Brandon Azim
Solutions ReporterI was raised on the East Side of Kansas City and feel a strong affinity to communities there. As KCUR's Solutions reporter, I'll be spending time in underserved communities across the metro, exploring how they are responding to their challenges. I will look for evidence to explain why certain responses succeed while others fail, and what we can learn from those outcomes. This might mean sharing successes here or looking into how problems like those in our communities have been successfully addressed elsewhere. Having spent a majority of my life in Kansas City, I want to provide the people I've called friends and family with possible answers to their questions and speak up for those who are not in a position to speak for themselves.
Contact me at brandonazim@kcur.org.
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In a new partnership with a company that provides high-tech garbage cans that turn food into compost, Kansas City will compost hundreds of thousands of tons of food waste for use on gardens and to grow food. Kansas Citians can now bring their food scraps to one of 50 bins around the city. -
Officials with KC Water say heavy rainfall around Omaha, Nebraska, is the reason people in the Kansas City area have noticed a strange taste and odor to their water in the last couple of days. The water is safe to drink, officials insist, and the treated water is slowly moving south, so everyone's water should taste the way it always has by Wednesday. -
ProX, a nonprofit that began as a community movement but is now funded by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, empowers youth from across the Kansas City region to take part in internships with companies and institutions. There are minimum academic standards so those with less-than-stellar GPA's or behavior records have equal opportunity to the high achieving student. -
Protesters gathered in Kansas City's West Side, one of the city's historically Latino neighborhoods, to protest President Donald Trump's immigration policies and stand in solidarity with protesters in Los Angeles. -
Kansas City is seeing flooding around the metro, plus downed trees and traffic crashes, after a "confirmed large and extremely dangerous tornado" was reported in Raytown near the Truman Sports Complex. -
Pools around the Kansas City metro officially opened this weekend, while Johnson County offers even more places to swim. This summer will see a blend of familiar favorites and some new places to try.
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Kansas City says it's completed 25% of an expanded, more targeted road repair program using digital tracking tools that it launched in 2021. But progress on potholes and cracks is hard to measure due the way the city logs data and the cyclical nature of road repairs. -
Port KC has outsourced its lawn service needs to a herd of goats for the third year. They work for food while improving the environment, chewing away invasive brush and clearing the space for walkers and joggers. -
The Kansas City Police Department created an independent missing persons unit in 2023. Two years later, the department reports progress in its effort to solve missing persons cases. But many in the Black community say the numbers mask impatience and frustration over a lack of attention to cases that drag on for decades. -
Saturday's rally was held in conjunction with a nationwide day of action, with nearly 1,400 similar events planned around the nation. Kansas City protesters took aim at the mass federal layoffs and funding cuts led by President Trump and billionaire Elon Musk's DOGE.
