Hoxie Collective provided strategic planning and community engagement support to a consultant team led by LandWorks Studio for this two-year process to develop a master plan for Kansas City’s parks.  For this work, the project team created a community profile informed by area demographics, ongoing initiatives, and a recreation market study.  A thorough inventory was conducted of park and recreation assets including all 221 parks, greenways, and athletic complexes, as well as 21 indoor facilities.  The project team developed a data-driven and strategic understanding of parks and recreation needs through a variety of different approaches, including analyses of level-of-service, finances, recreation trends, and benchmarking with peer communities.

 

The process included an extensive community engagement process to identify and refine community values, needs, and issues.  Outreach included 10 separate in-person events across the city, a custom website, a 10-month virtual engagement campaign, a staff survey, a statistically valid community survey, and monthly meetings with a steering committee of municipal staff.

 

Guided by community input and focused by insightful data, the project team developed a strategic action plan to support the goals of the plan and the Parks and Recreation Department.  These actions are organized according to four department pillars: social equity, health and wellness, conservation, and organizational stability.