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. 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. “KC Civic focused on addressing supporting conditions to make Kansas City ripe for the other education and entrepreneurship work the Foundation was pursuing,” said Gloria Jackson-Leathers, former associate who led the KC Civic strategy.
The work of the KC Civic team and its stakeholders informed a broader capacity-building strategy. In 2022, the United Way of Greater Kansas City with support from the Kauffman Foundation, launched a three-year, $2.7 million Nonprofit Catalyst Fund to invest in advancing organizations. The fund provided 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 barriers through trust-based, easy-to-access grants for planning, technology, fundraising, evaluation, talent development, board training, and back-office support. It served nonprofits with budgets between $25,000 and $500,000 with grants of roughly $5,000 to $50,000. In its three years, the Nonprofit Catalyst Fund supported more than 100 nonprofits with total funds awarded exceeding $2 million.
“We’ve seen tremendous growth as programs have been added, organizations have been able to hire staff, bring in new donors and volunteers, and they’re grateful to have their missions amplified through United Way and the audiences we reach,” said Essence Yancey, United Way Community Impact Director at the time of the final round of grantmaking.