The following article comes from the Aspen Institute’s State of Play Kansas City report. The report assesses the opportunities and barriers for more children to access sports and physical activity in the Kansas City region.
A significant development happened in 2024 for children in northeast Kansas City, Missouri, when the City Council approved $3 million for upgrades at the popular 9th and Van Brunt soccer fields. The journey to passage over 15 years was a contentious one, pitting neighborhoods against club and pay-to-play leagues that often dominated the park during peak hours, according to the Northeast News. At one point in 2023, as progress was being made, a city council member redirected $2.75 million in improvement funding for the soccer park to the Bartle Hall convention center for new carpeting.
The community was upset. About 700 residents signed a petition demanding money for 9th and Van Brunt to fund new turf for the existing field and to create a second turf field and futsal courts. Latino children from the Royogoku Soccer Academy testified before the City Council to plead for better fields than the damaged turf currently there.
While success stories like this exist, they are rare and illustrate a broader concern. One frustration we heard in the Kansas City area is that the Black and Latino/a communities do not receive enough funding and do not have quality facilities for smaller organizations to help underserved children access sports and other forms of physical activity.
“It’s not rocket science to know which kids need help the most,” said the leader of a nonprofit that serves inner-city children. “We have a lot of ground to make up, but the major funders in Kansas City don’t have relationships with people on the ground. It’s frustrating to hear them say they don’t know what to do to grow access. Relationships have to be developed.”
Kansas City needs more bridges between funders and boots-on-the-ground community leaders to directly build relationships that can serve neighborhoods’ needs. Smaller nonprofits would benefit from collaborating to form their own voice. Instead of waiting 15 years for improvements to soccer fields, local nonprofits could create a coalition to advocate for funding of youth sports programming and facilities in inner-city neighborhoods — money that too often slips through the cracks. Local nonprofits could apply a regional needs assessment to ensure areas in need are being served and build measurements for success to tell their story.
Sports providers in Kansas City find that very few donors support sports for the sake of sports anymore. The coalition would have to demonstrate how sports can provide physical, social, emotional, behavioral and academic benefits. Sports providers who intentionally commit to developing children as citizens, not just athletes, are more likely to be funded.
“A coalition would allow funders to see strength in numbers — a wider number of kids and families impacted by our collective services,” said Adrion Roberson, co-founder of the KC United! Youth/Family Sports & Education Initiative in Wyandotte County. “If we can show data with increased sports participation while math or reading levels are up or behavior improvements, that will show why we need more funding in these communities.”
The coalition would have to do more than ask for money. It would need to develop a plan for how its organizations would spend the money and create benchmarks that evaluate the effectiveness of programming.
Over time, a Kansas City coalition could create peer-to-peer networking with shared resources and exchanges of ideas. It could deliver programming and strengthen organizational infrastructure. It could generate local research and aggregate the impact of organizations. And it could raise public awareness of neighborhood needs and drive public policy changes.
Cataloging who’s providing sports and physical activity would be important for a consortium. For instance, the City of Boston recently published a youth sports online directory to help identify neighborhood sports programming and facilities. Users can search by specific sports, seasonal availability, gender accommodations, language, age group, and costs for each program. The Boston mayor’s office has started offering up to $5,000 in grants per organization to nonprofits aiming to eliminate barriers of entry into sports.
Kansas City can do the same. Locally, cataloging efforts are being made by the Kansas City Physical Activity Ecosystem Mapping Project, which is funded by Children’s Mercy Kansas City through the Kansas City Physical Activity Plan. The University of Missouri-Kansas City’s Midwest Center for Nonprofit Leadership is creating a regional map to understand the system of programs and organizations associated with encouraging and enabling youth physical activity in the region. This includes tracking direct service providers of sports programs with hopes to create a searchable database that the public can use.
No matter the direction Kansas City takes, the larger point is this: Funders need to develop more relationships with Black and Latino/a communities that generate more efficient investment into their neighborhoods for sports and play.
“There’s a definite haves vs. have-nots in Kansas City in which kids have resources based on where they live,” said Bill Brandmeyer, founder of the ShareWaves Foundation, which distributes micro-grants to help lower-income kids access sports. “It’s systemic, it’s a problem and it’s divided us. But it also could be fixed if we have the right group of people in a room.”
Two Models in Other U.S. Cities
Oakland, California
Positive Coaching Alliance’s Sports Equity Coalition aims to build community ownership of strategies in Oakland to remedy the negative impact systemic racism has had on the youth sports space. Members include education leaders, youth sports professionals, government leaders, community stakeholders, minority business leaders and professional athletes.
The coalition created the Oakland Sports Equity Agenda, which outlines goals and strategies to increase youth sports participation rates in low-income neighborhoods (especially for BIPOC girls), identify more BIPOC coaches and improve the quality of coach education to create better experiences for children.
Through monthly coalition meetings, the Oakland Unified School District and fellow coalition partners created a district-led sports league in district elementary schools. Coalition members provided the programming and received funding to do so. This effort created 4,000 new sports opportunities for low-income youth across the city in sports and activities including baseball, golf, hip-hop dance, skateboarding, soccer and softball. The programming increased sports participation rates in BIPOC neighborhoods and brought in more coaches of color.
Washington, D.C.
The Fight for Children Youth Development Institute serves as a collaborative network of regional nonprofits focused on improving the lives of young people through sports. The effort focuses on providing customized resources and services to nonprofit partners that address their fundraising, impact measurement, board and programming needs. There are 34 nonprofit partners representing 35 sports within Fight for Children’s network.
The spirit of the model is that it’s an a la carte menu of options to help nonprofits build out infrastructure. Organizations can find what’s most relevant and meaningful to them at a given time, recognizing that they don’t have the capacity to participate in everything that’s offered.
Jon Solomon is Community Impact Director of the Aspen Institute’s Project Play initiative. Jon can be reached at jon.solomon@aspeninstitute.org.