The mission of the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation is to improve our region's quality of life by increasing charitable giving, connecting donors to community needs they care about, and providing leadership on critical community issues.

The Foundation strives to find places in the community that it is uniquely situated to impact through its unrestricted grant making and corresponding staff resources. That does not mean that other issues are not important. Community leadership is our board of directors recognizing that the Foundation must put the $3 million of our grant making that is unrestricted to the highest and best community uses.

How does the board determine that? Through objective research. The Community Foundation, together with other funders and community partners, invited an outside team of writers to conduct hundreds of interviews across the Kansas City region. The writers identified broad areas of opportunity for the region in the “Citistates Report.”

To continue the work of the "Citistates Report," In 2005, A Blue Ribbon Task Force was convened by the Community Foundation and other community partners. Their work was published in the “Time to Get It Right” in 2006, creating the Community Foundation’s leadership blueprint for the next ten to twenty years.  Two follow-up reports "Time to Get It Right - A Strategy for Urban Education (PDF)" and "One Year Later: Time to Get Things Done" were released in 2007.  

“Time to Get It Right” is specifically where the Community Foundation believes its dollars can make the most impact on Kansas City. The Foundation will focus its unrestricted grant making toward Kansas City’s lack of an educational pipeline system that can educate children regardless of background or ethnicity, coupled with the lack of “new economy” industries to support and employ our educated population.

In addition to the above focuses, the Foundation is committed to supporting nonprofit organizations profiled in DonorEdge® with the Nonprofit Capacity Building grant competition. Click here to view the Fall 2007 Nonprofit Capacity Building Grant Recipients.

Contact the Community Investment Team at grants@gkccf.org or 816-842-0944, or contact a team member directly.