KCUR’s community engagement team works to listen to Kansas Citians, and to connect its many, varied communities and facilitate conversations about what’s on people’s minds. We partner with residents organizations and leaders to distill what we hear and help our newsroom frame stories from their perspectives.
On Monday, April 21, KCUR sponsored the forum: “How is Kansas City being affected by Washington?” The event focused on the rapid changes from the federal government, with the goal to make Kansas City’s Congressional representatives available for a live Q&A.
How we invited Congress members to participate
KCUR invited nine metro area Congressional representatives — the U.S. Senators from Kansas and Missouri as well as the five U.S. House representatives from the metro — to answer questions from their constituents in real time.
Our content would reflect mounting concerns over proposed DOGE cuts, tariffs, and other major decisions by the White House and its cabinet.
Given the rapidly-changing flow of information out of Washington, and the increasingly polarized rhetoric, we felt strongly about trying to provide a bipartisan panel, offering answers from a range of perspectives that could pull back the curtain, even slightly, to help constituents address their uncertainty, anxiety and fear.
We began reaching out in late February. It's difficult to overstate how challenging it can be to coordinate the schedules of Washington-based officials. In addition, area representatives, particularly Republicans, have faced difficulties in recent town halls and had been instructed by their party not to hold community events at all.
So, over the course of several weeks, KCUR’s community engagement team reached out by phone and email to all the elected officials.
We posted on their social media, asking them if they’d be willing to gather in Kansas City for a Q&A with their constituents. We called and left emails.
Kansas Sen. Jerry Moran’s office responded quickly, saying the senator would not be able to attend. We got a message from Rep. Sam Graves’ office, acknowledging our invitation, but we did not hear a commitment after multiple attempts to reply. None of the other Republican offices — Missouri Sens. Josh Hawley and Eric Schmitt, Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall, Missouri Rep. Mark Alford and Kansas Rep., Derek Schmidt — responded to our request.
Only Rep. Sharice Davids (Kansas 3rd) and Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II (Missouri 5th), the two Democrats who represent the area, agreed to attend.
KCUR began to publicize the event, hoping we might still get some of our Republican office-holders to join.
What we learned
Conscious of the emotionally-charged political climate, and raucous debates representatives have faced, we decided to cap the number of people we would accommodate.
But once we publicized the event, a tsunami of RSVP’s came in. We realized there was a hunger for access to representatives, so we quickly pivoted to a larger venue.
The event was moved to St. James United Methodist Church in Kansas City, Missouri. When that almost immediately sold out, St. James was kind enough to share their YouTube channel, so we could livestream the event. More than 500 people tuned live on YouTube and on the church’s Facebook page, for a total participation of more than 1,000 You can see the video of the event here.
We were awestruck at the hundreds of questions we received – almost 200 in advance of the event from an online form. KCUR staff also collected dozens of questions on cards from the live audience and monitored the live stream as more than 500 additional questions rolled in.
We also live-blogged the event on BlueSky, where audiences offered their comments. Check out that blog here. (Bluesky is a relatively new platform and another way for you to connect with us. We’d love to have you follow us!)
We did our best to consolidate the many questions on a variety of topics into major themes of concern to Kansas Citians: How Cleaver or Davids will support local businesses affected by tariffs, the SAVE Act that requires documents of proof of citizenship to register to vote, as well as what will happen to Medicaid and Social Security.
A lot of questions came in about why Democrats were not prepared for the flood-the-zone strategy that Republicans executed immediately after President Trump’s inauguration.
“It was a dizzying strategy,” Cleaver said at the event. “We were not organized for it. If that’s wrong, we were not organized.”
“I do want to just kind of acknowledge that we were slow on the uptake, in terms of the Democratic apparatus,” Davids said. “I don't want it to seem like ... the valid frustration wasn't there to begin with. We were slow on the uptake. It took us a bit to get going.”
Our daily talk show Up to Date aired an edited, hour long version of the Q&A session on Wed., April 23. Listen to that show here.
This event is just one of many organized by the community engagement team at KCUR. Led by program and community engagement director Ron Jones, community editor and reporter Laura Ziegler, and community engagement producer Zach Perez, our hope is to use our journalism skills to connect communities, especially those under-resourced and less-well covered by the media.
In addition to the Up to Date broadcast that reached hundreds of thousands who were not in attendance, the engagement team will come together and meticulously review the content of the evening's discussion to extract story ideas and sources. We will share those ideas and sources with our beat reporters, producers and editors.
Why community engagement is essential to KCUR's reporting
KCUR has many ways we connect with communities across the metro. We hold listening sessions in geographic areas, among various demographic communities or around specific issues. We sponsor panel discussions, resource tables and our text exchange.
We consistently partner with dozens of community and neighborhood groups, clubs and civic organizations, senior citizens, college groups and veterans, to name a few, who are invaluable in sharing information about meetings with their memberships and on their social media. These kinds of partnerships are the lynchpin of our work.
Indeed, this is the mission of our engagement work. KCUR is listening first in order to more authentically reflect our communities and frame our coverage from the grassroots. We peek behind the headlines and go into communities to hear what people have to say about them.
We meet with sources one-on-one, in groups of three, 15 or 300. We’ll set up a table and ask you about your lives, share news about important meetings and celebrations. We provide information and resources, like the engagement and distribution support for the Voter Guide KCUR produced along with partners of the KC Media Collective.
As for gaining access to more information about what’s coming out of our nation’s capital, stay tuned for KCUR’s community engagement team to hold our next Q&A or listening sessions north of the river and east of Jackson County.
We will be reaching out in the coming weeks to Republican representatives to offer them additional opportunities to address their constituents, should they want to. More details, coming soon!
