.

“The county can’t make (any cleanup) Oaklawnonly, because it’s funded through Sedgwick County money. They can’t send everybody else away,” she says.

The problems with cleanups are compounded by the economic conditions in Oaklawn, Howell says.

“Unfortunately, one of the problems is that every residence is supposed to have trash service. But a lot of people in Oaklawn don’t,” Howell says. “Why? Because when they have to choose between paying for their next meal for their kids versus trash service … they’re not going to have trash. It’s not surprising.”

Besides garbage, Oaklawn struggles with another health issue: dilapidated homes.

A COMMUNITY CLEANUP

In her role with the Oaklawn Improvement District, Sisco primarily focuses on quality of life issues,

“There are plenty of empty, rotting homes around,” says Vidales. “Yes, there is always trash in the community, that’s because people get large

A metal cabinet drawer inside the improvement district’s headquarters provides a window into one of Oaklawn’s most persistent challenges – policing property violations. Despite clearing 29 abatements in 2022, officials struggle to keep up.

Photo by Jeff Tuttle

Oaklawn's amenities are few. But the splash pad in Idlewild Park is a big draw for children like 7-year-old Kamden Campbell. The park itself is a source of neighborhood pride and is maintained solely by residents.

Photo by Jeff Tuttle

items and can’t afford to have it hauled off or have the resources to move it anywhere. Many empty lots. Yards are overgrown.”

The improvement district collects all nuisance reports on residences, including submissions made anonymously. A nuisance is a legal term referring to a condition or use of a property that interferes with the neighbors’ use or enjoyment of their property. Kansas law allows a governing body to intervene on reported nuisances, either wholly removing them or diminishing them. Sisco led this reporter through a tour of the improvement district’s headquarters, a building that holds its office, Oaklawn’s senior center and a state social services branch. She stops at a metal cabinet, yanking open a drawer to reveal its contents: hundreds of nuisance reports.

“Inside this here, is, well, not my nightmare, but …” Sisco ran her hand across manila tabs, trailing off. “When you go on (our) Facebook page and see comments like ‘We don’t do anything for cleanup’ that’s what this here is.”

In 2022, the improvement district cleared 39 abatements, according to data provided by Sisco. One additional abatement was handed off to the county, a move for nuisances that don’t get resolved by the improvement district’s timeline and are considered a “menace and dangerous to the health of inhabitants of Sedgwick County.”

The improvement district has the power to abate nuisances and pass along the costs to property owners. But district officials often prefer for property owners to remedy nuisances on their own, which reduces the district’s workload but also can require patience.

Sisco referenced a case of a homeowner taking over a year to finish cleaning up his property, but the improvement district remained flexible with his deadline, granting extensions when he appeared at the board meetings with proof of progress.

“People forget that it costs money to haul stuff away,” Sisco says. “And not all of us are physically able.” Even those with flexible finances might put off addressing home issues in favor of other priorities, like Vidales.

“My house has cracks in the foundations, cracks in the walls, poor insulation, outdated plumbing,” she says. “We have plenty of land to build on or improve our home. … But for my story, anything we need fixed has to wait because all my ‘extra’ funds goes for basic living and paying for immigration things.” Vidales and her husband are working to update his immigration status.

The strains of living in Oaklawn have, to some degree, gotten worse. When Sisco and Vidales moved into the community, there was a laundromat and grocery store. But both of those closed, further reducing the community’s access to basic necessities.

To alleviate the strain, the improvement district provides commodities to all residents within its 260 acres.

The Emergency Food Assistance Program distributes canned fruit or vegetables, meat, pasta and more to low-income households through the improvement district. The office gives out food on the first Thursday and Friday of the month. The district also works with Meals on Wheels, Giving the Basics, and one Oaklawn resident who continually donates socks for her neighbors.

In addition, there are free toiletries for those who need them. Inside of the district office women’s bathroom stands a large bathroom cabinet with half a dozen drawers crammed with shampoo, conditioner, soap, sanitizer and more, for those who, Sisco says, “feel as though they need help but they don’t want to ask.”

“We, as an improvement district, go way past what we should or shouldn’t be doing, to a certain extent,” Sisco says.

“We do a lot of things that’s not within our bounds to do but they’re all important. They’re needed. We’re a low-income area. You look at our houses – I don’t get a whole lot of property taxes off my houses.”

Vidales says she’s heard that the community has come a long way from “what it was” but when it’s a struggle to provide the basics, anything beyond that can be seen as an extravagance.

“There isn’t much of a safe recreational area for families to use, like a tennis court or swimming pool. There’s a splash pad, but that’s different,” she says. “The problem is (the Oaklawn Improvement District) probably couldn’t afford those services even if they wanted to.”

OAKLAWN’S SHIFTING LANDSCAPE

Despite its challenges, Oaklawn remains an attractive place for newcomers to find affordable places to live. As a result, the community is diversifying, accelerating a trend that started in the 1990s.

According to data from the 2021 American Community Survey, about 27% of residents within Oaklawn’s census tract identify as Hispanic or Latino. Another data point from the same survey notes that 21.3% of the population over 5 years old speaks Spanish at home.

“The community is changing,” Sisco says. “We’re getting more Spanish-speaking people in. We’ve always had Asians and Vietnamese.”

Despite that growth, the improvement district’s efforts to measure up to it are stunted. Sisco says that no one within the office is bilingual. Instead,

the office has a machine to provide live translation for any visitor who can’t speak English.

“I want to try to communicate with people. We get a lot of Spanish speakers to request permits to add onto their homes,” she says.

No one can say for sure exactly what’s driving the neighborhood’s demographic changes. The influx of Latino residents could be driven by the opportunity to buy a cheap home and flip it. Others see the neighborhood becoming a refuge of sorts. Vidales wonders if there’s safety in numbers.

“Perhaps the heightened threat of deportations and separation of families caused that influx?” she says. “When you show you have a higher percentage of a population, it’s harder to take down community. … People don’t feel threatened, so they feel they can come out and be who they truly are.”

PLANS FIT FOR A SHELF

It’s not uncommon for officials in Sedgwick County to periodically discuss ways to support Oaklawn more effectively. But it doesn’t appear those discussions have led to sustained action.

In 2002, the Wichita-Sedgwick County Metropolitan Area Planning Commission developed a neighborhood revitalization plan for Oaklawn, adopting it as an amendment into its County Comprehensive Plan.

The 50-page report finishes with a list of goals, such as recommending that Sedgwick County designate the Oaklawn/Sunview area as a “special district,” to create “supporting codes and regulations to promote decent, safe, and sanitary housing stock … and prevent conditions presenting a health or safety risk, contributing to neighborhood degradation, or that are determined to be a nuisance.”

The Journal asked Howell if he had any knowledge of the 2002 report. He says no, and seemed surprised at the report existing in the first place. He doesn’t see much of a chance of Oaklawn getting more attention from Wichita.

“I’d say this to anybody over there in the City (Hall): Wichita’s having enough problems managing their problems they have today,” Howell says. “They don’t have enough money to take care of the streets. They are underfunding their police officers. The public safety is lacking. They have over a billion dollars in debt.

“To think they would actually have the resources to extend more services to an impoverished community … it doesn’t sound very likely to me,” he says. “Maybe it was a nice discussion, but I don’t know how real that was ever going to be.”

Sisco remembers the plan, saying the housing director at the time, who recently retired, asked her to commit $5,000 toward the plan.

“I told him I did not mind helping to fund it just as long as it did not end up on a shelf somewhere.”

Lovely, the communications manager for Wichita, listed the services that the city provides open to Oaklawn residents:

“The city of Wichita offers many community programs, especially through our libraries and community service centers to both Wichita residents and non-residents, including free

computers, tax help, check outs, Filling the Gap free lunch programs, assistance with water bill relief and more,” she says. “The city also provides transit and supports public safety efforts in the community.”

Regardless of promises, one sentiment remains unwavering: Those living in Oaklawn want better for it. They see it as a gem that needs a little shining. Vidales says her family moved to Oaklawn to raise her kids in a safe, healthy environment. Yes, Oaklawn was affordable, but she says the community has been a “real nice area” too.

At the Oaklawn Improvement District offices, food is distributed to households that need it, including Kesa Hallum's, on the first Thursday and Friday of the month. On this day, volunteers Geno Mullins (left) and Tori Treadwell (right) lent a hand. Photo by Jeff Tuttle

In addition to Oaklawn's association with the Emergency Food Assistance Program, the district works with Meals on Wheels and Giving the Basics. For Rhonda Davenport, who's lived in Oaklawn for 11 years, and other residents, a meal at the district headquarters provides nourishment and fellowship. Photo by Jeff Tuttle

Enveloping the Oaklawn Improvement District’s building is Idlewild Park, a labor of love maintained solely by neighbors. It’s an expansive greenery, with a lawn and a splash pad. (“Which is $55,000 a year. Drives me crazy, but the kids enjoy it,” says Sisco.) A playground there is scheduled to be updated.

“You look out there and that’s a beautiful park,” Sisco says. “And this is only the (day)light of it. You come out here in the evening time, the deer come all the way up. Five or six of them!”

DISCUSSION GUIDE

1. How do you see people in Oaklawn exercising leadership to make progress on the issues facing their community?

2. What are the competing values of the City of Wichita and Sedgwick County officials as they attempt to engage the Oaklawn community?

3. We heard from a few inside and outside voices in this story. What are some other interpretations and stories that could be told about Oaklawn and its residents from a different perspective?

4. With the growth of the Latino community in Oaklawn, how can their voices be engaged in this ongoing conversation?

- By Neha Batawala

Outsiders tend to see Oaklawn with all its warts, which include poverty, dilapidated homes and clean-up issues. Residents, on the other hand, often look past shortcomings and envision a community that's as strong and attractive as the friendships they've made with their neighbors. Photo by Jeff Tuttle

BY: AJ DOME

Sparking a renewal

Lindsay Hutchison’s year started with a whirlwind of activity.

The 38-year-old mayor of Peabody – both the first woman to hold the office and the youngest in the city’s history – had less than a month to get 29 residents signed on to a grant application to provide money to preserve her community’s historic downtown district.

With that financial boost, Hutchison and members of the Peabody Main Street Association could then rely on the biggest strength of any small community – its people.

She and the Main Streeters had known for some time that their beloved buildings were in need of overdue repairs, many requiring major work and major cash. Throughout the month of January, she and the group used social media to mobilize residents in support of a large grant to help spur revitalization.

“Sometimes people that aren’t from a small town don’t believe that word of mouth can work that well,” Hutchison says of the process to get downtown property owners included in the application.

“The method to my madness, if you will, is: We’ll apply to all the free grant dollars we can, and

hopefully spark an interest in the community, to help people see the potential of what our city could be again.”

Hutchison says most residents wanted to see growth in Peabody, but they had differing opinions on how to utilize potential grant funds. She says Main Street board members made every attempt to clear up confusion and frustration – a good exercise in understanding other points of view.

Hutchison got the 29 property owners on board by simply offering them an opportunity to “ask for free money.

“Most people that own historic property in a town like Peabody can’t afford to turn down that kind of offer,” Hutchison says.

As with a lot of smaller towns on the Great Plains, the past few decades have been challenging for Peabody, which has lost about one-third of its population since the 1990s. A low point came in 2009, when Baker Furniture and Carpet moved out of a downtown space after a 125-year run, leaving six empty buildings along Walnut Street, says business owner Morgan Marler. A treasured antique store was also going out of business because its owner was retiring.

HOME TO ABOUT 950 RESIDENTS, PEABODY HAS A DOWNTOWN DISTRICT OF MORE THAN 20 HISTORIC BUILDINGS, ALL IN NEED OF VARIOUS REPAIRS OR RENOVATIONS. RESIDENTS SAY THE HARD WORK TO PRESERVE THEIR TOWN’S HISTORIC INTEGRITY, AND SET AN EXAMPLE FOR THE NEXT GENERATION, IS WOVEN INTO THE COMMUNITY FABRIC.

The design of the Sunflower Theatre in historic downtown Peabody is particularly noteworthy for the incorporation of a row of terra cotta sunflowers in its design. This spring, Mid-Continent Restoration cleaned and repaired tile, and repointed the brickwork. Photo by Jeff Tuttle

The Main Street Association triaged the damage at the time by buying the vacant buildings. Marler was able to secure a grant to repair their roofs. But more financial help, and more community volunteerism, would be needed to achieve the level of downtown restoration locals aspired to. The town’s historic downtown district represents a core asset – and a major point of pride – to the community.

Hutchison, who attended a Kansas Leadership Center training program last year, says she felt inspired to join the Peabody City Council in 2018 after she noticed a distinct lack of involved leadership in the town – in her words, an attitude of “nobody wants to lead.”

“The thing that really opened my eyes during that (Kansas Leadership Center) process is: We aren’t going to have more money if we don’t have more people who care about the community,” Hutchison says.

WELCOME TO PEABODY

A quiet community of about 950 residents, Peabody is situated in a sloping valley just south of U.S. Highway 50 in southern Marion County, about 45 minutes north of Wichita. Large, wellloved Victorian homes with neatly manicured lawns line brick-paved Walnut Street, the town’s main thoroughfare, that’s shaded by large old cottonwood and oak trees.

The road changes from brick to asphalt at the intersection of Second Street and Walnut. A wheeled informational kiosk stationed in the middle of that intersection marks the unofficial entrance to one of the largest historic districts in Kansas. On this date, Memorial Day, American flags waved from every other light pole and in downtown storefronts. On one shaded porch, an elderly couple took in the day.

“Peabody has roughly 40 properties within one historic district that’s registered with Kansas and the national historic registry,” says Jonathan Clayton, director of economic recovery for the Kansas Department of Commerce. “It’s a beautiful downtown, but it hadn’t kept up with modern

construction standards. It kind of made the town look run-down and forgotten about.”

Clayton has worked for the department for three years. In Peabody’s case, his job was to guide property owners through the process of applying for and securing grants amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Funding for the Building a Stable Economy, or the BASE 2.0 grant program, comes from the American Rescue Plan Act and is intended to primarily serve infrastructure improvements, especially for facilities that may have suffered a downturn in maintenance or delayed renovations because of the pandemic.

Clayton says he provided residents with the steps for completing the application, including getting estimates for needed repairs to downtown buildings and then settling on a reasonable grant amount to ask for.

“The Main Street Association invited every single property owner in that district that’s commercial, … owners and tenants, to participate and did a collective application process,” Clayton says. “Everybody gave us a list of what their building needed, whether it be a roof or HVAC or new doors or whatever.”

Clayton says the community went right to work getting quotes and estimates for repairs.

“It became a very detailed jigsaw puzzle,” Clayton says. “All told, the wish list was about $4.5 million.”

The Main Street Association board then whittled that amount down to $2.79 million. Hutchison recalled that she and other Main Streeters spread the word about their initiative quickly, to the point where the conversation about historic preservation spanned the entire community.

“The nice thing is that, at most every property downtown, somebody has a connection at least to someone,” Hutchison says. “Even if people don’t always get along, working together always happens in Peabody, and it’s always impressive how we can make that happen, how everyone can see the benefit for everyone involved.”

SMALL BUT ASPIRING FOR AWESOME

Linda Martinez, a Peabody native and career hairdresser who returned after many years away, has owned and operated the Mane Street Beautique at 110 N. Walnut since August 2011.

But she sees change in her future. Over the next two years, she plans to switch her business from one that deals in hairdressing to one that deals in salad dressing.

“My goal is to turn my salon into some kind of eatery,” she says, “more healthy stuff.”

Martinez says she won’t be competing with the restaurant across the street, Pop’s Diner, housed in

the historic Dr. C.A. Loose Building. Customers at Pop’s can catch up on their neighbors’ goings-on over a plate of “garbage” – a breakfast menu item consisting of ham, hash browns, onions, peppers and tomatoes – or they can choose from other popular dishes. A hand-drawn chalk menu along one wall features the weekly specials.

Martinez says she won’t have any fried food or soda pop on her menu to keep her bistro “totally different” from Pop’s and the city’s other restaurant, The Coneburg Inn. Martinez and her husband also own The Wringer Laundromat in Peabody, which is contained in the same building as her salon.

Martinez says one of the challenges she continues to face is getting locals to see what’s around them.

“Just because we’re small doesn’t necessarily mean we’re not awesome.”

A HISTORIC COMMUNITY

Martinez doesn’t have many structural issues with her building because it’s relatively new compared with others surrounding it. The original structure at 110 N. Walnut burned down in 1945 and was completely rebuilt.

The storied history of downtown Peabody can be felt through one’s shoes in the sidewalks along North Walnut. The C.A. Loose Building is one of several examples of Italianate architecture (a popular 19th-century building style inspired by 16th-century Italian Renaissance designs) that line Walnut, and one of 46 structures that make up the downtown district, which was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1998. The majority of buildings in the district, stretching from Division to First streets, are also on the Kansas Register of Historic Places.

The town’s other historic landmarks include the W.H. Morgan House, the old Peabody Library, Peabody City Park and the Peabody Township Carnegie Library.

“This is one of the most beautiful libraries in the region,” says Rodger Charles, the executive director of the Carnegie Library. “Peabody’s is

One way to get folks downtown in Peabody is the Peabody Cruise, where owners and admirers of classic, rare and customized vehicles – like Don Harmon and Linda Martinez – can gather and gab. The event is held every fourth Sunday from April to October.

Photo by Jeff Tuttle

Ann Leppke, who taught science at Peabody High School before her retirement, serves on the board of the Peabody Main Street Association. She and other members of the group share a vision for downtown's revitalization that outsiders might well overlook.

Photo by Jeff Tuttle

the first free public library in Kansas, established in 1874. We’ve been a Carnegie since 1914. The tables and chairs I have in my library right now came with the building.”

Charles arrived in Peabody in 1996, a transplant from El Dorado, to serve as pastor of the First Baptist Church. He became a librarian in 2007 and has been the executive director of the Carnegie Library since 2011.

“I haven’t traveled far,” Charles says, adding that he’s completed a lot of maintenance work on the library building since he came on board.

Over the years, the library has made several infrastructure improvements. In 2007, central heating and air-conditioning was installed upstairs. Tech upgrades followed. Charles considers the addition of a wheelchair lift in 2016 a huge leap forward. A new roof and remodeled restroom to comply with the American Disabilities Act came that same year too.

“There’s been so much done,” he says, “and every year we’ve made steady progress on working on the building.”

Charles says there’s plenty still to do to restore more of the library’s grandeur. His hope is to increase access to the library without sacrificing the structure’s historic integrity.

“The people that come in don’t notice the technology; they’re noticing the historic parts of the building,” Charles says. “We can marry the modern with the old; they can co-exist, they don’t cancel each other out.”

WAITING PAYS OFF

Clayton, along with Hutchison and other Main Streeters, ultimately had about two weeks to submit a finalized grant application – including contractor bids, construction estimates and permissions from all necessary parties – to the state.

Hutchison recalled that it “seemed like a panic” as they prepared the application, which ran hundreds of pages, but when Jan. 31 came around

and the application was submitted, “Everybody then just had to wait.

“That two months, three months of waiting, is hard because everyone gets really excited, but the energy in town stayed higher with the anticipation of grant dollars that can really support our community.”

Their waiting paid off – literally.

In early May, they learned that Peabody would be receiving $1.5 million in BASE 2.0 grant money.

“That’s a third of what was needed and half of what they asked for,” Clayton says, “but everyone got their No. 1 request (for renovations and improvements) fulfilled.”

Clayton says there’s still “a lot of work to go” before that money is allocated.

“There’s lots and lots of documentation,” Clayton says. “Every property owner has to sign an agreement with the board (of the Peabody Main Street Association), and they have to have an understanding of the allocation and procedures. Everything must go out to bid if it’s $5,000 or more. So, now we’re in the middle of the bidding process for work to be done.”

Now that the grant is approved, Clayton can take more of a hands-on role to provide guidance to property owners for documentation and seeking bids.

“It’s all the federal rules mixed in with state rules and regulations,” he says, “so everything has to be public and visible and open and fair.”

Clayton says property owners got half their money in early June to fulfill the “easily tangible” needs, with construction projects beginning by mid-June. The other half of the grant funds will come next year. In a matter of serendipitous timing, Clayton and his husband are selling their home in Kiowa County and moving to Peabody to become a permanent part of the community.

“We had pretty much decided that we were going to move to Peabody,” Clayton says. “My husband has a storefront business in Mullinville that we’ll be moving to town.”

Peabody property owners have two years to complete their documents and bids. Clayton says that process will absolutely be completed on time.

The $1.5 million pool of money will change downtown in small but noticeable ways. Martinez will receive about $15,000 to convert her salon into a bistro, covering much of her electrical costs.

Charles will receive $12,500 for the Peabody Township Library.

“We’re trying to get as much work done above ground so people can see a change being made in Peabody,” Charles says. “As long as we keep that positive energy, great things are going to happen.”

“IT’S JUST WHAT WE DO”

Like many Peabody residents, Morgan Marler’s roots run deep. She’s the owner of Flint Hills Gypsies, a downtown antique store, and is also the water and wastewater supervisor for the city of Hillsboro. Her father got a job at Peabody High School in 1976 as the band instructor, and except for the time she spent in college, she’s remained part of the community since.

“My parents were involved with the Peabody Main Street Association since the 1980s, when it began,” Marler wrote in an email. “They were lifelong volunteers in the community, and always tried to involve my sister and I in community events and volunteer work.”

Marler’s hope is that a new generation will be able to revive and sustain that spirit of volunteerism.

“We realized long ago that we just have to do it ourselves. I was part of that in the 1970s and ’80s. My parents had me doing projects in the community, side by side with them. It’s just what we do.”

DISCUSSION GUIDE

1. How did the mayor successfully give the work back to the residents of Peabody?

2. The story doesn’t illuminate any factions in the community that disagree with efforts or aspirations. Might there be some and how important is it to engage them if they want to keep revitalizing Peabody?

3. If exercising leadership looks like making progress little by little, what are the next two or three interventions the community could explore?

- By Racquel Thiesen

Jerry Belton of Sylvia and Bill Jennings of Benton were among those who rolled into town this spring for one of the Peabody Cruises. Downtown Peabody, with its 20 historic buildings, provides a unique and unhurried setting for participants.

Photo by Jeff Tuttle

Houston Herbert, of College Grove, Tennessee, gave it a good go in the bareback riding competition this year at the Flint Hills Rodeo in Strong City but finished out of the money. World champion Jess Pope also competed, finishing third.

STAYING IN THE

SADDLE

THE OLDEST CONSECUTIVE EVENT OF ITS KIND IN KANSAS, THE FLINT HILLS RODEO TICKS ON ALMOST CONSTANTLY, LIKE A FULLY WOUND WATCH. IT CARRIES ON, RAIN OR SHINE, AND IT’S A STUDY IN HOLDING TO PURPOSE AMID CHANGE.

BY: AJ DOME

Drops of rain splatter on wooden bleachers and gravel roads, on horse trailers, horses and people.

The drops come gently at first, then more and more abundantly. Within a minute, a downpour is encompassing Strong City. Buildings within the small community along U.S. Highway 50 in Chase County are tinged a darker shade by brief heavy rains, the result of pop-up thunderstorms feeding off late spring humidity. Dogs bark as thunder rumbles through the verdant Flint Hills.

Moody shifts in weather can’t deter townsfolk and travelers alike from setting up camp along Cottonwood Avenue, Strong City’s main drag. On this day, they’re saddling up to celebrate a timetested Kansas tradition that’s well-known among amateur and professional cowpokes alike. Some years it rains all three days of the Flint Hills Rodeo, according to Mike Holder, who served on the rodeo board of directors for 27 years before becoming a lifetime board member.

“We’re in the middle of the Flint Hills,” Holder says as he sits on the dance floor at the rodeo grounds on the north side of town. His voice is graveled,

his blue eyes kind. “This is cattle country.”

In the 1930s, Chase County rancher Emmett Roberts staged pasture rodeos on his farm west of Strong City. In 1937, he held his first organized rodeo event. The following year, Roberts teamed up with his son, Ken, and son-in-law Eddie Boysen, to host what they called the First Annual Chase County Rodeo. In 1939, the event was renamed the Flint Hills Rodeo.

It’s been going nearly continuously ever since. (The only year it was canceled was 2020, because of the pandemic.) Held the first weekend in June, the rodeo is still billed as “the oldest consecutive rodeo in Kansas.” The same arena and rodeo grounds that were built for the event back in 1948 remain in use today.

On the final day of the rodeo, the community celebrates with a parade leading south from town along Kansas 177 two miles to Cottonwood Falls. The liquor store, train depot and antique gas station downtown are popular spots for revelers to gather; a few rowdier participants prep water balloons for unsuspecting parade entrants.

Photo by Jeff Tuttle

On the opening night of the Flint Hills Rodeo, Tex Junker, 86, of Roggen, Colorado, stood at attention as the national anthem was played. Junker started competing in the rodeo in 1956 and hasn't missed one since.

Photo by Jeff Tuttle

Chase County Sheriff Jacob Welsh led this year’s parade, followed by emergency vehicles and work trucks, their passengers tossing candy as they drove by. Local Shriners performed tricks on Honda three-wheelers and squealed the tires on their tiny chopper bikes. Horses ridden by smiling and waving cowboys and cowgirls trotted down the street. More sweet treats were thrown from parade sponsor floats. Children watching roadside quickly snatched them up to add to their goody collections.

Then the onslaught began. The crowd, which banked water balloons in between games of cornhole, began using them, hurling aquatic grenades over people watching the parade. Some balloons landed with great effect, splashing against county firetrucks with a thump and a spray onto the pavement. At least one balloon careened into a car to douse its occupants.

Even chaotic merriment has rules. The rowdies knew better than to drench the driver of an immaculate 1967 Pontiac GTO. Other drivers, including some who weren’t trying to be part of the parade, didn’t get a pass.

From the skies, more water comes.

Rodeo organizer Cheryl Bailey laughed as she sought shelter from the rain for her and her ATV under the dance floor. Bailey’s grandfather helped build the bleachers that rodeogoers still sit on. Her family has been involved in the event for about 80 years.

“My dad was up here pulling ropes in the stripping chute,” Bailey says. “My mom was always helping. My grandpa always helped with stuff.”

Bailey has served on the Flint Hills Rodeo board for about 25 years.

“Her family’s been involved (in the rodeo) forever,” Holder says, “and that’s part of what helps keep an event like this going.”

Bailey, Holder and the roughly 200 other volunteers who fan out across the rodeo grounds before, during and after the show work together every year to make sure the rodeo continues its legacy. There are no weather delays – except if there’s lightning in the area – and no rescheduling or postponing events. The rodeo carries on, rain or shine.

This year turned out to be a rainy one. Another deluge soaked the rodeo grounds as cowboys herded goats and calves into their pens ahead of the children’s competitions. The arena was mostly mud by the time the main event began. Some years, that’s just how it goes.

Holder admits that some years are better than others regarding ticket sales and attendance, but there’s a hearty core of people who attend, no matter the weather forecast.

Rodeo competitors hold the event in high regard, seldom failing to mention how much fun it is to be part of a longstanding tradition.

Holder says there’s a thread of leadership embedded within the Flint Hills Rodeo, directly related to its homegrown origins.

“Leadership comes from ownership,” Holder says. “If you help build it, well, then you feel like you’re a part owner of it.”

Natalie Unruh of Pretty Prairie gets fitted for a hat by Johsie Reid of JR Hatters Mercantile of Marion, one of the vendors at the Flint Hills Rodeo. Photo by Jeff Tuttle

Ace Schroer, 3, son of Mel and Seth Schroer, of Strong City, and Hayes Glanville, 3, son of Lee and Brea Glanville, of Cottonwood Falls, haven't quite mastered the good-natured rowdiness that accompanies the Flint Hills Rodeo parade, but they have time to perfect their techniques. Photo by Jeff Tuttle

Counterclockwise from lower left: The stands on the Flint Hills Rodeo grounds in Strong City seat about 6,000. Some less comfortable seats are available for those who get their boots dirty. Natalie Hershmen and Brody Harrison, both of Cottonwood Falls, took to the floor with other couples at the Cowboy/Cowgirl Dance, hoofing it to the music of Trent Criswell on Friday and the Whiskey River Band on Saturday. The three-day rodeo features seven traditional events, including bull riding, a crowd favorite. Photos by Jeff Tuttle

it a point to cater to younger spectators — tomorrow's rodeo fans. "Kids 12 and under will get into Thursday’s performance free,” rodeo association President Buck Bailey told the Hillsboro Free Press. “The first 200 children in the gates Thursday evening will also get a ticket for a free hotdog.”

DISCUSSION GUIDE

1. What are potential motivators for the volunteers and attendees who return to the rodeo year after year?

2. What role does the sense of ownership play in the success of the Flint Hills Rodeo?

3. What leadership lessons can be learned from the resilience of this long-standing tradition?

- By Maren Berblinger

The Flint Hills Rodeo makes

Photo by Jeff Tuttle

WHAT WE COULD LEARN FROM TULSA

IN CONFRONTING THE 1921 RACE MASSACRE AND ITS LEGACY, TULSA IS ATTEMPTING TO MANAGE FACTIONS, EXPECTATIONS AND PROGRESS. BUT THE GOING GETS TOUGH WHEN ACCOUNTING FOR LOSSES INCURRED IN THE PAST MEANS ACCOUNTABILITY FOR THOSE IN THE PRESENT.

BY: MARK MCCORMICK

Novelist Charles Dickens wrote “A Tale of Two Cities,” but had he traveled to Tulsa, he’d have found at least four.

Segregation created Greenwood, a separate town where in the early 20th century one group flourished despite boundaries designed to suffocate its aspirations. In fact, the segregated group did too well. Climbed too high. Accomplished too much. So much, that segregationists descended violently on that part of Tulsa, burning and looting and killing hundreds of people and then marching survivors into holding camps to “maintain order.”

A heavy curtain of silence then fell over the community, which quickly got busy forgetting and misremembering. Few spoke about the horrors of

May 31 through June 1, 1921. Decades of silence created more cities inside the city. More places where time and the cold pressure of a collective secret further divided residents.

The secret that Tulsa protected for decades is more widely known today, profiled in numerous news reports and podcasts and vividly re-created in the HBO TV series “Watchmen”: A white mob destroyed a nearly 40-square-block Greenwood area of Tulsa, known as Black Wall Street because of the successful businesses there. Members of the Tulsa Police Department, the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce, the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Department as well as the Oklahoma National Guard and assorted other municipal leaders made up the mob.

The destruction of Greenwood was so utterly complete that even when accounts of the massacre are accompanied by photographic evidence, to this day it remains shocking. Photo by Jeff Tuttle

The marauders killed hundreds of Black residents, injured thousands more and burned down more than 1,000 homes and businesses but not before looting those homes and businesses. Damage estimates range as high as $200 million in today’s dollars. The number of homeless was put at 9,000.

As the centennial of the race massacre approached, a group of residents began raising money for a commemoration of the event and to announce a plan to make sure the community, the state and, yes, the nation, would not only remember what happened, but learn how to create a more just society where something similar could never happen again.

But as donations mounted, schisms formed between Black factions. One faction believed that since fundraisers used the likenesses and travails of survivors, then surely, some of the $30 million raised should go to those three survivors as reparations. The fundraisers, though, believed the money should fund educational projects and that the government should pay survivors, not the educational fund.

The notion of reparations divided white Tulsans too. The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission excused the white mayor as a member after he said reparations would divide the community. The commission also ejected the state’s white governor after he pushed through a measure prohibiting the teaching of certain racial topics in Oklahoma classrooms.

Here is where this historic oil town finds itself today, caught under a gusher of history. There are centenarians deserving restitution. Still others, in oil-patch parlance, want this gusher capped and for the history that has surfaced to be shutin along with all the civic, legal and financial responsibilities flowing from those terrible days. The city is learning how real racial reconciliation can’t occur without a reckoning. There’s hope here, however, despite the tensions.

The story of Tulsa and the efforts of its people to reckon with its past is a fitting case study for Kansans and the country at large to consider as Americans continue to wrestle with the nation’s history and our differing interpretations of

that history. It’s a tale about the limits of good intentions and how resistance to loss in the present can continue to divide us even as we seek to remedy the losses of the past.

NO ONE’S FROM HERE

Americans can get pretty Pollyannaish about race. We seem to want reconciliation without the requisite reckoning – a real examination of the systems that produced social inequality. Mere discussions or shallow friendships get mistaken for actual progress. However, real understanding develops in real depth.

That’s what Greenwood Rising Executive Director Raymond Doswell believes is happening at his relatively new history center, as well as in the community at large. It is a place with a better shot at reconciliation than most, he says.

“That’s the whole thing about Tulsa. It was built by people coming from other places. People looking for their fortune. People looking for a better life.”

His organization is trying to create a community out of individuals brought there by the four winds. Every Tulsa Public Schools eighth-grader comes through the history center, and there’s even a carve-out allowing for the teaching of this history despite an edict pushed through the Oklahoma Legislature by Gov. Kevin Stitt in the wake of panic over critical race theory. Every police academy recruit comes through, as well as officers from other cities such as Wichita.

It remains one of the few places actually designed for the kinds of conversations the culture must have.

“We’re on a journey toward reconciliation,” says Doswell, who formerly served as curator at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Missouri. “We want you to talk about it. We encourage dialogue.”

Doswell said he’s seen strangers strike up conversations at the history center and watched the momentum of those conversations carry the visitors out of the building and on to dinner for more discussion.

What’s discussed at the history center, he says, “is an ugly truth about the country.”

Doswell points out that as the pandemic began to slow, it did not slow fast enough for some people who were eager and even impatient for a return to normal. There’s a similar desire for a kind of racial normalcy. But as was the case with the pandemic, we’ve been changed by what has happened. We’ll never get back to normal. We’re going to have to adjust to a new normal.

“I think that’s happening,” he says.

Doswell declined to address it, but most observers agreed that the pall over the city has to do with reparations.

Archeologists continue to search for mass grave sites following the discovery of one group of coffins using ground-penetrating radar/sonar.

Tensions remain taut. In 2015, a white reserve sheriff’s deputy shot and killed Eric Harris during an arrest. The next year, Officer Betty Shelby fatally shot Terence Crutcher while his hands were raised. In 2020, following the deaths elsewhere of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, demonstrators briefly blocked Interstate 44. That prompted the state’s Republican-controlled legislature to pass a law providing legal immunity in some cases to motorists who run down demonstrators on roadways.

Race still divides people here in life – the city remains relatively segregated – and in death, as those excavations found.

HONEST DIFFERENCES

James Goodwin’s family survived the massacre. One of his relatives, a fair-complexioned Black

“We’re on a journey toward reconciliation,” says Raymond Doswell, executive director of Greenwood Rising. “We want you to talk about it (the massacre). We encourage dialogue.”

Photo by Jeff Tuttle

man, stood on his porch and because he looked white, he was able to wave the mob away.

His family, which owns and publishes the state’s oldest black-owned newspaper, The Oklahoma Eagle, stayed in Greenwood and rebuilt their lives. It was an achievement, but Tulsa was not done with Greenwood.

State and federal governments – in much the same way other Black communities across the nation were destroyed – drove an interstate highway through the neighborhood. The government called it urban renewal. African Americans called it “Negro removal.” The highway put the final nail in the coffin of Greenwood’s prosperity. Goodwin said there are plans underway to reclaim a wide section of old Greenwood that the highway now covers.

Goodwin would like to see seedlings for a new Greenwood sprinkled there where Black Wall Street could be reborn.

“The removal of the highway will free up 30 acres,” says Goodwin, who is also a lawyer. “We can re-create a Black business community.”

The community received a $1.5 million grant from the federal government in an effort that his niece, State Rep. Regina Goodwin, spearheaded, to eliminate the highway exchange.

Now, two entities in Greenwood, the new Greenwood Rising history center, and the established Greenwood Cultural Center, have formed a fault line. The buildings stand relatively close, but a real distance in focus exists between them.

Goodwin says many Black residents hoped both entities would advance together, but Greenwood Rising has received significantly more support. They also think that because images and stories of the survivors were used to fundraise for Greenwood Rising, some of that money should go to the centenarian survivors. Other Black residents think segments of the community are just waiting for the survivors to die.

A failed centennial event two years ago, meant to memorialize the tragedy, offered a sense of how deep divisions go between Black factions.

Leaders of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission organized a mammoth

Memorial Day weekend event at the community’s minor league baseball stadium, featuring awardwinning songwriter and performer John Legend, and former Georgia gubernatorial candidate and voting rights advocate Stacey Abrams. The event, Remember and Rise, collapsed days before it was to be held.

A smoldering debate erupted over who should compensate massacre survivors. One group stated that the commission, which had raised $30 million, should compensate survivors. Members of the commission stated that since government actors participated in the attack, government should pay the reparations. They weren’t necessarily opposed to reparations, just not from their pool of funds.

Oklahoma State Sen. Kevin Matthews founded and chaired the centennial commission that promoted the holiday event as a way to share Greenwood’s story. Matthews and the commission earmarked the money that it raised almost exclusively for a history exhibit, art projects and a cultural center in the neighborhood.

On the other side of the debate stood Damario Solomon-Simmons, a lawyer representing survivors in a lawsuit against the city and a range of city and state entities involved in the marauding and aftermath. It’s Solomon-Simmons’ position that the commission raised money using images of the massacre but used the money for a building when some of the funds should have gone to survivors and descendants.

To try to rescue the Memorial Day events, the New York Times reported that Matthews and the commission negotiated 11th hour, $100,000 direct payments to each survivor as well as $2 million to establish a reparations fund, which the legal team initially accepted – only to return the next day asking for significantly more. Further talks and the planned events then crumbled.

A couple of decades earlier, the state had made a gesture toward reconciliation. In 1997, the legislature established a commission that studied the riot. It recommended that the state pay reparations and build a memorial to the dead. In

2001, the legislature passed the 1921 Race Riot Reconciliation Act. The legislation did not include reparations, nor did it provide funding for any initiatives, despite the commission’s conclusion that reparations “would be good public policy and do much to repair the emotional and physical scars of this terrible incident in our shared past.”

So much of what has happened in Oklahoma’s racial history is in fact difficult to face.

BLACK WALL STREET ATTACKED

The destruction of Greenwood came about largely because Black success was an unspeakable indignity to white supremacists. It tragically represents the kind of inclusive prosperity that politicians and governments often say they want to create in this day and age.

“Imagine a community of great possibilities and prosperity built by Black people for Black people,” The New York Times wrote. “Places to work. Places to live. Places to learn and shop and play. Places to worship.”

In the 100 block of Greenwood Avenue, for instance, more than 70 businesses operated out of red brick buildings, The Times reported, with all but a couple owned by Black entrepreneurs. Because segregation excluded Black Tulsans from shopping at many white-owned businesses, Black Wall Street created a self-sufficient, selfperpetuating economy. You could find billiard halls, clothing stores, music shops, furniture stores, confectionaries, meat markets, hotels, restaurants and a movie theater, along with a library, two schools, a hospital and two newspapers.

Dell Gines, lead community development advisor for the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s Omaha branch, has called it the best example he knows of a truly inclusive entrepreneurial ecosystem. We have nothing like it today.

Along with the erasure of Black Wall Street came the blotting out of the event itself.

Attorney and Oklahoma Eagle publisher James Goodwin sees hope for a new Greenwood if a 30-acre section of the community now covered by a highway can be reclaimed. “We can re-create a Black business community,” he says.

Photo by Jeff Tuttle

Said the Times: “The act of remembering the Tulsa Race Massacre has been smothered, resisted, and contested for the entire century since it took place. For many decades, few spoke of how hordes of white Tulsans with deep racial resentment had stormed Greenwood, one the country’s most prosperous Black neighborhoods. Overcoming a fierce defense by those who lived in Greenwood, the mob brutally slaughtered residents before pillaging and burning most of the district to the ground.”

Years of forgetting led to years of denial but time also led to the truth, wriggling up deep from its reddirt burial.

In October 2020, archeologists found the outlines of at least 10 buried coffins, one of several mass grave sites that historians had long been searching for. The excavations will likely continue and attempts to identify survivors of the exhumed bodies will continue as well.

Faced with massive evidence, it has become next to impossible to now claim nothing happened. But strangely, the fact that this horrible event did occur seems the only thing everyone here agrees on.

WHAT ABOUT THE SURVIVORS?

Oklahoma may stand as the worst location yet for a teaching ban like Gov. Kevin Stitt’s, which came about after a conservative panic spread nationwide over the graduate-level teaching of critical race theory, a concept that racial bias – intentional or not – is so deeply rooted in U.S. laws and institutions that it leads to differential outcomes by race. The centennial commission summed it up well, saying, “The bill serves no purpose than to fuel the racism and denial that afflicts our communities and our nation.”

Before it became a state in 1907, the area served as the transplanted home to Indigenous tribes pushed out of other sections of the country in fulfillment of the nation’s thirst for white settlement and expansion. It also attracted formerly enslaved people fleeing the South. Some Black people had been brought there by slave-holding tribes.

Many of those folks even hoped to make Oklahoma a majority-Black state, free from white terror.

But with the possibility of land, white settlers from the surrounding Confederate states rushed in with their culture of Black inferiority in tow. The state’s first law? A Jim Crow statute requiring segregation of railcars and depots. Pulitzer Prize winning author Isabel Wilkerson famously wrote in her book “The Warmth of Other Suns” that even phone booths in Oklahoma were segregated.

Tulsa didn’t have an elected Black City Council member until 1990, when the city adopted a ward system.

The racial problems in the city didn’t end when the fires from 1921 were extinguished. Reparations often surface as a way to address our legacy racial issues, but opponents typically say they weren’t around when the injustice occurred and shouldn’t have to pay for it or that there are no survivors to actually pay.

Those excuses fall flat in Tulsa.

Days before the events planned in 2021, the three known survivors of the massacre appeared before a congressional committee to talk about their experiences, to share what they saw that awful day, and to ask for the measure of justice they’d been denied all these decades since. C-SPAN carried their testimony live and re-ran the hearing during the recent Memorial Day holiday.

Viola Ford Fletcher, now 109, spoke hauntingly about Black people being shot and Black bodies lying in the streets. Her brother, Hughes Van Ellis, then 100, also shared images of what he saw, but his voice began to break. The memories, all

these years later, remained painful for him. Lessie Benningfield Randle, then 106, also testified. Each pressed for reparations.

In so many other debates about racism and how to confront it, the call for reparations has been based on something that happened hundreds of years ago. We’re reaching out over centuries and studying disparities, looking for evidence or leafing through old documents in trying to put a puzzle together. But amazingly, here we have centenarian survivors. They are eyewitnesses not just to what happened, but to the aftermath of conscious and willful misremembering.

Greenwood Rising describes the history center as telling "the specific story of the dignity of a people who turned trials, tribulations, and tragedy into a triumph of the human spirit." Among its recent visitors was Ann Myers, a Tulsa resident. Photo by Jeff Tuttle

The Vernon A.M.E. Church, here being photographed by Troy Ewing of Boston, was the only building on North Greenwood Avenue to "survive" the massacre. But only the basement and parts of the lower level remained intact. By 1928, the structure had been rebuilt – solely through private donations.

Photo by Jeff Tuttle

A cultural center is nice for the public – Blacks and whites – but in and of itself, it could not possibly compensate survivors.

Imagine first, that a society that claims to have granted you full-citizenship status, has chased you out of its mainstream and into its margins and then sets hard boundaries to keep you there. Against all the odds, you build a profitable business and a cozy home for yourself and your family with the half expanse of the sky you’ve been allotted.

But then, the very society that chased you into the margins, now begrudges you the portion you’d built for yourself and, on the pretense of upholding order, descends violently on your business and your home. Police officers, sheriff’s deputies, all manner of “public servants” join in the burning and sacking of your property. Crop dusting planes drop turpentine and tar bombs from the sky.

The public servants and others rob your home and business, carrying off your clothes, your jewelry and other valuables and the fires they set gobble up the rest of your belongings as well as your home.

When the torrent of violence ends, your life in ruins, you’re herded into camps and held there by many of the same people who terrorized you for

the previous two days. You try seeking justice, but no one in authority cares enough to honor your claims. In fact, a great pall of silence and denial settles over the community, which quickly gets busy forgetting. Decades later, there’s hardly a trace of the crimes.

As a century passes, new generations discover the horrors of those deadly days. Denial has given way to angst among the descendants of the apartheid. They still control the municipal government and instead of “no,” now you hear excuses about statutes of limitations, about legal standing in lawsuits, about white people feeling uncomfortable with direct payouts.

Some white residents suggest that the new history center was a form of reparations and that the building and its programs should suffice.

Progress?

Despite all that history and all the divisions and the steep learning curve, Goodwin says Tulsans can navigate these narrow and rocky racial straits.

“I’d say first, because the world is looking at Tulsa right now. It’s in the public eye. Worldwide. Everyone is watching.”

Goodwin says Tulsa is very sensitive about its history and somewhat apologetic about it. It also has a

The Tower of Reconciliation at John Hope Franklin Reconciliation Park in Tulsa gives voice to those died and were brutalized in the Greenwood Massacre while depicting the sweeping history of the African-American struggle. The tower is the work of sculptor Ed Dwight, the first Black male to graduate from Bishop Ward High School in Kansas City, Kansas. Dwight served in the Air Force and might have been a pioneering astronaut but for what he called the “racial politics” of the day. After leaving the service, he has reached new heights in the art world, creating well over 100 large-scale and public art installations.

The routing of Interstate 244 through Greenwood put an end to the revival of Black Wall Street. According to the Congress for the New Urbanism, "In 1942, Greenwood was home to 242 Black-owned businesses spread over 35 square blocks. The highway reduced that number to only a handful." But federal money has been put toward a study that would involve rerouting the highway, giving advocates hope the neighborhood can be reclaimed.

Photo by Jeff Tuttle

vibrant community fund with a national reputation. It is a source of civic pride, he says, and that pressure of public opinion has the power to nudge residents toward their better angels.

“There are also people of goodwill in Tulsa,” Goodwin says.

On the surface, the Tulsa standoff could seem to be about reparations, and even conservative journalist David Brooks of The New York Times has said that there must be an effort to address the wide disparities in our culture.

“Reparations and integration are the way to do that,” Brooks once wrote. “Reparations would involve an official apology for centuries of slavery and discrimination, and spending money to reduce their effects.”

There’s also a wrong way to do this, he cautioned.

“Trying to find the descendants of slaves and sending them a check,” Brooks said. “That would launch a politically ruinous argument over who qualifies for the money, and at the end of the day people might be left with a $1,000 check that would produce no lasting change.”

But that’s not the real issue. The real issue, many say, rests in the resentments and resistance about reparations.

Why, many asked, in such a litigious society do we suspend those standards because the plaintiffs are Black? The historical evidence overwhelms. Survivors and witnesses remain. As Americans, we fall heir to the nation’s bounties and benefits as well as its debts and obligations. Most of us didn’t fight in Korea or Vietnam, but our taxes still flow to those now in retirement who did serve.

We can’t pick and choose which line items our taxes will support.

The racial factions can’t agree on progress because their respective communities have experienced life in different castes.

Several Tulsans, speaking on background only, accused Greenwood Rising and the centennial

commission that birthed it of hollow racial window dressing. They contend that the entity is little more than a symbolic gesture toward people needing concrete change, including but not limited to financial reparations. Many said the museum couldn’t possibly replace the loss of homes and businesses.

Is there progress in that the episode is no longer referred to as a “riot”? Sure.

But author James Baldwin may have said it best when he said, “There is scarcely any hope for the American Dream because people who are denied participation in it, by their very presence, will wreck it.”

In 1921, the city saw years and years of work building a stalwart business community destroyed in a matter of hours. If the city (as well as the nation) is going to survive, this confrontation with its past must yield more than new buildings, more tourists and courteous conversations. Like the history that forced its way up from its burial, a long-denied justice must emerge from this work.

It’s the real work that begins inside the building, after the construction is complete.

DISCUSSION GUIDE

1. What factions or groups with shared loyalties and losses are present in this article?

2. What could it look like for the various factions to speak to loss?

3. How can reparations contribute to healing and reconciliation? What challenges might arise in implementing reparations?

- By Maren Berblinger