This article is part of an ongoing series to chronicle the work of the 30 organizations involved in KHF’s Building Power and Equity Partnership (BPEP) initiative. To learn more about BPEP, click here.

Established more than two decades ago, Community Housing of Wyandotte County (CHWC) has invested nearly $120 million in constructing and improving hundreds of homes in older Kansas City, Kansas, neighborhoods.

With a staff of 26 full-time-equivalent employees and an annual operating budget of approximately $3 million, CHWC has also counseled thousands of residents on the ins and outs of homeownership — including helping avoid foreclosure.

Why, then, does a tour of CHWC’s projects include a stop at an art studio in the historic Strawberry Hill neighborhood near downtown KCK? It’s for the same reason that the organization established Splitlog Farm, a community garden near M.E. Pearson Elementary School, said CHWC Executive Director and CEO Brennan Crawford.

“Art and food are common denominators that cut across cultural barriers, that cut across language barriers,” he said, “and we’ve been successful in using those both to create energy in a place and to create an amenity in a place and also as a way to draw neighbors together.”

That comprehensive approach to community building makes CHWC a great fit for the Kansas Health Foundation’s Building Power and Equity Partnership (BPEP), said Juston White, the foundation’s director of institutional partnerships and special projects.

White said CHWC’s “innovative use of arts and urban farming as community organizing tools not only fosters a sense of togetherness but also significantly contributes to promoting better health.” In addition, he said, the organization leverages “deep institutional connections across sectors” to drive change.

Beginner Pottery

One example of programming at the EPIC Arts space was on display on a Tuesday evening when seven women of varying ages hunched over pottery wheels. It was the first of four fall 2024 sessions in a beginner pottery class taught by clay studio Manager Rachel Warren.

“Try to not let the clay boss you around,” Warren instructed.

The students braced their elbows into their sides as they centered a hunk of clay with their hands while controlling the spinning of the wheel with a foot. With Warren guiding them, the students gradually raised the sides into the early stages of a pot.

The narrow studio stretched back from the entrance off of North 6th Street. Unglazed work sat on large racks on one side across from a wall of exposed brick.

When CHWC acquired the termite-infested building in 2013, the chimneys had fallen into the basement and the foundation had crumbled.

Today, CHWC’s arts campus includes a hall that hosts community gatherings, yoga classes, and rotating art shows. During the warm months, the arts campus also puts on Third Friday Art Walks and welcomes musical acts on the patch of green space next to the clay studio.

CHWC’s broad approach to community development includes providing the services of a community health worker to its clients, and Crawford noted that the clay studio doubles as a space to get the word out about her work. It’s that community awareness aspect that Crawford also points to when people ask what a clay studio has to do with housing.

The clay studio has also developed a sisterhood among a predominantly female clientele, which regulars said is unusual in a male-dominated field.

Longtime participants include Jill Clements, Jess Anthony, Laura Ball, and Rachel Pollock. Clements lives in Roeland Park while the other three women live in KCK.

Kids are a common denominator among the four, whether they discovered EPIC Arts through summer camp activities or bring their children when they come to the studio. A couple of the women still participated even though they now live farther away in KCK than when they started coming.

Clements said clay is a “therapeutic medium that really helps ground me,” and Anthony said open studio provided a midweek break free from the demands of family or work.

“It’s low stakes, low pressure, and extremely welcoming,” Anthony said. Through its arts programming, she said, CHWC proved itself as more than just a housing organization by recognizing that “serving that community goes beyond, ‘Here’s your box that you can live in and we got you there and that’s it.’”

For Ball, an art major in college, the studio was a creative outlet for her and therapeutic for her 10-year-old son’s anxiety disorder. One of his projects was a mug with a dragon tail wrapped around the base.

Pollock is a social worker at an elementary school near EPIC Arts. She has seen the impact the studio has on her children and students at the school.

The staff is supportive of kids. “I love that they can be themselves and [staff] embraces that, and it’s just been really beautiful to watch them come out of their shells,” Pollock said.

Two Organizations Become One

CHWC resulted from a 2002 merger between Catholic Housing of Wyandotte County and Neighborhood Housing Services of Kansas City, Kansas.

Crawford said Neighborhood Housing brought “deep community-rooted counseling” while Catholic Housing “brought a lot of capacity for construction,” which it initiated in 1998 with 10 new homes in the St. Joseph/St. Benedict neighborhood.

And even with its innovative integration of arts and food, providing affordable housing — and revitalizing distressed neighborhoods — remain central to CHWC’s work.

On one front, that means catalyzing residential development in struggling neighborhoods by building initial homes when commercial builders won’t take the risk. Crawford said CHWC can build a 1,400- to 1,600-square-foot home for about $300,000.

“If it looks new, we built it,” said Megan Painter, director of neighborhood development.

CHWC focuses on development around anchor institutions that serve kids to leverage public investment. “We think that’s a way to build a sense of possibility, a sense of mobility, in a neighborhood where that might not otherwise be visible,” Crawford said.

To that end, CHWC has partnered with the school district to repurpose school sites and with the local city/county government to revitalize Waterway Park by installing playground equipment, a half-mile track, picnic tables, and other improvements.

In addition, CHWC’s House to Home program used state tax credits to build 43 homes in three neighborhoods. In one instance, it was the first new construction in the neighborhood in 85 years.

The program allows renters to become owners by the end of 15 years. Crawford estimated in just one of those neighborhoods the program could create approximately $5 million in combined home value that can be passed on as intergenerational wealth.

CHWC’s additional impacts include providing a means of homeownership to the community’s growing Burmese and Nepali immigrant population and rehousing a dozen families displaced by the closure of a low-income housing development in CHWC’s first-ever large apartment development.

Financing tools offered by CWHC include providing up to $21,000 in down-payment assistance through the Federal Home Loan Bank’s Affordable Homeownership Program and up to $1,500 toward closing costs (for a lot in a low-income census tract) through a grant from the Capitol Federal Savings Bank.

For people who need some help remaining in their homes, CHWC offers home repair and improvement grants of up to $10,500.

Crawford said the program represents CHWC’s “most direct intersection between housing and health” because its community health worker assesses living conditions when accompanying the home repair manager to sites.

Success Stories

Keeping people in their homes also means helping them avoid foreclosure, which is what CHWC did in assisting an elderly couple who had fallen behind on their payments.

“One of the barriers preventing them from working with their bank and getting on a payment plan is that they didn’t have any disposable income, and taking a closer look, it turns out that they did,” said Associate Executive Director Carlanda McKinney.

The problem was that the distressed couple had resorted to high-interest loans requiring monthly payments of approximately $600.

Through its high-interest debt buyout program, CHWC paid off the loans and restructured the debt so that the couple now has disposable income because they are only paying $154 a month to CHWC.

“You can’t budget your way out of poverty; that’s a misnomer,” McKinney said. “If you don’t have enough, budgeting doesn’t suddenly give you enough, and finding ways to help people have enough is huge. I think it’s something we do really well, and I think it’s something that we did.”

Leslie Scott represents another CHWC success story in a couple of ways.

Saddled with roughly $250,000 in student loan debt, Scott figured homeownership was a pipe dream.

CHWC worked with her through the federal Neighborhood Stabilization Program, and she purchased a vacant house in the Historic Northeast section of KCK.

Through a second program that kicks in if she stays in the house for five years, Scott reduced her mortgage to $65,000. She has been in the house for 3-1/2 years.

Scott formerly worked at CHWC as its volunteer coordinator and is thankful that the organization “gave me an opportunity I did not think I would ever have: to own a home and be able to build wealth instead of paying rent every month.”

CHWC came through a second time for Scott in qualifying her for a $17,000 loan that paid for a full bathroom and kitchenette in her finished basement. The home improvement vastly improved the living situation of the 71-year-old widow that Scott took in a couple of years ago.

“It has been a life-changing resource for her. She was really roughing it down there without access to water, without access to a full bathroom, or the ability to cook,” Scott said. “She didn’t realize how hard it was doing without those things until she got them again.”

‘Audacious Common Goal’

The array of programming is CHWC’s biggest asset and its continued work “will promote and drive forward the connection between housing, neighborhood self-organization, household financial stability, and health,” said White, the KHF director.

Crawford said the core operating support provided through the BPEP initiative will help fund work throughout the organization, including putting funding for the community health worker on more stable footing.

He also said the BPEP offers leaders of the various organizations time to collaborate. The BPEP can help strengthen bonds between participating nonprofits that are in Wyandotte County and others that are close by, such as SENT Topeka.

Crawford said he might never have run across SENT without BPEP, and he is looking forward to visiting Topeka to trade ideas about community land trusts and other initiatives.

As part of a strategic plan adopted in 2022, CHWC has set aggressive goals to meet by the end of next year. The three overarching goals are to:

• Build, renovate or repair 500 new homes.
• Help 500 families become homeowners.
• Bring the community together for 50,000 hours of community engagement through the arts, volunteerism, and urban agriculture.

To put it in perspective, Crawford said, CHWC built, renovated, and repaired about 500 homes in its first 20 years of existence. “But it is reflective of our increased capacity and the scale of the need in our community,” he added.

The draw of the BPEP, he said, was to be part of an “audacious common goal” that aligned with the organization’s philosophy and underlying premise:

“That if you invest in housing and if you invest in the people that live in that housing, and then if you invest in the common spaces where those people gather, then you will have a much broader impact on the quality of life in a place than you would if you took all those same resources and focus them only on housing development.”

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