If you drive through Kansas City’s Ivanhoe neighborhood today, you’ll see signs of a place that’s fighting to change.
On one block, you may see overgrown vacant lots and dilapidated or abandoned buildings. On the next, you’ll see a vibrant community garden, a sprawling urban farm and newly renovated houses.
For long-time residents like Alan Young, the area has come a long way from what it once was.
“The police would speed 90 miles an hour down 39th Street. We (had) several drug houses on our block,” says Young. “Two thirds of the vacant properties that Kansas City’s Land Bank owned were in this neighborhood. It was concentrated blight, concentrated poverty and hopelessness.”
His daughter, 36-year-old Alana Henry, also remembers the darker days of the neighborhood.
“I remember the neighborhood being unsafe,” says Henry. “I remember seeing drug deals and hitting the ground in my living room when gunshots would be happening outside on the street.”
But after decades of grass-roots organizing from the residents who called Ivanhoe home, the blight and hopelessness that once gripped this east side neighborhood is being pushed back.
Much of this transformation has been credited to the work and leadership of people like Alan Young and his wife, current Missouri State Representative Yolanda Young, who helped restart the once defunct Ivanhoe Neighborhood Council after moving to the area in the late ‘80s.
In the years since then, the INC has become a pillar of the Ivanhoe community. But recent internal conflicts and funding concerns have shaken residents’ faith in the future of the organization and the neighborhood it serves.
To Henry, INC’s current executive director, the only way out of these uncertain times is by reminding people that Ivanhoe is where it is today because of its residents and their willingness to come together.
“They are a community of people who want things to be better than what they are,” says Henry. “They are hard working, and care about what their neighborhood looks like.”
‘Why isn’t somebody doing something?’
When the Youngs first moved to Ivanhoe from Raytown in 1987, they had planned on sticking around for just a year or two in order to flip a house they had bought.
They were quickly shocked at the state of the neighborhood, but even more so at how many of those who lived around them seemed to accept its condition as a fact of life.
“It was the frustration of, ‘Why isn’t somebody doing something?’” says Alan Young. “One day the light bulb came on and we looked at each other and said, ‘Well, maybe it’s because God wants us to do something.’”
The Youngs began taking small steps to organize weekly prayer groups and neighborhood meetings at their house, where they encouraged attendees to share what issues they were experiencing and find ways they could help one another.
The small successes achieved through these meetings convinced the Youngs to stay in Ivanhoe, where they would spend the next three decades of their lives working alongside their neighbors to revive the INC and address the ills that plagued the neighborhood.
Young remembers one of the hardest things about these early years was battling a fatalistic sense of hopelessness.
“Early on there was a perspective of, ‘It's been like this forever. What makes you think anything's going to change?’” says Young. “You cannot change anything if you don’t believe it can be done. You have to believe you can accomplish it.”
‘It will always be a process’
While the work to create buy-in within the community was sometimes slow, Young says he and his small cohort of neighbors were able to succeed in reaching beyond just their block.
In the first 10 years the Youngs lived in Ivanhoe, they helped recruit 205 residents to help them keep track of issues in the neighborhood, organized 30 block clubs, and partnered with KCPD and city officials to clean up illegal dumping sites and close drug houses that dotted the area.
“We told them, ‘We don’t want that in our neighborhood anymore,’” says Young. “That was the beginning of a long journey to build a relationship with the police department. Over the span of about 20 years, the police said we helped close 700 drug houses.”
As the scale of their work grew, the Youngs and other neighborhood leaders officially reformed the INC into a 501(c)(3) non-profit in 1997.
In 2000, Young worked with the University of Kansas and the Ivanhoe community to come up with a 100 point improvement plan the INC would use as a road map for the organization.
The list of goals written in the plan, which included things like helping residents start community gardens and creating a neighborhood center, has grown over time. Young says he and the other leaders see its growth as part of their work.
“That list was meant to be a living list,” says Young. “As something was accomplished, we would meet again, and other needs would supplant the one we met. We will never be at the arrived state. It will always be a process of making the neighborhood a better place to live.”
‘Make due with what you’ve got’
In the years since then, the INC has only grown the services it offers, which now include rental property management, lawn care services, transportation services for seniors and weekly youth engagement activities, just to name a few.
Despite this growth, recent internal conflicts and funding concerns have shaken residents’ faith in the future of Ivanhoe.
In 2024, after two years of on-going conflict between residents and the organization's board of directors culminated in the board firing all INC staff, residents overwhelmingly voted to remove the entire board.
Alana Henry, the Young’s daughter, took over as the INC’s Executive Director shortly after. She quickly began working with her parents and other previous board members and staff to regain the trust of those burned by the recently ousted leadership.
“A lot of folks said, ‘Well I don’t know her yet, but I know them and I trust them,’” explains Henry. "'I know that if these are her advisors then I know it’s a good thing and I can put my money behind it, my involvement behind it and my trust behind it.’”
In addition to rebuilding lost trust, Henry also has been attempting to lead the INC through the loss of federal grant money due to cuts made by the Trump administration. Henry says the cuts are already leading to changes within the organization.
“We are scaling back in some areas,” says Henry. “For our summer program, for example, we’re going to do three days a week instead of five, with a shortened day. We’re unable to hire staff that were planned for our farmers' market and our Lot and Lawn maintenance service.”
While Henry says that the INC is taking several steps to make up the lost funds, such as reaching out to new donors and exploring in-kind donations options, she worries these cuts are contributing to a return of the hopelessness that once afflicted the community.
“I think there's a level of hopelessness that I feel like I see from the millennial generation and younger in terms of the state of affairs, not just for Ivanhoe, but for the world,” says Henry.
Henry, who lost her brother to gun violence in 2022, knows all too well how things in and outside of Ivanhoe can make people feel like nothing is changing for the better.
But both generations of the Young family feel you have to believe that change is possible before it can happen, and while they admit they’re facing big challenges, both still see a promising future for Ivanhoe.
Now Henry is working with members of INC’s past leadership — like her father — who now serves under her as a part-time staff member. They’re trying to better connect the generations of Ivanhoe residents in order to build confidence in their collective ability to make change.
“I hope that in this work we’re able to create relationships between the old guard and new to bring back some of that optimism,” says Henry. “That belief in empowerment and ability to change a trajectory.”
As Henry puts it, “in non-profit work you make due with what you’ve got,” and in times like these they’ll lean on the only asset they’ve consistently had since her parents moved to Ivanhoe: The people that live there.
“In this work,” says Henry, “I have come across many, many and many more folks who care about things getting better. And there are some members of the community that are willing to give a helping hand to making that possible. ”
