A letter from Terry Woodbury
President of Kansas Communities, LLC

Three years ago I was asked “what is your commitment to the Tribe of Kansas?”

The question unnerved me. For over 30 years, I had been about the business – both paid and volunteer – of building community: neighborhood, church, city and county. I had spoken many times to groups and to leaders about the importance of “community.”

But I had never thought of “Kansas” as a community.

I recalled my childhood years in far western Kansas, growing up on a ranch 25 miles from Leoti, graduating from a one-room grade school with 13 students I thought about driving my first car 200 miles to attend college in central Kansas. Then I pondered my adult years spent on the eastern edge of the state in Kansas City.

I realized that, indeed, Kansas had raised me – west, central and east. I had been shaped by rural community and small college and large city.

It came clear in that moment that it was time for me to give back to “The Tribe” that had birthed and taught and matured me. I decided to get about the business of “building and re-building community across Kansas.” Thus began Kansas Communities, LLC.

Why “re-building?”

Because I believe the American way of life has been aggressively dismantling “community” for at least 40 years. We are paying high prices as a society for that loss. A most tragic consequence is the rise of fear in our lives.

Small towns and big cities share this loss of community. The urban Wyandotte County neighborhood where I’ve lived for 28 years declined dramatically beginning in the 1960’s. The main street of small town Leoti has suffered a similar fate. I grieve both.

Today, my wife Eldonna and I divide our time between Leoti and Kansas City, between isolated ranch and noisy inner city, between Republican and Democrat counties. We do so to make the connection between east and west, building community across Kansas, overcoming our divisions both locally and statewide.

Kansas Communities LLC began work in Greeley County and in Chanute, 400 miles apart. By the first Kansas Communities Conference in 2005, six communities were engaged – three east and three west. And by the second fall Conference, ten spirited communities sent nearly 70 leaders to tell stories of re-building community and share dreams of what is possible. They were hosted by Finnup Foundation Trust, Kansas Department of Commerce, K-State Agriculture Extension & Research, Kansas Department of Agriculture and Frontier Farm Credit Services.

The Tribe of Kansas is gaining strength and building hope, one community at a time. Click on any “sunflower” on the Kansas Communities map and you’ll catch the spirit.