By Stan Finger, KLC Journal
They converged on the rural art gallery early on a sunny summer Saturday, a few of them strangers, some of them acquaintances, all of them willing to try something that might just make them feel a bit uncomfortable.
More than a dozen numbered mugs awaited them at Gallery Mostaza just outside of Harper, along with some gluten-free sweetbreads for those who had skipped or skimped on breakfast.
Each participant took a mug, filled it with coffee or tea and then waited to be randomly paired with someone to answer – and ask – thought-provoking questions.
It’s called Cups and Conversation, a way for people in Harper County to get to know one another better and explore ways to make the community better.
“The point is to have a conversation, leave the world behind and drink a whole lot of coffee,” Isaac Shue, the artist who owned and ran the gallery with his wife, Karina, told the participants.
Among the questions chosen blindly:
What is something you believed early on in life that you have changed your mind on now?
If you could say anything you wanted to on a billboard on Kellogg Drive in Wichita that 10,000 people would see each day, what would you post?
When was the last time you tried something completely new, and what was it?
“Today,” one of the participants jokes.
‘Solving problems for the future’
The goal of Cups and Conversation, Shue says, is to “hopefully tear down some walls in our community and build up some fresh ones and make it a better place” to live and work.
Community engagement efforts have blossomed around Kansas as leaders have looked for ways to build bridges in an increasingly polarized world.
When Rise Up Rice County held its first community engagement program in September 2023, organizers were hoping as many as 15 people might show up for a look at ancient Native American petroglyphs in a rural pasture and to hear Rex Buchanan talk about the historic site. Instead, about 70 people gathered to see the rock and listen to Buchanan, a director emeritus of the Kansas Geological Survey, a published author and a native of Rice County.
“That blew me out of the water,” Karly Frederick said of the response. “I think a lot of people recognized the special opportunity to see the petroglyphs – as it is on private property – and then we had a local conversation of ‘What community are you from and what are you proud of? What do you hope to see for the future?’
“We made the metaphor of ‘The Quivira Indians made their mark on Rice County with these petroglyphs. How do you want to make your mark on Rice County?’” said Frederick, who helped launch the effort as executive director at the Rice County Community Foundation before stepping down to pursue a postgraduate degree abroad.
The unexpectedly healthy turnout in Rice County and the popularity of Cups and Conversation in Harper County reflect a hunger for connection and community across the state, officials say.
“A lot of that has to do with the pandemic, and a lot has to do with the political environment,” says Alicia Hommon, a community volunteer who was serving as Lyons’ community development coordinator when Rise Up Rice County was launched.
After all the lockdowns prompted by COVID-19, Frederick and Hommon say people were eager to get out and do something. But it goes beyond that.
“Technology has taught us not to be in community anymore,” Hommon says. “Technology has taught us that community happens on Facebook, when it really doesn’t.”
As organizers talked about how to get people to reconnect during these polarized times, they recognized the value of simply being able to sit and talk.
“It’s easy to be angry at somebody or to dislike somebody that you’ve never sat across the table from,” Hommon says. “We wanted to get people together and start having the conversations. We wanted to talk about our history and what we have in common in order to be able to utilize the camaraderie that comes from commonality and from a common history to move forward into the future and start solving problems for the future.”
‘Be the fly on the wall’
Interest in Cups and Conversation is so high, businesses and local governing bodies have hired Shue to conduct similar sessions with their employees. He recently relocated to Newton because he needed more space for his gallery and studio, and hopes to start offering the events once they get settled in.
Shelly Hansel was so impressed by Cups and Conversation that she helped start a community leadership program in Sumner County, and she says she will continue the gatherings in Harper County.
“The thing about Cups and Conversation that I love is you can bring a bunch of people from various backgrounds and beliefs … and have positive conversations that bring them to common ground, as opposed to things that would separate them or divide them,” says Hansel, who now lives in Harper.
Actively listening to and connecting with participants are cornerstones of effective community engagement efforts, says Teresa Kelly, food value chain coordinator for the Kansas Rural Center.
“You can’t engage the community without building relationships and becoming part of the community,” says Kelly, who spoke about community engagement at the Kansas Local Food Summit in August. “You need to be the fly on the wall, not the guy in the helicopter above the ground.”
Efforts that fail, program leaders and others say, have a flaw that may surprise people: They don’t aim high enough.
All too often, “we’re too gentle” on people invited to community engagement events, says Pete Nájera, president and chief executive officer of the United Way of the Plains. (Nájera also serves on the board of directors for the Kansas Leadership Center, publisher of The Journal.) “We’re not giving them enough meat on the bones for them to sink their teeth into. We’re coddling them to get them civically engaged and bought in. You have to make it worthwhile and give them something to really do.”
People who participate in two Rise Up Rice County outdoor events get to keep a lawn chair embroidered with the organization’s name – a tactic Nájera calls “very clever.” The chairs, Frederick says, are a way for people to connect and can be a natural way to invite others to future events.
Seeing progress
One reason Habitat for Humanity has been so successful over the decades in attracting volunteers to help build houses for families in need is because participants can see they are making progress.
“We want people to really feel like they did make a difference,” says Christine Moser, the volunteer coordinator for Wichita Habitat for Humanity.
A house built from the ground up is tangible evidence of their impact, but Moser says it goes beyond that. Studies have shown that having a stable home can be a generational change for families and creates a foundation for brighter futures, and Habitat lets volunteers know that what they are doing goes beyond four walls and a roof.
Another example of how community engagement can lead to impactful changes is occurring in Salina, where the nonprofit Build A Pro Foundation was launched following a series of listening sessions conducted by Lead for America fellow Amanda Jarvis.
As part of her two-year fellowship with Lead for America, Jarvis was placed in Salina’s Department for Housing Development Services. In that job, she worked on various housing projects as the city grapples with surging demand.
While working on those projects, Jarvis says, “it really became clear to me that there is a big disconnect between the housing that we have and the capacity of our city to be able to deliver the labor in order to build those houses.”
The demand is so great that even if Salina’s unemployment rate dropped to zero – “which is completely unrealistic,” Jarvis concedes – there would still be nearly 800 job openings.
Her husband, a real estate broker, was struggling to refer potential sellers of existing homes to tradespeople that could put them in shape to go on the market “because they’re just so busy,” Jarvis says. They’re routinely booked three to six months out.
Build A Pro connects businesses with workers through registered apprenticeships. Among the populations included in the foundation’s work are people who have battled addiction, experienced incarceration or been homeless.
“We’re addressing the issue of growing talent, so we’re not increasing the population but we’re upscaling what we already have,” says Jarvis, a co-founder of the organization. “We have a lot of excitement around it.”
One of the long-term goals for Build a Pro is for the model to be replicated across Kansas and around the nation.
Old timers and fresh ideas
Community engagement efforts are an integral part of Lead for America, a national service organization that strives to help towns retain and develop homegrown talent.
“The secret sauce of Lead for America is that bridge-building aspect,” says Joseph Shepard, chief of staff for the organization. (Shepard is also a teacher at KLC.) “You can look at bridge building in many different ways. We look at bridge building holistically, not just from an ideological lens, but from a geographic lens and age lens. We believe that in order for a community engagement effort to work and truly be successful, you have to work across factions.”
Engaging a broad spectrum of people is key, says Hommon, the Lyons volunteer.
“We need to be able to combine the knowledge and the wealth of information about the past of the old timers with the fresh new ideas from the younger families who are moving into the communities,” she says. “That was really the heartbeat behind what we were talking about: everybody together to have the conversation.”
It’s important to listen in those conversations, Kelly says, and not just think about what you want to say next.
“Have you asked them what they want?” Kelly says of local residents. “Because what they want isn’t necessarily going to match what you think they need.”
The best answers may build on what’s already there, she adds, rather than launching something completely new.
One way to build bridges, organizers say, is to break down barriers.
In Rice County, that means holding the events in rural areas.
“We want them to happen on neutral ground,” Frederick says. “We want people to feel welcome, and they might not necessarily feel welcome in the city limits of another community. We know that that’s going to take time to build those bridges, heal those wounds. So we want to make sure it’s a very neutral location, very welcoming.”
After the gathering at the petroglyphs, the foundation held another “lawn chair” event where a once-prominent road ends in Rice County, replaced by a bypass.
Get community talking again
In Sumner County, the approach to avoiding insularity is to spread activities and events across numerous communities.
At Cups and Conversation, they break down walls by allowing participants to go wherever they feel comfortable to discuss the questions posed: the gallery’s front porch, under shade trees or on playground equipment, moseying around the grounds or holing up in a distant room or far corner of the gallery.
In general, Kelly says, engagement events should be held when and where it is easy for most people to attend. Whatever form it takes, Nájera says, “it needs to be a high-quality event that gives value to the participants.”
Though Cups and Conversation has yet to yield sweeping changes in Harper County, participants in a recent session left feeling encouraged about what is possible.
Janet Ardery came because she had heard a lot about the event and wanted “to get to know people in a deeper way. In our society right now, it’s ‘I’m right; you’re wrong’ – and this makes everybody human.”
One common refrain as participants discussed their experience of the gathering was, “We need more of this.”
“This is something I wish could happen back home in Marion County,” Edel Miller says. “Marion County is a bunch of teeny-tiny towns very spread out across a large area with terrible roads, and it’s hard to get anywhere.”
There’s no reason some version of Cups and Conversation couldn’t happen anywhere in Kansas or even around the nation, Shue says.
“Every little town could easily do this,” he says. “This isn’t a sales tactic for us to make money on a Saturday. We don’t expect people to go buy mugs. It’s just to get community talking again.”
A version of this article appears in the Summer 2025 issue of The Journal, a publication of the Kansas Leadership Center. To learn more about KLC, visit http://kansasleadershipcenter.org. Order your copy of the magazine at the KLC Store or subscribe to the print edition.
This article first appeared on KLC Journal and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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Previously Published on klcjournal.com with Creative Commons License
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