News & Issues
Documentary casts light on Kansas City’s mental health care woes
The state of Kansas City’s mental health care services is dire, according to a forthcoming new documentary. Journalist and documentary filmmaker Michael Price’s Lost Minds: KC’s Mental Health Crisis focuses on the growing number of fraught confrontations between severely mentally ill people and police on Kansas City’s streets. The locally produced documentary airs Wednesday, Oct. 1, at…
Ruling on in-home Medicaid services raises concerns
Karen Barezinsky is looking for an answer to what she says is a simple question: Are the people who run Kansas’ Medicaid program planning to cut the supports she and her husband use to keep her son, Ray Santin, who’s paralyzed from his neck down, out of a nursing home? “I can’t find out anything,”…
Sidelined player moves on, steps up game in concussion awareness effort
A talented athlete, it was not out of the question that Kylee Bliss would be a scholarship basketball player at a small college. As a sophomore point guard at Blue Valley High School, she practiced hard and had a real feel for the game. That trajectory changed, however, after she sustained two concussions on the…
Village Square will encourage Kansas Citians to 'disagree agreeably'
Allan Katz has spent the better part of a decade trying to solve a big problem in politics and has recently moved his fight to Kansas City. He wants to do the seemingly impossible: teach Kansas Citians on both sides of the aisle to “disagree agreeably.” Katz is the co-founder of the Village Square, a…
What can KC learn from Ferguson?
The shooting of an allegedly unarmed, 18-year-old African American man by a St. Louis County police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, has fueled outrage and debates over race and justice in communities across the country.