ROBERT PIERCE

   • Leader & Times

The Western Kansas Community Foundation has launched its third and final year of a survey in four area communities, including Liberal, and foundation leaders are looking for residents in those towns to see what the needs are for those communities.

The “Our Community Our Future” initiative is part of WKCF’s broader effort to serve the Southwest Kansas region, and the survey is intended to get a deeper understanding of local priorities and needs in Cimarron, Hugoton, Lakin and Liberal.

Program and Marketing Director Stacie Hahn said the survey has been launched and responses are being collected. She said the purpose of this is to try and take the temperature on what has changed in the communities and about residents’s outlook on various aspects of the local community.

Hahn too said the survey helps get some national perspective to gauge what some of the top priority needs in each of the four communities to help WKCF be a better partner to address those needs.

Surveys are available in both English and Spanish and take about five to 10 minutes. The survey can be accessed via QR codes available on WKCF’s Facebook page and Web site at wkcf.org, as well as in print.

Hahn said the survey will run through June 15, and residents in the four communities are encouraged to participate in the initiative and help steer funding.

In its first two years, Hahn said Our Community Our Future has gotten about 1,100 responses in the four communities, each of which has more than 1,000 residents age 18 and older.

While WKCF leaders want to get a good picture of what residents in the four towns think their needs are and where the foundation can provide support, Hahn said the survey likewise says if an idea is formed with the backing of a group, a program can be formed and executed to help grow community resources.

Foundation Director Conny Bogaard said the goal of the survey is simple yet ambitious.

“We want to better understand where communities are heading,” she said. “The survey will help us get a better picture of these communities’s wants and needs. We also seek to build partnerships with non-profit and for-profit entities, local government and economic development to work on solutions together. The way we will do that will largely depend on the responses we receive from the survey.”

Hahn said the first two years of Our Community Our Future were great.

“The very first year when we launched this, this was something new to us as well,” she said. “It was a learning and an experiment opportunity for the foundation in that first year – making connections with organizations and people we hadn’t regularly communicated with previously.”

Hahn said this was a good opportunity for the foundation to make progress in the communities and get started.

“The first year is always just getting started and seeing where you can go,” she said. “In the second year, it was nice to go back to those communities and have people recognize the foundation and the work that had been done through the grants that had been provided before through the data that had been collected and shared with the community the year before and really being able to build some momentum with those four communities to be able to work on another opportunity of funding for those communities.”

Hahn recalled one community organization and program being provided grant money two years in a row.

“They really were building on what they had started in the first year and continuing that process to really follow through in what they said was going to happen for the community,” she said. “There was another community where someone had attended one of our community conversations in the fall after the survey had been done in the first year, and from that, they knew there was something that needed to be done for their community.”

Also in the second year, Hahn said that community worked hard to establish a new non-profit.

“That non-profit works to address some of the needs that were originally displayed in that first year and also worked towards being able to apply for the grant funding in the second year to further address those needs for the community,” she said. “It’s been really great to see some of that development and momentum build behind a community when they see this is what we say our community lacks or what it needs, what we can develop and do better and having a group of people come together behind that and work towards addressing those things.”

As with the first two years of the survey, Hahn said WKCF will host some community convenings to discuss responses and what that means for the community, if any of those priorities have changed.

“Additionally, there’ll be one last funding opportunity for the communities based on this year’s responses,” she said. “Once this cycle and this season closes, we’re past the funding opportunity. Funding has been provided.”

Hahn said the survey is more about making the foundation a better partner in the communities and having data to know what needs are in those towns.

“We’re going to assume for some time, those community needs are probably going to persist because a $10,000 or $15,000 grant for three years is probably not going to alleviate those needs completely,” she said. “Being able to know this is what the community said they needed, the community now knows more about us as a funding partner. They know more about us, what we need to see in grant applications, what sorts of things they can request from us.”

Hahn said communities likewise have ideas about what they can do and about local non-profit partners who can help them address those needs going forward.

“It just looks like a better community partnership between the foundation and those four communities knowing we can be resources for each other going forward,” she said. “There is the possibility this may come around again at some point in the future.”

Hahn said depending on the success of Our Community Our Future, what has taken place could lead WKCF officials to want to revisit communities to see how they are doing and what their needs are.

“Using the funding we have to address needs is what we’ve been entrusted to do,” she said. “There may be some of that in the future, but that would probably be many years down the road.”

With the current initiative finishing this year, future community efforts could take place, but Hahn said at this point, the topic has not been discussed due to a transition period taking place with the foundation’s leadership.

“That would be something new leadership and our board of directors would need to take into consideration once we’re through this process with this group,” she said. “We don’t have a decision on that at this point. It is something that has been talked about, but no clear path yet.”