Prior success stories have focused on tying together social equity, economic vitality and environmental stewardship in ways that maximize community impact and benefit. Stories ranged in their focus from green buildings to watershed restoration, complete streets, urban agriculture and composting. Project sponsors included public, private and non-profit organizations across the MARC region.
Antioch Urban Growers: Aquaponics, organic growing, composting, beekeeping, and cage-free animal raising, with training and education for recreating processes in the community. MARC's Sustainable Success Story program (a predecessor to Resilient Success Stories) helped them take their story to a larger audience and created a community of sustainable-living-minded people. Additional grants added funds to their growing space, and they have since created an urban farmer incubator program.
Avenue of Life: Providing jobs to people with barriers to employment to work in their refurbished warehouse that was slated for demolition. Work focuses on recycling of mattresses and providing manufacturing-rich materials provided by those processes.
Grandview Gateway/Main Street improvement Project: Catalyst for revitalization of two 1950s shopping centers as well as youth sports grounds. The project emphasized walkability and road diets. The changes increased sales tax receipts for the area, contributing to a 7,400% return on the $5mm investment , and revitalized what was previously declared as one of the 10 fastest dying communities in America.
Bridging the Gap: Thousands of trees were planted across the KC region along with native plant installations and rain gardens to protect area watersheds and reduce urban flooding. Other benefits sought by these activities were increased shade, improved air quality and reduced crime rate.
Johnson County Community College: Programs here have been recognized in multiple years for their Children's Garden, their natural stormwater treatment system, and for their campus composting program. Recognition from MARC's Sustainable Success Story program helped the school raise funds to improve composting bays, and also help proponents convince the school leadership to donate a replaced trash compactor for use in processing post-consumer compostables. The Children's Garden was able to be expanded to a 2.5 acre sustainable agriculture farm. And the green infrastructure is now used to host educational workshops.
Rozarks Urban Nature Trail System: Trails created to give better access for active living in local natural environments, and a way to better connect the local urban community to hiking, mountain biking and observing the local ecosystem. Project stewards have since noticed a community embrace of the trails, and a higher-profile for the surrounding woods, where local and regional volunteer groups now amass to conduct trail clean-ups of both stagnant litter caught up in trees and bushes, and loose litter that could contaminate the nearby Turkey Creek watershed.
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