Under the Kauffman Foundation’s Kansas City Civic portfolio, Key City Assets was a strategy to identify and strengthen important civic and cultural institutions that anchor community life in Kansas City. By 2017, the Foundation developed a structured effort to understand the impact of institutions and what it would take to sustain them, which informed a broader capacity-building strategy. In 2022, the Foundation and the United Way of Greater Kansas City launched a three-year, $2.7 million Fund for Nonprofit Capacity under KC Civic’s Key City Assets/Nonprofit Capacity initiative. Key City Assets included Union Station Kansas City, the National WWI Museum and Memorial, the Harry S. Truman Library and Museum/Truman Library Institute, the Kansas City MLB Urban Youth Academy, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.
The original Key City Assets strategy reflected a core insight: a city’s quality of life depends not only on individual programs, but on the long-term health of the institutions and places that hold civic life together. In 2022, the strategy evolved to a catalyst-style capacity fund to support smaller nonprofits, that historically had less access to mainstream philanthropic and public resources, despite being vital to Kansas City’s community infrastructure. The fund was designed to reduce those barriers through trust-based, easy-to-access grants for planning, technology, fundraising, evaluation, talent development, board training, and back-office support. It targeted nonprofits with budgets between $25,000 and $500,000, with grants of roughly $5,000 to $50,000, and aimed to reach at least 50 organizations per year while compiling a practical resource base for recommended capacity-building providers.