Summer 2016

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JOURNAL

INSPIRATION FOR THE COMMON GOOD •

VOLUME 8 • ISSUE 2 •

Facing

SUMMER 2016 •

JUDGMENT CHIEF JUST ICE L AW TO N NUSS AIMS TO HOLD STE ADY AS H E AN D THE KANSAS SUP R E M E CO URT ENCOUNTER INCREASI NG SC R UT I N Y

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(Print edition: ISSN 2328-4366; Online edition: ISSN 2328-4374) is published quarterly by the Kansas Leadership Center, which receives core funding from the Kansas Health Foundation.

The Kansas Leadership Center equips people with the ability to make lasting change for the common good. KLC focuses on leadership being an activity, not a role or position. Open to anyone seeking to move the needle on tough challenges in the civic arena, KLC envisions more Kansans sharing responsibility for acting together in pursuit of the common good.

KLC MISSION

To foster civic leadership for healthier Kansas communities

Jeff Tuttle Photography 316.706.8529 jefftuttlephotography.com

To be the center of excellence for civic leadership development

JOURNAL CONTRIBUTORS

ARTWORK

Rebecca Hoyer rebeccahoyer.com

Contents

MANAGING EDITOR

Chris Green 316.712.4945 cgreen@kansasleadershipcenter.org ART DIRECTION + DESIGN

Novella Brandhouse 816.868.9825 www.novellabrandhouse.com CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

KLC VISION

KANSAS LEADERSHIP CENTER BOARD OF DIRECTORS

PHOTOGRAPHY

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Sarah Caldwell Hancock Mark McCormick Dawn Bormann Novascone Laura Roddy Patsy Terrell Brian Whepley

INSPIRATION FOR THE COMMON GOOD • VOLUME 8 • ISSUE 2 • SUMMER 2016

Bob Hamrick

PUBLISHED BY

CONTRIBUTING WRITER

KANSAS LEADERSHIP CENTER

Bob has been writing for and about Kansas and its businesses for more than 40 years, including copy writing for some of the state’s premier advertising and marketing agencies. In 2010, Hamrick authored the book, “Looking Back, Moving Forward: A Story of Wichita’s Old Town.” He is currently writing a 45-year retrospective on Winfield’s Walnut Valley Festival.

COPY EDITORS

David Lindstrom, Overland Park (Chair) Ed O’Malley, Wichita (President & CEO) Ron Holt, Wichita Karen Humphreys, Wichita Susan Kang, Lawrence Carolyn Kennett, Parsons Greg Musil, Overland Park Reggie Robinson, Topeka Consuelo Sandoval, Garden City Clayton Tatro, Fort Scott Frank York, Ashland

Bruce Janssen Shannon Littlejohn Pat Byrnes

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CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

BY: PRESIDENT AND CEO ED O’MALLEY

ILLUSTRATIONS

Kim Gronniger Bob Hamrick MeLinda Schnyder

WEB EDITION

klcjournal.com SUBSCRIPTIONS

Annual subscriptions available at klcjr.nl/amzsubscribe ($24.95 for four issues).

Single issues available for $10 at watermarkbooks.com.

Welcome to the Journal Kim Gronniger CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Kim is vice president of marketing for the Greater Topeka Chamber of Commerce. She administers the Leadership Greater Topeka program and serves on the Washburn University Leadership Institute Advisory Council. She has a master’s degree in journalism and is pursuing an MFA in creative writing at KU. Gronniger writes articles for KANSAS!, Kansas Alumni, Topeka Magazine and other publications.

BY: CHRIS GREEN

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Origin Story BY: BOB HAMRICK

Hacking a City, For the Better

Abstracting is permitted with credit to the source.

For other reprint, copying or reproduction permission contact Mike Matson at mmatson@kansasleadershipcenter.org.

325 East Douglas Avenue Wichita, KS 67202 www.kansasleadershipcenter.org

The Leadership Library: Film Edition

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PERMISSIONS

KANSAS LEADERSHIP CENTER

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BY: JOE STUMPE

Dawn Bormann Novascone CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

Dawn spent 15 years working at The Kansas City Star and now works as a freelance journalist based in Lenexa. Her previous work for The Journal includes a leadership profile of Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback in the run-up to the 2014 general election and the barriers to ending a tax incentives border war in the Kansas City metro area.

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A Call for ‘Stone Catchers’ and Mercy BY: MARK MCCORMICK

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The Bottom Line BY: CHRIS GREEN PHOTOS BY: JEFF TUTTLE

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Beyond Advice BY: SETH BATE, JOYCE MCEWEN CRANE AND TERESA SCHWAB

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Usando Su Voz BY: KIM GRONNIGER

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When the Bench Becomes a Hot Seat BY: DAWN BORMANN NOVASCONE

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The Power of Partnership BY: MELINDA SCHNYDER

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New Guitar BY: KEVIN RABAS

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Whirl

FEATURED ARTIST REBECCA HOYER

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The Back Page BY: MARK MCCORMICK

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LETTER FROM KANSAS LEADERSHIP CENTER PRESIDENT & CEO ED O’MALLEY

Increasing your ‘Leadership Average’ MUCH LIKE BASEBALL, THE PATHWAY TO SUCCESS IS LEARNING FROM YOUR FAILURES

Maybe the batter doesn’t even see the pitch.

Or maybe he sees it, but keeps the bat on his shoulder. Maybe he swings, knowing, intellectually, the odds aren’t in his favor. But believing, emotionally, he will succeed. And maybe he will see the ball just right, connect and send the ball into the gap, advancing a runner and helping his team.

In baseball, hit the ball on average just three out of 10 times and you’ll be one of the best.

You will be enshrined in the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown; your .300 batting average will be the envy of players and kids everywhere.

And, you would have failed seven out of 10 times. Seventy percent of the time you would have struck out, grounded out or popped out.

The understanding that even the best fail more than succeed creates a humbleness rarely seen among many professionals.

What if that same understanding was embedded in our collective thinking about leadership? I can assure you it should be after almost 10 years working with thousands of Kansans and others working hard to exercise leadership.

We each have a “leadership average,” but when we walk into a room, our “leadership average” doesn’t flash upon a jumbo scoreboard. Wouldn’t it be fascinating if it did?

The difference between a baseball Hall of Famer and someone who can’t even make the roster is just one hit in 10. Hit .300 and you are a star. Hit .200 and you are a goat, probably unable to even make it in the minors. The only difference is one hit out of every 10 chances.

What if the difference between the best at exercising leadership and the mediocre were that slim as well? I think they are. Would we be more forgiving of those we expect to lead? Would we be thrilled when they do it well, when they connect and help mobilize a group, company,

community, state or nation. But would we also understand that most of their efforts, probably seven out of 10, wouldn’t work?

People who attempt to exercise leadership often get defensive when things don’t work out. A politician spins the facts. A CEO over-explains the strategy. A community official does whatever possible to make it look like whatever they did was a success. What if an official could just say, “I didn’t see that one all too well. I’ll work on a few things and be back at it tomorrow.”

And their constituencies would accept that, because they would know leadership isn’t something that someone can do all the time. Just like it’s not possible to hit .800 or .900 in baseball.

Personally, I think I fail at exercising leadership more than I succeed. Knowing that makes it easier to hear the criticism, constructive or otherwise, from others. But their criticism need not inspire a defensive stance because there is nothing to defend. Of course I’m not perfect.

Of course I don’t always lead well. Of course, of course, of course. Now, help me get better.

The difference between hovering at the Mendoza line or achieving Hall of Fame credentials is the steady application of practice, discernment, practice and more discernment, all eventually and hopefully leading to our being just a bit better. In baseball and in leadership.

Onward!

PRESIDENT & CEO KANSAS LEADERSHIP CENTER

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“Spotlight”

The Leadership Library FILM EDITION By: CHRIS GREEN

STARRING MARK RUFFALO, MICHAEL KEATON, RACHEL MCADAMS, LIEV SCHREIBER, JOHN SLATTERY AND STANLEY TUCCI.

Deep-seated problems aren’t so much about individuals as they are about systems. But exploring tough interpretations of a situation and testing them requires patience, discipline and persistence.

That’s one of the leadership messages that runs through “Spotlight,” which this year won the Academy Award for Best Picture for its portrayal of The Boston Globe’s investigation into the systemic sexual abuse of children by Roman Catholic priests.

The inquiry begins at the behest of an outsider to the community, new publisher Marty Baron (Schreiber) who spurs Spotlight, his four-person special investigative team, to look into the story, even though the subject could alienate the paper’s heavily Catholic readership.

The reporters uncover a pattern of abuse involving dozens of priests, but Baron implores them to focus on the behavior of the institution, not just individual priests.

IMAGES COURTESY OF MOVIEPOSTERDB.COM

“Bridge of Spies” STARRING TOM HANKS. DIRECTED BY STEVEN SPIELBERG.

James B. Donovan, a no-nonsense lawyer played by Tom Hanks, embodies the Kansas Leadership Center competencies of intervening skillfully and energizing others in this film, which is based on a true Cold War story.

First off, Donovan is given the unpopular task of defending Rudolf Abel, an accused Soviet spy. The government wants the spy’s trial to appear fair so it won’t become fodder for Soviet propaganda. But Donovan takes the job seriously (perhaps more seriously than anyone intended), holding to purpose despite facing disapproval within his law firm and in the public and amid questions from his family.

Donovan’s persistence leads him to persuade a skeptical judge not to sentence the spy to death

after his conviction, on the grounds that at some point it might be possible to trade him for a captured U.S. spy. His prescience is rewarded when the Soviets shoot down a U.S. spy plane and capture the pilot, Francis Gary Powers.

Donovan is sent to East Berlin to handle the negotiations, where he demonstrates skill at working across factions. Caught between the competing interests of the CIA, the USSR and East Germany, Donovan manages to secure the release of not only Powers, but also an American economics student in exchange for Abel.

It’s ultimately a story that reflects Donovan’s commitment to creating a trustworthy process.

His principled stand for treating his country’s enemies with fairness and compassion ultimately gives Donovan the trust and credibility he needs to bring his captured fellow countrymen safely back home.

What are you reading, watching or listening to as a way of continuing your leadership learning? Email your book, film or other suggestions to Chris Green, managing editor of The Journal, at cgreen@kansasleadershipcenter.org.

Still, it’s tough to resist the pressure to act. When one of the reporters, Michael Rezendes (Ruffalo), unearths public documents confirming that Boston’s then-archbishop, Cardinal Bernard Law, knew about problems with one priest but ignored them, he pushes for running the scoop right away. But his editor, Walter “Robby” Robinson (Keaton), objects, arguing that the paper needed to keep digging to capture the bigger, systemic picture.

That same debate often unfolds within our own heads when we’re facing a leadership challenge.

“Spotlight” is a reminder of the importance of resisting our urge to act swiftly in favor of devoting our energies to putting the puzzle together.

“The Martian” STARRING MATT DAMON. DIRECTED BY RIDLEY SCOTT.

When you’re working on a tough challenge in leadership, it’s hard sometimes not to feel like Mark Watney. An astronaut mistakenly left for dead on an inhospitable planet, Watney (Damon) finds himself trying to figure out a way to survive on Mars for years with a food supply that’s good for only about 300 days.

But when you’re feeling all alone, it often turns out that you have more resources at your disposal than you realize. So Watney improvises. He figures out a way to grow his own food and establish communication channels with NASA.

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When things don’t go as planned, he makes an extended sojourn across the red planet to the ascent vehicle that can, with extensive modifications, take him to reunite with the crew from his mission. But not without one final act of improvisation (no spoilers on this one).

Thankfully most of the leadership challenges we face each day don’t rise to the occasion of being a life or death matter. But we shouldn’t underestimate our abilities to do incredible, new things with our existing resources by acting experimentally. Experiments, as Watney learns, don’t always work – or work out quite the way you expect them to.

But if you can figure out how to experiment – and stay alive long enough to learn from those experiments – you’ll be better positioned to survive the toughest conditions, even if you never set foot on Mars.

“The Babadook” WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY JENNIFER KENT.

A little-known psychological horror film out of Australia may seem like a strange choice as a vehicle for learning anything, much less leadership. But it’s precisely the dark, extremely disturbing subject matter of this terrifying film – grief – that makes it so relevant to learning about how to mobilize people more effectively.

The Kansas Leadership Center teaches that in order to energize others, we sometimes must be able to speak to loss. But this is something that we often don’t do very well. It takes an enormous amount of empathy to really understand someone else’s grief and eschew the temptation to minimize the losses of others to push fulfilling our own goals.

“The Babadook” gives physical shape to the torments of grief in the form of a shadowy, top-hatted monster that shows up in a mysterious pop-up children’s book discovered by a widow’s troubled son. But a series of strange events makes it clear that the Babadook is far more than just a storybook character. He’s a very real, evil force haunting the widow, Amelia, who has yet to recover from her husband’s death.

And he can’t be killed, only contained.

The strange thing about grief is that it’s something we all accumulate by virtue of being alive. Losses, from traumatic to minor setbacks, haunt everyone.

Yet rarely do we want to be with others as they confront theirs. Leadership requires us to speak to the monster lurking in the basement that we’d rather pretend doesn’t exist.

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LOCALLY BREWED CRAFT BEER IS BECOMING UBIQUITOUS IN KANSAS. BUT 30 YEARS AGO, IT DIDN’T EXIST AT ALL. THE JOURNAL LOOKS BACK AT THE LEADERS HIP REQUIRED WHEN ONE MAN WHO WANTED TO OPEN A BREWERY SEIZED THE MOMENT TO HELP GET IT ALL STARTED.

By: BOB HAMRICK

When Chuck Magerl of Lawrence first had the idea for starting a microbrewery in Kansas, such operations were still illegal. So in 1987, he set out to convince the Legislature to change state law.

Nearly 30 years later microbreweries are becoming increasingly common in communities throughout the state.

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It began as a research project, but it turned into a vision.

Sifting through historic documents, Chuck Magerl discovered photos taken in the 1800s of Lawrence’s brewing operations. Fascinated by the idea of small breweries, Magerl put together plans to create his own “free state” brewery and restaurant.

There was just one problem: Breweries were illegal in Kansas and had been since 1881. Kansas was the first state in the nation to constitutionally outlaw alcohol sales and consumption. It had figured prominently in amending the U.S. Constitution to ban the production, transport and sale of alcohol. And though statewide Prohibition ended in 1948, Kansas has yet to ratify the 21st Amendment that repealed federal Prohibition.

“Prohibition was a part of what Kansas was,” Magerl says. “But the small breweries that German immigrants brought here, that’s also part of who we are. The more I learned, the more I felt it was time for Kansas to get back to its roots.”

Magerl’s chance to lead Kansas to those roots came in 1986, when voters approved a ballot measure allowing liquor by the drink in public drinking establishments.

“The state Legislature had to rewrite every regulation involving alcohol,” Magerl says. “I knew I could jump in and make the case for Kansas breweries, or I could just fritter away the opportunity.”

Magerl jumped, starting with a letter to a task force looking for public comments on liquor laws. “Once I was able to get a paragraph inserted in the possible changes, I earned a seat at the Senate committee hearings,” Magerl says.

As sensible as Magerl’s arguments seemed to him, he found a completely different mindset

in Topeka: “It wasn’t that the legislators didn’t want breweries – they just didn’t care.

“No one had any idea what an independent brewery was. People would say, ‘I’ve been to Coors, and I’ve seen the Clydesdales. I really don’t think we need that here.’”

To gather support, Magerl decided to become the face and voice of everything anyone needed to know about Kansas breweries. It wasn’t a role that came naturally for him.

“I don’t see myself as an outgoing personality,” Magerl says. “But I’m a good observer. I work hard on knowing what’s going on, gathering information and providing honest material for others to act on.” Magerl set about piling legislators’ desks with information on issues from brewery regulations to taxes to possible effects on Kansas communities.

Integrity was paramount. “You can’t fabricate stories to advance your own agenda. People have to understand the challenges. You have to give people an honest sense of confidence.”

One of the first to embrace Kansas breweries was state Sen. Wint Winter Jr., who introduced a bill on Magerl’s behalf. “If there was one individual who was responsible for getting the bill passed, it was certainly Wint,” Magerl says.

Sen. Ed Reilly, chairman of the committee that handled liquor regulations, also came on board, and the proposal began to find traction.

The tipping point came when Kansas Wine and Spirits Wholesalers lobbyist R.E. “Tuck” Duncan advised Magerl to shift the focus from a brewery bill to an “ag-value enterprise.”

OPPOSITE PAGE TOP: Patrons gather around the bar at Free State brewery in Lawrence. When Chuck Magerl opened Free State in 1989, it was Kansas’ first legal brewery in more than a century. BOTTOM: Magerl sees links between today’s local microbreweries and the small breweries that German immigrants brought to Kansas. The brewery uses a 1902 quote about beer from the diary of Brother Epp of a monastery near Hays on items such as T-shirts.

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IF VISITING EVERY KANSAS CRAFT BREWERY IS ON YOUR BUCKET LIST, YOU’D BETTER HURRY.

AT THE SAME TIME, THOUGH, THE STATE’S LONG HISTORY OF LEGAL RESTRICTIONS IS NOT A THING OF THE PAST.

Because the list of locally owned breweries is growing every day. As of March, there were 25 local craft breweries operating in 13 different counties throughout the state. More than 20 additional breweries are being planned, which would expand Kansas microbreweries to another eight counties.

Ten counties in Kansas, mostly in its western third, carry on the state’s dry tradition by not allowing the sale of liquor by the drink.

KA N S A S C RA FT B REWERI ES

KANSAS LIQ UO R BY THE DR INK

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O P E R AT I N G MICROBREWERY L O C AT I O N S

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PLANNED MICROBREWERIES

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LICENSED L O C AT I O N

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COUNTIES WITH NO LIQUOR BY THE DRINK

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COUNTIES WITH 30% FOOD SALES REQUIREMENT

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NO FOOD REQUIREMENT

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OPPOSITE PAGE TOP: Free State brewery is a popular local gathering spot. Towns large and small have been adding microbreweries in recent years. BOTTOM: Jimmy Calderon and Bill Woodard, both of Lawrence, enjoy a beer on the Free State patio.

“The language we added stated that beers brewed in the state had to contain at least fifty percent Kansas products. So the issue became a matter of economic development for Kansas farmers,” Duncan says.

Still, prohibitionists were a force to be dealt with.

Most vocal was the Rev. Richard Taylor, a United Methodist minister, and his organization Kansans for Life at Its Best. A longtime leader of the dry forces, Taylor believed that “lawmakers who vote for laws promoting consumption are drug pushers.”

Explaining Taylor’s political approach in The New Yorker, Kansas City, Missouri, native Calvin Trillin wrote, “Realizing that complete prohibition is not a realistic goal, Taylor concentrates on cutting down consumption. When it comes to drinking, he favors inconvenience.” And Kansas breweries would make things far too convenient for Taylor’s tastes.

Given voter support for liquor law changes, Magerl’s group was positioned to overcome prohibitionists’ arguments. Tougher opposition came from Kansas wholesale distributors, the businesses that purchase beverages from producers and sell them to the retail stores that supply consumers.

“They saw breweries as competitors,” Magerl says. “Every gallon we brewed was a gallon they wouldn’t sell.”

So brewery proponents offered a compromise.

“If microbreweries were going to distribute their beers to Kansas liquor stores, they had to use a Kansas wholesaler,” Duncan says.

“That was good for the wholesalers, because they wouldn’t lose money to new breweries.

And it was great for the brewers because it gave them immediate access to a complete distribution operation. They could just concentrate on making good beer.”

Even with the agreement, brewery legislation almost didn’t make it into the final bundled bill. “It was literally the last day of the session, and it still hadn’t come up for a vote,” Magerl says. In a last-ditch effort to derail the bill, legislators from dry counties demanded that changes in beer regulations be stripped from the bill before the vote could proceed.

“I remember standing with Senator Winter and Senator Reilly as they were advocating with the Senate president, saying, ‘Now we’ve had our hearings. We think it’s a good plan.

Let’s go forward.’”

On April 8, 1987, with the beer language intact, the bill did go forward. On a 30-10 vote, the legislation passed and headed to the governor’s desk to be signed into law.

Two years later, Magerl opened Kansas’ first post-Prohibition brewery, the Free State Brewing Co. The Lawrence business remains one of Kansas’ favorite destinations, Free State beers are sold throughout the state and 30-plus breweries have followed Magerl’s lead, opening facilities in towns large and small.

Looking back, Magerl is both proud and reflective of the efforts he led. “In legislation as in life, it’s easier to do nothing than it is to take steps forward.

Changes don’t just happen by pure happenstance.

Anytime there is a change, there’s an effort to be made. You just have to know it’s worth it.”

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Brewing Change: Leadership Lessons from Free State Brewing Co. founder Chuck Magerl

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CHANGE DOESN’T JUST HAPPEN. IT STARTS WITH YOU DECIDING TO ACT.

SEEK WAYS IN WHICH YOUR IDEAS CONNECT WITH WHAT OTHERS VALUE.

CONFLICT IS INEVITABLE. BE PREPARED FOR PRINCIPLED OPPOSITION.

A LITTLE GIVE-AND-TAKE CAN CREATE UNLIKELY ALLIES.

BIG CHANGES OFTEN SPRING FROM A SMALL SPARK.

Leadership starts with one person caring enough about something to take action on it. When Magerl looked around, he didn’t see anyone else positioned to make the case for Kansas microbreweries, so he decided to be the one to do it.

It may sound funny now in a state with dozens of microbreweries, but a local brewery was a foreign concept to many legislators in 1987. As a result, they didn’t think much of Magerl’s idea. To bring in a broader coalition, he followed advice to adjust the bill so that it would help foster economic development for Kansas farmers.

The bigger your idea, the more likely it will collide with others’ values. Anti-alcohol advocates fought any changes that might make beer and liquor easier to access. Liquor wholesalers saw microbreweries as potential competitors for business because, as Magerl says, every “gallon we brewed was a gallon they wouldn’t sell.”

Brewery supporters ultimately found a way to compromise with liquor wholesalers by requiring breweries to distribute their beer to retailers through Kansas wholesalers. The move ensured that wholesalers wouldn’t lose money to new breweries and allowed breweries to “concentrate on making good beer.”

Nearly 30 years after Magerl began his effort, microbreweries continue to take root in Kansas, spreading to communities throughout the state and becoming a nearly $400 million industry. In many instances, these breweries are important public gathering spaces that bring people together and foster stronger community connections.

Rachel Sample and John Faris, both of Lawrence, sit and drink on Free State’s patio. The legislation that allowed for locally owned breweries was the result of a compromise between brewery supporters and liquor wholesalers.

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Hacking a city, for the better By: JOE STUMPE

WHAT CAN A CITY DO BETTER WHEN A CADRE OF CITIZENS – INCLUDING TALENTED COMPUTER PROGRAMMERS – GET UNFETTERED ACCESS TO USEFUL GOVERNMENT DATA? SETH ETTER A N D O P E N W I C H I T A A I M T O F I N D O U T. BUT RESHAPING A CITY THROUGH C O D E R E Q U I R E S M O R E T H A N S I M P LY NAVIGATING TECHNICAL CHALLENGES.

Web developer Seth Etter, founder of a volunteer group called Open Wichita, hopes to make life in Kansas’ biggest city better through the sharing of information and technology.

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T

he aroma of Mexican food wafts

out of the break room of the Labor

Party, a shared workspace in Wichita’s lively Old Town entertainment district. It’s been brought in to feed about two dozen people attending the monthly “Hack Night” held by Open Wichita, a volunteer group trying to make life better in Kansas’ biggest city through the sharing of information and technology.

Despite Open Wichita founder Seth Etter’s urging, the food finds relatively few takers. The participants, mostly men and women in their 20s and early 30s, seem much more interested in talking about where the organization is headed.

Etter, craft beer in hand, stands in the middle of one group that’s throwing out ideas to increase voter participation. Another group sits around a long table, hatching strategies to promote the local food movement. A handful of others hunker over laptop computers, discussing a proposed mobile app that would make public transit easier to use and a website devoted to reducing infant mortality. The size of each subset grows and shrinks as people come and go. There’s no agenda, no one taking minutes and nothing like Robert’s Rules of Order in effect here.

The effort inches forward. By the end of the night, for instance, a consensus is reached that the voting initiative should collaborate with a similar project already underway by KMUW, the local public radio station, rather than stand on its own.

Later, Etter says he’s happy with the progress.

Rather than one handy app for bus riders or easily accessible list of local food sources, Etter’s vision for Open Wichita is broader: the engagement of citizens, by and for citizens, in all sorts of fields using technology and previously inaccessible sources of data.

“I don’t see it as one big end-goal,” Etter says.

“This group and the efforts we’re working on, they just kind of lay the groundwork for a lot of other awesome things to happen. It’s more kind

of laying the framework for citizens to be more engaged in their city.”

Open Wichita, in other words, is open ended.

And part of that is due to the leadership of Etter himself, a techie who’s not just focused on solving technical challenges. He’s also been a relationship builder, cultivating allies within city government and quick to recognize that hacking Wichita’s civic challenges will require a lot more people to be involved than just the city’s coding community.

But there are formidable challenges. For one thing, even with widespread engagement of the community, there’s the question of whether Wichita’s relatively small pool of technological talent is big enough to help foster big scale changes.

Furthermore, even though Etter has found receptive ears at City Hall, getting governments to more fully embrace open data principles figures to be an ongoing challenge with plenty of ebb and flow.

Josh Stewart, a spokesman for the Sunlight Foundation, a national group that advocates for government transparency, says groups such as Open Wichita “face all kinds of challenges.

You need buy-in from the institutions within the government itself, and you also need some sort of civic tech infrastructure to supply talent for your city to do this. For every city, not all of those things are going to come together.”

HACKING FOR CHANGE

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pen Wichita is indicative of a new civic

reform movement emerging across

the country, summed up in the phrase “hacking for change.” In other cities, open data groups have created apps to let citizens track issues of public policy that are important to them as they move through the channels of government. Apps can perform broad tasks, such as

allowing citizens to view health inspections of restaurants, keep up with traffic reports or notify local governments of problems they’ve spotted.

Other apps help people locate alternative fuel stations, monitor air quality and be alerted to earthquakes and hurricanes; view safety reports of various products; and even connect people who know CPR with those in cardiac arrest nearby, to name a few.

Some cities have created open data portals that citizens can mine for information and even appointed high-level managers to make them operate as effectively as possible. For instance, Kansas City, Missouri, hired a chief data officer in early 2015 for that purpose. The idea is that making government data open and accessible will allow smart, innovative people to come up with creative ways to make use of it for the public good – often without further involvement from government officials.

Wichita has an open data portal, created about six months ago partly in response to Open Wichita, although it contains only about a dozen data sets and is not easy to navigate.

Etter, a 26-year-old who grew up in El Dorado, earned his associate’s degree in web development from Butler Community College and has taught part-time in that program. Since 2011, he’s run his own freelance web design business and then worked for several Wichita-based companies with large technology components. In his spare time Etter enjoys live music, yoga and penning blog posts about his love for Wichita.

Most recently, he’s taken on a new job with the OpenGov Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that develops open source software for use in the public sector.

“I write code for them,” says Etter, who works from Wichita. “The main thing we work on is called Madison. It allows legislators to put draft legislation in the system so the public can see it before it goes to a vote, can suggest edits, comment on it. It could be used by any kind of legislative body.”

In keeping with the principles of open data, anybody can download Madison and use it without permission. “We found out the country of Georgia is using it to write their constitution, which is cool,” Etter says.

Even cooler – from Etter’s standpoint --- is that his hometown is using it. The Wichita city manager’s office recently posted a proposed open data policy for the city on the website (drafts.wichita.gov/) Open Wichita is an outgrowth of another group, called devICT, which Etter started in 2012 to bolster the local web development community through social events and educational programs.

He’d also closely followed the efforts of Code for America, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that’s been called “the technology world’s equivalent of the Peace Corps,” and knew that regional affiliates Code for Tulsa and Code for OKC were up and running.

Etter favored the inclusiveness suggested by a similar group called Open Houston. “I like the word ‘open’ better than ‘code’, because code immediately shuts out a certain group of people,” Etter says. “We need more than just developer and code folks to make an impact.”

Etter has placed an emphasis on engaging more than just usual voices who’d show up to a coding event. While developers can build technology, it takes designers to make it look good, marketers to promote it, business thinkers to scale it up, and subject matter experts who know the ins-and-outs of the area a project affects.

The first Open Wichita event at the Labor Party last June, on the National Day of Civic Hacking, attracted about 30 people and lasted 10 hours.

Over the course of the event, the group decided to focus on five projects: increasing voter participation; reducing infant mortality; promoting local food; helping reopen the Lake Afton Observatory; and getting the city of Wichita to adopt an open data policy. The last is the concept that data collected by the government should be open to citizens to use as they see fit.

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COMPETING VALUES AT PLAY

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ven before the inaugural Open Wichita

meeting, Etter found a couple of very

important allies. They include Mike Mayta, the city’s chief information officer, and his boss, City Manager Robert Layton, who were familiar with Code for America and the open data movement in general.

Mayta attends the monthly meetings of Open Wichita and seems to enjoy them, joking about the contrasts between him and most of the group’s members in terms of age, weight, hairline and tattoos.

Mikel Bowyer, president of the ICT Food Circle, works with Sara Greenlee, left, and Stephanie Keomany, center, during an Open Wichita meeting earlier this year. The Food Circle, a web directory for locally produced foods, is the Open Wichita project that has developed the quickest.

Jason VanDeCreek speaks during a civic hacking meeting at The Labor Party, a Wichita co-working space. Open Wichita’s meetings are often punctuated by brief but intense collaborative efforts among volunteers interested in the same project.

“When you go down there and here’s a bunch of kids – and I use that term nicely – spending their own time to try and use technology to make this a better community, it’s pretty cool,” Mayta says.

Mayta sees something contemporary in the way its participants work, mimicking what some call the new economy based on short-term collaborations. “It’s really interesting to me,” he says. “These people just kind of collaborate, they meet, they create things. They’ll come and go.

If others don’t show up, they’ll go over to another project. It’s really kind of free flow.”

Mayta is able to tell Open Wichita members about the types of data generated by the city and what format it takes. What he hasn’t done is simply give them access to all of it. Some of it is off limits due to privacy concerns, or is not in a format that can be utilized by the group. Much more data could be open, he says, but at a cost.

“What a lot of cities did is they outsourced their open data and posted their data sets, usually at a cost of about fifty to one hundred thousand dollars a year. In some cases that might be okay. Look at San Francisco, with its large tech community. Here I wanted to be a little more strategic and kind of say, ‘Hey, what do you need?’

I don’t want to just spend a whole lot of money.”

In a city with a budget of $227 million this year, $50,000 to $100,000 might not be seen as cost prohibitive, Mayta says, but then added:

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“Do we want to spend $100,000 doing that or fixing streets?”

The city possesses hundreds of data sets. Most requests from the public and media are for data about crime and city spending. The city has posted the former in open data format, although it is not automatically updated as it would be in some systems. Within two years, the city expects to have a system in place that posts financial records and other information in open data format and keeps it updated.

Mayta and Layton also back Open Wichita’s call for the City Council to adopt an open data policy to store information that isn’t private in a way that doesn’t require the city to function as the filter.

But there will be competing values at play. On one hand, there’s the desire for openness, which city officials support. But there are also the values of efficiency, protecting citizen privacy, and even the concern about losing control of what people might do with open information.

Etter says he understands the city “can’t just up and change every system they’re using to manage the city at this point. But going forward, he added, any data that doesn’t violate privacy concerns “should also dump into a system where people can grab it and do what they want with it.”

ENCOURAGING EXPLORATION

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tter’s success in building bridges with the

city is another example of how building

Open Wichita has been as much about building relationships as it has been about writing code.

Another early supporter of Open Wichita was Aaron Wirtz, known for zany TV commercials he created for Super Car Guys, a chain of Wichita used car lots (“Where buying a car doesn’t have to suck!”).

He presented a much different appearance at January’s monthly meeting of Open Wichita, bringing along his infant daughter in a carrier that he rocked gently throughout the evening.

“Our first father-daughter outing and I bring her here,” he says.

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Wirtz was drawn to Open Wichita because Etter reached out to him to pick his brain on different marketing ideas.

Although Wirtz gets paid for handing out that kind of advice as a professional marketer, he wanted to help because Etter asked.

“What I’ve noticed is that a staggering number of organizations are unprepared to ask for help, asking specifically ‘I see you can do this, this is what we need.’” And when some organizations do get help, Wirtz says, “They are unable to make those people feel appreciated. People want to feel like their unique efforts have made a difference.”

One of Wirtz’s roles with Open Wichita is to make sure members are recognized in blog posts and short videos he makes for social media. Wirtz says the structure of Open Wichita makes sense to him, even if the monthly meetings appear free form in nature.

Most of the actual coding and web developing gets done between these sessions, with participants communicating via the web.

“There is no shortage of talent within the group,” Wirtz says. “I think the challenges we are facing will be focusing and executing, seeing projects through from the beginning to the end, keeping people motivated and actually developing projects that offer real value instead of kind of revisiting the wheel, or trying to get attention for things that aren’t useful.”

VARIABLES AT PLAY

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he Open Wichita project that developed quickest

is low-tech, at least by coding standards. The

ICT Food Circle (“ICT” is the federal aviation code for Wichita’s Dwight D. Eisenhower National Airport) is a website directory of farms, restaurants and other businesses selling locally produced foods, from beef and bison to eggs, honey and sweet corn. The idea is to connect the growing number of consumers interested in local food with the people raising it.

Mikel Bowyer, who manages a Wichita restaurant called Public at the Brickyard, says he presented his idea for ICT Food Circle at Open Wichita’s first meeting and immediately got a positive response from other participants. Today the group has a board of six people, including Bowyer as president (“which means I talk the loudest”); a farmer liaison;

Mike Mayta serves as the chief information officer for the City of Wichita. He attends most monthly meetings of Open Wichita and has worked to help make available some, though certainly not all, of the city’s data sets to the group.

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Open Wichita Timeline

and directors of technology, marketing, research and strategic planning.

2012

2014

2015

September/October

November

May

June

Seth Etter, a 2010 graduate of Butler Community College, founds devICT, a local community for web developers in Wichita.

Etter meets Jeff Reichman, an organizer of Open Houston, at Startup Weekend Wichita, which teamed up developers, entrepreneurs and others to create business models.

Inspired by examples in Houston and other cities, Etter launched Open Wichita, a “civic hacking” group that aims to solve problems by using public data, with help from the City of Wichita.

Open Wichita conducts its first event during a National Day of Civic Hacking being promoted

by San Francisco-based Code for America.

2016 January

March

June

ICT Food Circle, a project that developed out of Open Wichita’s first hackathon, begins receiving public attention. The group’s efforts include a website directory of farms, restaurants and other businesses selling locally produced foods. The idea is to connect consumers interested in local food with the people raising it.

Mike Mayta, Wichita’s chief information officer, reveals that city officials will meet with representatives of What Works Cities, a program launched in 2015 by Bloomberg Philanthropies to help 100 medium-sized cities use data to improve services and engage citizens.

Twenty-four hour civic hackathon scheduled to go on during Wichita’s Riverfest, which was awarded a $25,000 grant from the Wichita Community Foundation to stage the event.

Open Wichita will play a key role in the effort, which will see participants collaborate and then pitch technology-related ideas to a group of judges that includes Mayor Jeff Longwell.

Josh Stewart of the Sunlight Foundation calls it “a full program that takes you from A to Z in terms of how to get an open data policy and portal.”

Although the group has obtained a database listing hundreds of properties zoned for agriculture in Sedgwick County, the website currently has about 60 listings mostly compiled from personal contacts. The group has talked about plans for another project – an event that would introduce farmers to young consumers in what Bowyer called a “rock star setting.”

Because the effort is driven by volunteers who are often giving their time for a personal passion, a different kind of leadership style – a kind Etter and others in the group excel at – is necessary to keep the ball rolling. Open Wichita is a group where leadership requires skill and personal credibility, and individuals engage effectively with each other. This isn’t a situation where it makes sense for anyone to give a lot of orders or commands.

“Seth communicates so well,” Bowyer says.

“He has total dedication to the community, which trickles down. He’s very good at connecting with people and reaching out, and then, as he reaches out, keeping everybody on the same page. He’s very human, too. He shares a willingness to improve the community. You’d never know he has a thousand things going on. When he feels pressure, he reaches out to people.”

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This year brings more milestones for Open Wichita. In June, the group will play a key role in a 24-hour Hackathon during Wichita’s Riverfest as part of a National Day of Civic Hacking. Participants will collaborate and then pitch technology-related ideas to a group of judges that includes Wichita Mayor Jeff Longwell. One year after its start, Open Wichita will be open to the public as never before.

So far, Etter is happy with the pace that Open Wichita has made progress. If anything it’s grown more quickly than he expected. But the level of the success that the project attains will depend on a couple of variables at play.

“There are two primary factors and maybe a third that will really shape what all this looks like in the end,” Etter says. “One is the number of technology proficient professionals that we have here in Wichita. It’s going to take some skills. Another is an interest in being civically engaged. Just because they have those skills doesn’t mean they choose to use them. The third factor is that the city stays on board, commits to an open data policy and releases a lot of open data. There are a lot of things that can be done by a rich civic hacking community.”

Getting there, though, will also require hacking of a different sort. Perhaps you could call them leadership hacks -- the kind of actions that will inspire people past hurdles and toward a shared goal of using open data to create a better city.

Take Action:

CONNECT WITH AN OPEN DATA INITIATIVE

• Learn more about Open Wichita by connecting through www.openwichita.com.

• Find out how you can contribute to the “hack for change” movement at https://www.codeforamerica.org/join/.

• Explore the Madison Project at http://opengovfoundation.org/the-madison-project/.

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A Call for ‘Stone Catchers’ – and Mercy

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By: MARK E. MCCORMICK

CRIMINAL JUSTICE REFORM ADVOCATE BRYAN STEVENSON SAYS LEAVING OUR COMFORT ZONE TO GET CLOSER TO DIFFICULT PROBLEMS IS CRUCIAL TO SOLVING THEM.

The community of Monroeville, Alabama, dotes on the legacy of the late Harper Lee and her literary classic, “To Kill a Mockingbird.” The film adaptation drew screen legend Gregory Peck there for the famous court scenes. That building is a museum today.

During his February visit, Stevenson argued that without proximity, we won’t see problems with the clarity and intricacy necessary to solve them.

Pride springs eternal locally about the story of an innocent black man bravely defended by a white lawyer. But decades later, Monroeville authorities placed Walter McMillian, a black man, on death row – even before his trial – for a murder of a white woman – a crime he could not have committed.

In the book, Stevenson tells of meeting an elderly woman who would regularly sit in on trials. She comforted people the way she’d been comforted following the death of her 16-year-old grandson.

McMillian’s case spoke to distance. As close as people felt to Lee’s masterpiece, they still weren’t close enough to recognize that her protagonist, Atticus Finch, ultimately failed in his defense of Tom Robinson and that they hadn’t made much social progress.

Bryan Stevenson, a lawyer who eventually helped exonerate McMillian and the author of “Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption,” visited Kansas this past February, sharing leadership competencies that included “changing narratives,” “clinging to hope,” and “doing uncomfortable and inconvenient things.”

But Stevenson’s competency of “proximity” seemed to define his bestselling book, his Kansas visit and his riveting talk. It brought people closer to the reform issues he’s redefining. “Just Mercy” highlights his campaign for criminal justice reform, including eliminating the death penalty. Throughout his book, he relates his intensely personal struggle to free broken and vulnerable people from a system that “treats people better if they’re rich and guilty than if they are poor and innocent.”

“Capital punishment,” according to his book, “means them without the capital, get the punishment.”

Author and criminal justice reform advocate Bryan Stevenson spoke to an audience in Wichita earlier this year.

Sometimes, he says, it’s not just about getting close but putting yourself in harm’s way.

“All these young children being sent to prison forever, all this grief and violence,” she told him. “Those judges throwing people away like they’re not even human, people shooting each other, hurting each other like they don’t care.

I don’t know, it’s a lot of pain. I decided that I was supposed to be here to catch some of the stones people cast at each other.”

Stevenson is exhorting others to do the same thing: “Our self-righteousness, our fear and our anger have caused even the Christians to hurl stones at the people who fall down even when we know we should forgive or show compassion. … We have to be stone catchers.”

Proximity obviously has been important in his work. It has fed a vantage point rich with understanding and spoken powerfully to the axiom that people cannot lead where they aren’t willing to go. Leadership becomes real when, despite the risks, people can no longer keep their distance.

That intimacy, Stevenson argues, forms our understanding of mercy.

“The power of just mercy is that it belongs to the undeserving,” Stevenson wrote. “It’s when mercy is least expected that it’s most potent – strong enough to break the cycle of victimization and victimhood, retribution and suffering.”

Mark E. McCormick is the executive director of The Kansas African American Museum.

Kansas City area nonprofit

HappyBottoms drives change by going well beyond the traditional charitable drive.

the bottom line Photos by: JEFF TUTTLE

Story by: CHRIS GREEN

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At first, Jill Gaikowski didn’t know what a diaper drive was or why a charity would focus on collecting diapers.

As she learned more, it led her to want to seek a more systemic solution to a problem she hadn’t known existed beforehand. In 2010, she started HappyBottoms, a Lenexa-based nonprofit that serves as Kansas City’s diaper bank. It would become an effort that embodies the idea that while leadership can start with you, it must engage others.

Gaikowski discovered that something as basic as having fresh diapers for your baby is beyond the reach of many people. Government safety-net programs don’t provide aid for diapers, which can be a huge expense ($80 to $100 a month) for low-income families.

As a result, families hovering just above or below the poverty line made do as best they could, which often meant their babies went without fresh diapers, creating health risks for as many as 21,000 children in the Kansas City metro area.

Cloth diapers aren’t a viable option for many families because they can’t wash soiled diapers at a laundromat or carry them on public transit.

A lack of diapers also feeds a vicious cycle of poverty. Child care centers often require parents to provide disposable diapers, and if they can’t, they may not be allowed to enroll. Without access to child care, parents can’t work or educate themselves, the very things they need to get ahead.

But not too long after she had gotten started, Gaikowski found her family being pulled to the Minneapolis area by a job relocation. Her challenge suddenly became contributing to the creation of infrastructure at HappyBottoms that would allow the organization to thrive without her.

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“Jill sat and looked at the biggest need, which was to create a strategic plan and start looking at how we were going to build this organization,” says board member Liz Sutherlin.

Using a sophisticated data collection system, the organization now repackages and warehouses diapers it distributes to 35 social services agencies on both sides of the state line that provide them to families in need at 47 locations. The agencies provide the demographic data that allows HappyBottoms to ensure that its volunteers create packages providing the correct sizes of diapers to each individual child.

The organization also works with five hospital systems to distribute diapers to newborns. It’s a system that weaves volunteers, social service providers and the families themselves together to maximize efficiency and impact and to prevent duplication.

In 2015, HappyBottoms distributed 1.62 million diapers to help 7,806 children throughout the region.

The goal is to increase that reach to 10,000 children.

Doing so will require more funding, partnerships with more agencies, and enough volunteers and warehouse space to serve the community, executive director John Teasdale says.

“Poverty is a complicated, huge puzzle,” Teasdale says. “Diapers are just a piece of it, but a really big piece when it comes to getting families out of poverty and into positions of lifelong success.”

It’s a puzzle that Gaikowski will once again play a role in helping solve. Earlier this year she returned to the organization for a second stint as a grant writer and development specialist.

It’s a larger, more impactful organization than when she left, which is perhaps a testament to the kind of leadership that looks long term and engages others at building something bigger together.

OPPOSITE PAGE COUNTERCLOCKWISE FROM TOP: Jubilee Schmidt of Olathe holds her 4-month-old son, Dawsyn. She receives donated diapers that come from a Kansas City area nonprofit called HappyBottoms, which distributed 1.62 million diapers to 7,806 children in 2015; Selina Kincaid, a Junior League of Kansas City Missouri volunteer, helps package diapers at the HappyBottoms warehouse in Lenexa; HappyBottoms employee Jackie Williams stacks diapers. Using a sophisticated data collection system, the organization repackages and warehouses diapers it distributes to 35 social services agencies on both sides of the state line.

Take Action: • Learn how to donate or volunteer at HappyBottom by visiting www.happybottoms.org.

• Visit nationaldiaperbanknetwork.org to learn about diaper banking in your community or how to host your own diaper drive.

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“Poverty is a complicated, huge puzzle. Diapers are just a piece of it, but a really big piece when it comes to getting families out of poverty and into positions of lifelong success.�

JOHN TEASDALE Executive Director, HappyBottoms

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COUNTERCLOCKWISE FROM TOP: HappyBottoms Executive Director John Teasdale and Junior League of KCMO volunteers Selina Kincaid of Leawood and Alice Angulo of Fairway help sort diapers. HappyBottoms was created as a large-scale effort to increase the supply of fresh diapers to needy families; A sign at the HappyBottoms warehouse details the impact the organization intends to have. Diapers are packaged by size and quantity and boxed at the warehouse so they can be delivered to specific distribution sites in Kansas City; Kaitlin McDonald, a HappyBottoms employee, prepares a package for a client. Diapers are often a major need for low-income families because government safety-net programs don’t provide aid for them.

As a result families hovering at or below the poverty line make do as best they can, meaning that their babies sometimes go without diapers.

OPPOSITE PAGE: Tashay Horton of Kansas City and her son Jeremiah receive diapers from HappyBottoms.

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By: SETH BATE, JOYCE MCEWEN CRANE AND TERESA SCHWAB

In an effort to be helpful, people often give colleagues and friends advice and easily offer their own amassed knowledge. This might help when the challenges people face are known and predictable. In other situations – the daunting, complicated situations that require effective people skills and trying out new things – we can better serve people we care about by helping them dig deeper to explore and access their own creativity and resourcefulness.

As professional leadership coaches, we’ve learned a set of skills that we believe anyone can pick up and use to help others navigate the dark spaces of civic and workplace challenges – those times when it’s hard to see what’s going on and the path forward is complex or unclear. Professional coaches spend countless hours practicing and honing these skills, but anyone can try them on to improve their own effectiveness and to assist others in improving theirs.

beyond advice By mastering the four basic skills employed extensively by professional leadership coaches, anyone can help their colleagues find their own answers to pressing quandaries. But first, one must be willing to suspend the instinct to provide advice and instead focus on exploration.

Deep listening, exploring purpose, losing attachment to the outcome and direct communication help form the backbone of professional coaching and are designed to help people receiving coaching better understand what is important to them and open them up to the many possibilities available to them. Once the options have been completely explored, a coach encourages deliberate action: What will you try next? When will you do it? How will you learn from it? How will you stay accountable to make sure it happens?

While these skills are open to anyone, they aren’t intuitive for everyone. It is always much easier and seemingly more efficient to provide what you think are the answers to another’s problem.

Effectively utilizing leadership coaching skills requires suspending one’s own experience and judgment in service to helping others make progress on what matters most to them. In the sections below, we’ll outline some of the skills that you can practice.

But first, a story – based on a typical real-life situation – will give us a better understand what

it looks like to use coaching skills with a colleague rather than to give advice.

Josh had assigned the ringtone to only one contact. He knew Carolyn, a colleague from his graduate school days, was texting him – again.

Carolyn was trying to make an important decision.

She had been in her job less than a year. She had helped make a difference very quickly, re-establishing relationships that had languished under her predecessor and promoting a higher standard of excellence. The culture change around her was noticeable but slow. Carolyn knew that progress was underway but would take time. She expected to be in her position for five to seven years.

Already, though, another division of her company had reached out. The other division, sometimes an internal rival with her own, invited Carolyn to apply for a position it was creating. Carolyn felt energized by the possibilities that the new position would hold for her – she could create something new instead of slowly remolding an existing system. But interviewing for the new post could damage all the work she had put in so far; there was no way to apply secretly.

“I know I’m repeating myself,” Carolyn told Josh over the phone. “I feel like I’m walking through the forest in the dark. I keep going in circles and bumping into things. I don’t know which way to go.”

Josh had listened and offered advice many times.

Yet Carolyn continued to come back to him.

Although he had definite opinions about what she should do, he set those aside and chose to take a different approach this time. He asked, “Imagine you have a pair of night vision goggles and can clearly see the path in front of you. If you look miles down the road, what do you see at the end? What do you notice along the way?”

There was an awkward pause. Then, hesitantly, Carolyn began describing the forest path. “At the end of the path I see an exciting new place that I’ve never been before. I notice that the path is

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rugged, uneven, steep and maybe even a little dangerous. Although what’s at the end seems so exciting that I don’t mind because I want to get to the end and explore this new place. It feels worth the risk that I need to take to get through the steep and dangerous climbs.” When Carolyn had finished describing the path, Josh asked, “What was that experience like for you?” Carolyn responded, “On one hand, I realized I wanted stability in the path, but when I saw the place at the end, I realized I also wanted the possibility and excitement of what the new place could offer me. Josh, I don’t want to waste all the hard work I’ve put in so far, and I don’t want to disappoint anyone. But if I don’t take this opportunity, I know myself well enough to know that I will regret it. And with that regret, I’ll start to get bored. I guess the biggest obstacle here is that I want stability, but at the same time I want new, challenging opportunities to live without regret.

I guess it comes down to me figuring out which is most important to me.” Within a few minutes, Carolyn used this different perspective on her situation and made her choice about how she would navigate the forest.

When they were finished talking, Carolyn thanked Josh. “I could tell you were really listening,” she said. “You trusted that I could find my own way.”

If you’ve experienced a session with a professional leadership coach, Josh’s unusual question probably won’t surprise you. It’s the kind of query that a skilled coach might use to shift a difficult conversation out of an unproductive, repetitive pattern and into a fresh, more open space where barriers can be more easily seen and surmounted.

Josh had realized that he didn’t necessarily care what decision Carolyn made – what he did care about was that she made the decision that was best for her. Josh knew that she was so mired in her worries and what-ifs that she was having trouble untangling herself from the issue. Josh suspected she had all of the answers within herself, but what she needed was a partner to help her reveal them. Someone who could step away from their previous interplay and approach her quandary differently. But helping others make the switch isn’t something that happens by accident.

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the skills: LISTEN – AND LISTEN SOME MORE

Lots of leadership books emphasize the importance of listening. Still, it is very common to hear people admit, “I’m not a good listener.” Most people have learned technical solutions for improving their listening skills, such as being able to mirror what has been said by using the speaker’s exact words or a paraphrase. These techniques can often help people feel heard in a way they’ve never been before.

Still, this kind of listening is awkward and hard to do.

Probably the most common barrier to intense listening is something we all know about and regularly experience. We tend to think much more about what we will say next than about what is being said to us.

The reasons we get caught in this trap are because we are trying to connect, we are trying to be helpful or, in less-than-noble situations, we are trying to demonstrate how smart we are. (Ouch!) By thinking of an answer that sounds “right” or looking for a transition to share our own knowledge, we miss the chance to listen deeply to what is being said.

This deeper kind of listening goes far beyond understanding the words that are being said. It requires a much more adaptive approach – curiosity, keen interest and listening without evaluation. Instead of working to fit what is being shared into our own worldview, this kind of listening is about attempting to understand the models of thinking and beliefs and internal experience or feelings of the speaker.

In this sense, when we listen, we connect with others by starting from where they are (not where we are). This is the kind of listening Josh offered Carolyn, and it’s the kind of approach needed with colleagues, friends and family members who are facing difficult challenges with no easy answers.

HONING IN ON PURPOSE – AND SETTING YOUR OWN AGENDA ASIDE

If you’re in a session with a professional leadership coach, you are bound to get asked a question about your purpose – that deep-seated desire that compels you to move forward. It is common for professional coaches to ask several such questions in a single session: What would you like to accomplish in this

conversation? How does this connect to your larger purpose? What would be the purpose of the next action you are considering?

As you’re attempting to play a coaching (rather than an advice-giving) role with a colleague or friend, you’d be wise to make a significant use of questions about purpose, too. They are fundamental to making gains on a leadership challenge and helping us stay focused on what is important. It’s all too easy for us as human beings to leave our purpose unstated or gloss over it as we move forward on executing an action plan.

Playing a coach’s role is to help others focus and be “on purpose” in a way that ensures that they get what they truly want – not what the coach imagines they want or what the coach wants for them. You genuinely want someone else to move forward, so you encourage the person to consider different perspectives from within themselves without pushing them toward a particular conclusion. Coaching also involves helping others explore multiple options, weigh the risks and decide what to do next, all the while leaving the responsibility of taking action with the other person. But doing this well means setting aside any particular agenda or outcome you

have in mind in favor of partnering to help someone else choose a direction they can live with and are committed to exploring. Coaching is not about the coach’s purpose or desires – it’s about the purpose of who you are coaching and what they want.

BE DIRECT

If you pull up a 1980s sitcom on Netflix – one that was filmed in front of a studio audience – you will know when someone makes a remark that cuts to the quick. Rather than guffaws, the audience will react with a chorus of “oooo!” You may have heard the equivalent in a meeting. Afterward, you might have heard “I can’t believe you said that!” or “Well, everyone was thinking it.”

Playing a coach’s role means developing the ability to name interpretations about what is going on without dressing them up. This skill of being direct comes from a belief that people are capable and resourceful, and are ready to hear the truth, or at least a blunt, unvarnished interpretation of the facts.

Once a situation has been named, or a previously ignored elephant in the room is acknowledged, there is often new “heat” for the people you want

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to help. This heat provides energy for deciding how to respond to what is really going on. It often elevates the courage for people to address the issues.

While there is value to doing that sometimes, it can place unnecessary limitations on learning and progress.

Anyone can use the skill of being direct. Saying what needs to be said, with compassion, but without a long preamble. Not softening the words. Trusting others to be resilient enough and interested enough in making progress to take it.

They may not like what they hear, but with a new perspective, they have the chance to shift gears.

And, if you say it and it lands wrong, it’s OK to admit your error and apologize. Believe it or not, this kind of truthful and authentic communication actually strengthens relationships.

Formal coaching training isn’t necessary to play the coach’s role to help a friend or colleague.

(Although we think it’s essential if you ever intend to be a professional leadership coach.) But ongoing, sometimes awkward and frustrating practice definitely is. Believing there is value and committing to trying a different approach is often the first step. Stay alert to opportunities to practice one or more of these skills in all aspects of your life.

Similar to starting a new workout program, it will get easier with practice.

Admittedly, this approach to direct communication carries risks. There are other, gentler ways to raise heat that are also available to anyone. One is using the language of the people you are trying to mobilize. How do they describe their aspirations?

What names do they give their challenges? By incorporating their own words, you can say plainly what needs to be said and help them say it, too.

Part of your practice should also be opening up yourself to not just using coaching skills yourself, but also encouraging others to play the coach’s role with you. Ask them to deeply listen to you, to challenge you to explore your purpose, to stay focused on the exploration, not the outcome, and raise the heat on you by being direct. This kind of practice is routine and crucial in the world of professional leadership coaching, and we think you’ll learn a great deal about how to use coaching skills with others through the experience of having them used with you.

Another way to engage in direct communication is by using a metaphor – preferably one already named by the person or group. If you hear a metaphor, even a cliché like “We just can’t get on the same page,” you can ask questions that build on it: “What are the different pages people are reading?” “How far apart are the pages?”

“Who chose the book?” “What makes you certain it is the right book?” “Who won’t turn the page?” “Who is skipping to the end?” By employing a metaphor, you make it possible for people to say what needs to be said with less risk, because they are exploring an image. You also make it possible for people to compare their images and learn from their similarities and differences.

IT TAKES PRACTICE

The four coaching skills outlined in this story – deep listening, exploring purpose, setting aside your own agenda and direct communication – can be useful at any time in any situation. But they are especially helpful in situations where you are well-placed to empower someone else to take charge of their own workplace or civic challenge. Clearly these skills are quite different from strictly exercising authority or helping through offering your opinions and experiences.

We encourage you to make a plan. When will you practice one of the skills discussed here?

How will you ensure that you take the time to know whether it was effective or not? Whose support do you need to make sure that you follow through? If you can become adept at applying these skills in your daily work and life, we believe that you’ll be on the path to more profound, impactful interactions with those around you and contributing to the creation of a better climate in your community, business or organization.

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There are many benefits beyond work and civic life for approaching relationships in a different way. Here’s a personal story that highlights how these coach like skills can truly strengthen relationships – in my case, with my teenage son.

Since they were old enough to play, all three of our sons have been expected to play baseball every summer. Not only is it what my husband and I did as kids, but it also teaches them about teamwork, good sportsmanship and keeps them physically active during the relatively unstructured summer months.

Our oldest son recently announced pretty emphatically that he was “putting his foot down and was not going to play baseball this summer.” Not surprisingly, my first response was to bristle a bit, and I immediately thought I could invoke my parental authority and simply make him play. I felt really strongly about this because my responsibility as a parent is to make sure he stays active. Even for a professional coach, this work is hard and sometimes requires pause. Rather than letting flow from my mouth the words prompted by my emotion, I took a deep breath and I simply asked my son if we could have a conversation about it in a few days. This gave me some space to not respond with emotion but, rather, to respond with compassion for his needs and desires as a growing young man.

A few days later, we circled back to the conversation. I started off with an offer: “Would you be open to telling me a little bit more about why you don’t want to play baseball this summer?” Rather than invoking authority, which would have been a heck of a lot easier (and would have gotten me the result I wanted), I chose to help him explore what he wanted. We had a great conversation. Once I let go of what I wanted and believed in him, it allowed me to truly listen to him and to get a better sense of what he finds important and for us to find a compromise that worked for us both.

By making the decision to approach him as a resourceful young man capable of making his own choices, I bolstered his confidence to make future, bigger decisions and created an even more solid foundation for our relationship.

-Story used with his permission.

1. Learn more about professional coaching and the skills required to do it through the International Coach Federation at https://www.coachfederation.org/.

1. The best way to begin practicing coaching skills is to make a plan.

What skill will you try? When will you practice it?

3. Explore Kansas Leadership Center conferences, workshops and certifications related to coaching at klcjr.nl/teachingldr.

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By: Teresa Schwab

Discussion Guide

The Kansas Leadership Center’s Lead for Change program includes practice sessions for coaching-style skills such as deep listening. Learn more and register for the program at klcjr.nl/lead4change.

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STAYING ACCOUNTABLE FOR PROGRESS

Ways to Take Action

2.

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2. Once you practice your skill, how will you ensure that you can measure whether

Mayor or notJeff it was effective?

Wichita Longwell saysWhose support do you need to make sure that you follow through? the days of south-central Kansas What dowith you each find challenging about practicing coaching skills with others? cities3.competing other

What do you find rewarding about it? to score jobs are over.

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USANDO SU VOZ Hispanics represent an increasing share of Topeka’s population, but that hasn’t translated into more Latinos taking on positions of influence in the community. A leadership program launched last year seeks to amplify the voice Hispanics have there.

Having graduated its inaugural class, the Latino Leadership Collaborative of Kansas has set its sights on having an ever-growing impact.

By: KIM GRONNIGER

The history of Hispanics helping shape Topeka goes back more than a century to when the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway shops began drawing Mexican families to the community.

Many ended up settling in the Oakland area, just south of the Kansas River and north of present-day Interstate 70 in northeast Topeka. Unfamiliar with the English language and American customs and sometimes faced with discrimination, families found refuge in fellowship provided through the Our Lady of Guadalupe parish and in Spanish-speaking neighborhood establishments.

Proud of their part in influencing the city’s past, Hispanics also figure to play a profound role in forging its future. While the population of Topeka increased just 2 percent between 2000 and 2010, the number of Hispanics spiked by 57 percent to more than 17,000 (in a city of nearly 130,000).

Inspiring and training more Hispanics to take active roles in civic life is the purpose of the Latino Leadership Collaborative of Kansas, a community leadership program that graduated its inaugural class last year.

Michael Padilla, Veronica R. Padilla, Irene Caballero, Lalo Munoz and Michelle Cuevas-Stubblefield all play prominent roles in Topeka-area Hispanic organizations. Inspiring more Hispanics to take active roles in civic life is the purpose of the Latino Leadership Collaborative, a leadership program they started that graduated its first class last year.

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“W

ith the Hispanic population

growing so quickly, we need

to have more Latinos sharing

their voices on boards and in businesses to make progress,” says Lalo Munoz, executive director of El Centro of Topeka, a nonprofit organization that provides interpretation and translation services, community referrals and mobile preventive health screenings.

Although there are Hispanics serving the community in important roles at present, Munoz says that many more could fill positions of influence if they felt prepared to do so.

“A few of us get asked frequently to serve or provide names of Latinos who would be willing to serve on agency boards, but historically the same individuals have stepped forward,” Munoz says.

“Most often the issue is not competency so much as confidence. We wanted to offer classes to reinforce for participants that anyone can lead.”

Many Topeka employers and organizations offer leadership training, but the collaborative focused on the Hispanic population.

“We weren’t seeing in the numbers of leadership participants a lot of commonality for Hispanics,” says program co-facilitator Michelle CuevasStubblefield, director of the Kansas League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC).

“We saw this program as an opportunity to bring them together to dramatically increase board preparedness and participation with the potential to serve as a model for other communities.”

To help formulate a plan for the collaborative, Munoz and Cuevas-Stubblefield enlisted Veronica Padilla, president of the Topeka LULAC Council; Tina Williams, president of MANA de Topeka; and Irene Caballero, grant coordinator/bilingual community mobilizer from Safe Streets and the Washburn Leadership Institute. The group identified opportunities and obstacles, meeting every two weeks for a year to devise a workable template before promoting the program to potential participants.

They wrestled with whether individuals would be able to afford the $595 tuition, so they worked with sponsors to reduce the cost and created payment plans. As facilitators, they worried about their abilities to teach effectively, but plunged in

anyway – “terrified but determined,” Munoz says.

One particular struggle was whether to offer classes in Spanish or English, knowing that either option would exclude individuals who could benefit.

Ultimately, they conducted classes in English, but facilitators are still mulling how to involve those who primarily speak Spanish.

After a year of planning and consulting, the program launched last year with a $1,000 grant and support from El Centro of Topeka, MANA de Topeka and Topeka LULAC. Nine participants attended seven three-hour Saturday morning classes July through November. Each was encouraged to secure a board position, and a panel of agency representatives with open seats presented options at the last session. Vidal Campos, a collaborative graduate and Topeka police officer originally from Del Rio, Texas, volunteered to teach colleagues key phrases to diffuse tense encounters with non-English-speaking individuals. Although giving up Saturday morning activities with his two sons wasn’t easy, Campos appreciated the chance to further refine leadership skills he can use on the job.

For Susana Prochaska, a first-generation college graduate, married school counselor and mother of three, the experience led her to accept a president-elect position with the Kansas School Counselor Association and kindled a desire to pursue a doctoral degree.

“We came into this program with different experiences and became inspired by one another,” Prochaska says. “I saw my professional and personal goals more vividly and gained the confidence to take steps to reach my full potential.”

Organizers say they hope the collaborative’s impact and reach will grow with time.

“We have a great bunch of Latino talent, and as the collaborative continues, we’ll increase the number of leaders willing and capable of serving while bringing greater diversity to businesses and boards,” says Cuevas-Stubblefield.

The collaborative’s efforts could grow to be something of statewide interest. After all, Topeka isn’t the only city dealing with a growing Latino population. “We invite others to attend our training to see whether the collaborative curriculum could be a good fit for their community,” Munoz says.

LEADERSHIP LESSONS: Starting a Community Leadership Program

1.

DETERMINE THE PROBLEM YOU’RE TRYING TO SOLVE AND FOCUS ON IT.

Many Topeka employers and organizations already offered some form of leadership training, so it was important for organizers of the Latino Leadership Collaborative to hone in on a clear purpose for creating a leadership program. They realized that even though Topeka’s Hispanic population was growing, the number of Latinos willing to take on positions of influence was not. So they aimed the leadership program at the community’s Hispanic population with the clear goal of inspiring and training more Latinos to take active roles in civic life.

2.

BREAK DOWN BARRIERS.

Being able to meet people where they are is an important aspect of exercising leadership. A great idea doesn’t go anywhere unless it meets the values and the needs of the people you’re trying to connect with. Organizers asked themselves tough questions about whether participants would be able to afford the $595 tuition for the program and, based on those answers, worked with sponsors to reduce the costs and create payment plans.

3.

YOU CAN’T AVOID TOUGH VALUE CHOICES.

Organizers had to choose between offering classes in English or Spanish. It was a difficult decision, because they knew that either way, they’d be excluding some individuals who could benefit. They ultimately decided they would have more impact initially by beginning to offer classes in English. But they haven’t given up on finding ways to involve those who primarily speak Spanish.

4.

THINK BIG EVEN AS YOU MAKE PROGRESS ONE STEP AT A TIME.

Organizers of the Latino Leadership Collaborative haven’t shied away from thinking big even as they’re just getting started. They’ve framed their program and its curriculum as something that Latinos across the state can benefit from, even though their initial class focused on the Topeka area. Leading effectively means keeping your big, lofty goal in sight even as you advance toward it in bite-size increments.

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“With the Hispanic population growing so quickly, we need to have more Latinos sharing their voices on boards and in businesses to make progress.”

LALO MUNOZ, Executive Director of El Centro of Topeka

By: KIM GRONNIGER

Lalo Munoz, executive director of El Centro of Topeka, says that the Latino Leadership Collaborative could grow to become a program of statewide significance.

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WHEN THE BENCH BECOMES A HOT SEAT

T HE KA NS A S S UP REME CO URT FAC ES INC REA S ED S C RUT INY IN T HE A FT ERMAT H O F HIGH- P RO FILE RULINGS O N P UBLIC S C HO O L FUNDING A ND T HE DEAT H P ENA LTY. C HIEF JUST IC E LA WTO N NUSS , T HE CO URT ’ S S ENIO R JUST IC E A ND P ERHA PS ITS MO ST V IS IBLE FAC E, A IMS TO HO LD ST EA DY T HRO UGH T HE HEAT.

Kansas Supreme Court Chief Justice Lawton Nuss speaks to news reporters at a press conference earlier this year.

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By: DAWN BORMANN NOVASCONE

Inside Kansas Supreme Court Chief Justice Lawton Nuss’ chambers, a playful sign is perched at the edge of his desk.

“ALLES IST MEINE SCHULD!” Roughly translated from the German, it means: “Everything is my fault.”

“It’s a reminder to me,” Nuss says, “that it’s my responsibility what goes on in the judicial office.”

These days he hardly needs a reminder of the weight he carries in his role as the chief justice of the seven-member court, the administrative authority for all Kansas courts and the most visible face of an institution that’s under heavy fire from a significant faction of the political spectrum. The court has come under a microscope following rulings in politically charged cases, including its findings that under the Kansas Constitution the current school funding formula is inequitable and that two notorious murderers were improperly sentenced to death. The opinions made the justices a lightning rod for criticism by Gov. Sam Brownback and the conservative, Republican-dominated Legislature.

This November, Nuss and four other justices have to stand before voters in a judicial retention election to remain on the bench for six-year terms. Voters, who are given a choice of voting “yes” or “no” on whether to keep the justices in office, traditionally support keeping members of the judiciary by overwhelming majorities.

But on the heels of close retention votes for two justices in 2014, interest groups have said they intend to seek the removal of justices, a campaign that could be extensive, essentially unregulated and also unprecedented in Kansas.

The confluence of events surrounding the courts in Kansas prompts big leadership questions that don’t have quick or easy answers. With the stakes so high, what options, if any, do Nuss and others on the court have for exercising leadership?

Is the court’s role solely to exercise its authority and attempt to maintain its integrity, impartiality and independence? Or should it be trying more to build bridges, either with the general public or the lawmakers who now routinely criticize it?

What does leadership look like when the courts and many lawmakers are so divided?

Some critics are already calling for Nuss and Justices Marla Luckert, Carol Beier and Dan Biles to be voted out of office. Writing earlier this year in The Wichita Eagle, Richard J. Peckham, an Andover attorney and the chairman of Kansas Judicial Watch, a group critical of the courts, accused the justices of showing “disregard for the constitution, the statutes and the people of Kansas.” He supported retaining Justice Caleb Stegall, Brownback’s lone appointee to the high court, who has served on the bench since December 2014.

One thing Nuss feels strongly about is when critics call out decisions, his job isn’t to be popular.

House Speaker Ray Merrick, a Stilwell Republican, is among those lawmakers who have been critical of the Kansas Supreme Court’s decisions on issues such as public school funding. In 2013, he turned down a request from Nuss to address the Legislature.

“I think it’s a sense of duty that keeps me going,” says Nuss, who graduated in the same University of Kansas School of Law class as Brownback. “The people of Kansas have retained me in office in two different statewide elections.

And they didn’t keep me just so I would say yes to everything and just go along with what some politicians want me to do. They’re expecting a lot more of their chief justice than that. Otherwise anybody could do this job if you’re just going to say yes, yes, yes to everything.

“Our job is to uphold the constitution, and the constitution is the people’s document.”

‘CAN’T DUCK THE DEBATE’

Since becoming chief justice, Nuss, a Salina native who wears cowboy boots to work and keeps a pair of spurs in his office, has certainly played a key role in efforts to increase public understanding of the court system and how its operates.

In recent years, the court has begun livestreaming oral arguments to make the process more accessible to anyone with an Internet

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connection and taken its operations to public locations around the state. Nuss has opened the court to outside feedback on budgetary issues by appointing an advisory committee that includes the public and legislative critics of the court. In addition to the barbs lawmakers lob at the court generally, he faces criticism from lawmakers who say he – along with much of the rest of the court – remains too distant from the other two political branches of government at a time when conflict between them threatens to reach all-time highs.

In the face of high heat – justices have been called bullies, activists, and even lazy and incompetent by their critics – Nuss aims to hold to his purpose of making decisions as judges should: based on the law and the facts of the case. “All we can do is keep doing our jobs, which is to review the constitution,” he said.

But it’s also an increasingly fraught duty, not just in Kansas, but for judges across the country.

Nuss and his Supreme Court colleagues are hardly the first members of the judiciary to be criticized by those in the executive or legislative branches. And they certainly won’t be the last. But this seems to be an especially pressure-packed moment for the Kansas court.

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But Nuss found solidarity with Scalia, who Nuss says had agreed with him on some previous rulings, in one of the quotes he came across, which summed up the life of a judge.

“The main thing is that when you come to a conclusion that the law requires, you have to accept the fact that that is the conclusion regardless of what you may personally think about it,” Nuss says, paraphrasing Scalia’s thought. “And he said we make decisions that are contrary to what we may believe but if the law requires that decision to be made, then it’s our job to make that decision.”

It resonated with Nuss.

Rep. James Todd, an Overland Park Republican, prepares to present a constitutional amendment in the House that would allow Kansas voters to change how Kansas Supreme Court justices are selected. The debate over the resolution, which failed to receive the required two-thirds majority to pass, overlapped the chief justice’s remarks from the nearby Kansas Judicial Center on the State of the Judiciary.

Some blame the 24-hour news cycle and a politically polarized country. But scholars also point out that courts like Kansas’ have been asked to step in often to decide fiercely divisive issues that lawmakers can’t or won’t reconcile – and that lack much societal consensus as well.

“More and more hot-button issues are brought to the courts and resolved. In the past few years, we’ve had things like same-sex marriage, school funding, abortion rights and so on,” says Richard E. Levy, the J.B. Smith Distinguished Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Kansas Law School. “And courts don’t have the ability really to say, ‘Well we’re not going to decide this issue.’ If parties are litigating it and it’s a real case, they have to decide it.”

“So the more highly charged political issues that come before the court, the more they’re likely to be seen as political.”

For better or for worse, judges have increasingly become society’s tiebreakers on disputes that spill over into the legal system. It’s a role Nuss didn’t exactly sign up to play. But it’s one he can’t step away from either.

‘WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE?’

If Nuss is intimidated, he doesn’t let on.

They can’t duck the debate. Much as people exercising leadership have to choose among competing values, judges often can’t avoid making difficult choices.

His top-floor office in the Kansas Judicial Center provides a striking view of the Kansas Capitol.

On this sunny winter morning, the Statehouse’s flags were lowered to honor U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. The legendary conservative justice had died days earlier and his passing filled the headlines.

“Most cases – even though they’re politically charged – they have to answer the question one way or another. And in answering the question one way, they’re naturally going to tick off the people that think it should be answered the other way,” says Levy, who has remained nonpartisan as the debate roars between government branches.

Earlier in the year, Scalia had written for an 8-1 majority of the U.S. Supreme Court in overturning the Kansas Supreme Court’s controversial decision vacating the death sentences for Wichita murderers Jonathan and Reginald Carr, as well as that of Sidney Gleason, convicted of murdering a Great Bend couple in 2004.

“That holds true for the most conservative to the most liberal to everyone in between,” Nuss says. “That’s why we’re here.”

But for many in the Legislature, the justices of the Kansas Supreme Court are a bit of a mystery. Some don’t feel they understand who the justices are or how they come to the decisions that they do.

State Rep. Pete DeGraaf, a conservative Republican from Mulvane, says geography might be part of the problem when it comes to tension between the judicial and legislative branches.

All branches used to be housed in the Capitol.

But with the judiciary across the street, the two branches hardly interact.

“We rub shoulders with the executive branch regularly,” he says. “We don’t see them (the justices) very often, and I don’t think they even see the Kansas people very often. They’ve pretty much cloistered themselves off.”

DeGraaf was part of the budget committee Nuss put together years ago. DeGraaf says he felt honored to receive the invitation and be part of the work. He’d like to see the branches spend more time together.

“Relationships take time and energy,” he says.

Yet relationships become further strained, he says, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturns

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controversial state decisions, rulings that DeGraaf thought were out of step with Kansans.

“Then you begin to wonder, ‘Who are these people, and where do their beliefs of truth and justice come from?’” he says.

‘ALWAYS A MARINE’

If the public rarely gets a glimpse of the person who sits on the bench, Nuss’ office does offer some clues. It is filled with treasured mementos that show his affection for history and love of his family. His son’s military dog tags have a place of honor. Bar association awards hang on the wall. A spittoon from the old Supreme Court Room sits at his feet. Visitors can’t miss the needlepoint pillow made by his grandmother and a butcher knife used by his grandfather.

His admiration for Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt is also on clear display.

Images of the men and books about them are among the many treasured things that Nuss, who bears a resemblance to Roosevelt, keeps in his office. He marvels at Lincoln’s “team of rivals” approach — appointing those who opposed him to his Cabinet. Nuss admires how Roosevelt earned a Medal of Honor for courage and honor in war and a Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating peace.

The men provide an example of sorts for Nuss, who was appointed by Republican Gov. Bill Graves in 2002 and became chief justice by seniority in 2010.

“They overcame such conflict to accomplish things that when I look at the amount of pressure they were under, to compare my pressure is just infinitesimal. But I can take them as my examples.

So if Lincoln can be president during the Civil War and Theodore Roosevelt can manage all the things he did, then certainly I can manage my position as chief justice.”

Friends and colleagues say Nuss is known for keeping a steady hand and listening to all views.

That’s clear when he’s on the bench asking questions, they believe, but it also can be traced all the way back to his time as a young officer in the Marines.

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UNDERSTANDING THE KANSAS COURTS:

The Kansas Supreme Court in 2016

The Kansas Supreme Court sits in Topeka and is the state court of last resort. A look at who the seven justices are, who appointed them and whether they are up for retention in 2016.

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“ALL WE CAN DO IS KEEP DOING OUR JOBS, WHICH IS TO REVIEW THE CONSTITUTION.” LAWTON NUSS Kansas Supreme Court Chief Justice

Kansas Supreme Court Justice Lawton Nuss, a Salina native, works out of an office in the judicial center that overlooks the Kansas Statehouse.

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Nuss attended the University of Kansas on a Navy ROTC scholarship. He went on active duty in the Marine Corps immediately after graduation in January 1975 and spent the next several years as a combat engineering officer with the Fleet Marine Force Pacific.

“He was certainly taking a risk, throwing open the court,” Arnold-Burger says. “Perhaps we could have come up with the recommendation that furloughing people was the worst thing we could possibly do and that could feed into his detractors.”

His first sergeant, Ray Horwath, still remembers how newly commissioned officers would roll in wanting to pull rank on the enlisted men. But Nuss was different.

At an initial brainstorming session, one lawmaker proposed eliminating some Supreme Court justices to save cash.

“He had a lot of respect for me, and in turn I had a lot of respect for him,” Horwath says.

“His judgment was great.”

Their bond has lasted nearly 40 years. Horwath, now 74 and living in North Carolina, stops in during cross-country motorcycle rides. He doesn’t have time to read every decision handed down in Kansas.

But he knows his friend’s good judgment hasn’t budged. Even if Horwath, a proud Christian, doesn’t agree with Nuss’ court rulings, he knows his friend has access to more information.

“Me as an individual, all I get to know about it is what you see on the news,” he says.

Others say Nuss’ military background is evident on a daily basis.

“Lawton is a Marine. And he’s always been a Marine. He just has that very dignified, caring but very much in control at all times. His military background is evident in his personality or maybe he went toward the military because it fit his personality. He’s always been a measured leader,” says Kansas Court of Appeals Judge Karen Arnold-Burger. “He does a lot of listening – more listening than talking.”

When Nuss needed to cut $8 million from the judicial branch’s budget several years ago, he thought furloughs would be the right approach.

The Legislature balked at the plan, so he appointed an advisory committee to get more opinions. It included judiciary staff, ordinary Kansans and – taking a page from Lincoln’s approach – the committee included some lawmakers like DeGraaf who had voiced their displeasure with Nuss.

“It was obvious where some of their positions were to begin with,” Arnold-Burger says. “But by the end we were able to come up with some agreements really easy as to what was realistic.”

Furloughs ended up a major part of the equation.

‘CHAIRMAN’ OF THE BOARD

One sign of the Kansas Supreme Court’s relatively low public profile is that some voters skip responding to the retention questions about justices and judges even as they weigh in on other races. For instance, in the 2014 general election, more than 100,000 fewer voters cast ballots in Justice Eric S. Rosen’s retention election than voted in that year’s hotly contested gubernatorial race. Rosen was retained by a margin of about 41,000 votes.

Under Nuss’ administration, the court has worked to change how it interacts with the public. Nuss says it’s his job to make sure Kansans better understand the judiciary’s work.

The Supreme Court has also gone on the road to hear oral arguments around the state. The public can listen to and see the court in action and learn more about the process. Attendance has been strong. Hundreds have turned out in places like Hays, Kansas City and Garden City.

Nuss has heard comments like: “Now I see how this operates” and “I see the protocol that (the court) follows.” In March, the court met one night in the auditorium at Topeka High School so those who work during the day (including lawmakers) could attend.

The court has also tried to make its workings more understandable to the public. Instead of handing out a one-page docket summary to spectators, the court distributes a small booklet at its traveling sessions that details everything from what an oral argument is to who sits where and how the judicial branch spends its money.

The sessions prompted something no one expected. The public organically started asking astonished Supreme Court justices to sign the booklets as they shook hands during receptions held after oral arguments. It’s happened several times across the state.

Despite that, being the chief justice isn’t exactly a glamorous job. Nuss spends about 80 percent of his time on administrative matters. Other chief justices report a similar workload. He occasionally pops in unannounced to see judges in action and to check in on the 31 district courts that provide day-to-day justice throughout the state. He doesn’t remain anonymous for long.

Nuss’ trademark mustache stands out in any crowded courthouse.

Nuss went straight to the court from private practice. Since then he’s helped put the judicial branch online. When he arrived, the court was still paper-based. He regularly had used computers at his private firm and was aware of the benefits of digitization.

As chief justice, Nuss is the face of the court, but he isn’t the dictator, he says.

“We operate as a seven-member board of directors basically. Yes, I’m the chairman, but everybody has an equal voice,” he says. “I could not do what I do without my colleagues. I’ve just been very blessed to have them.”

He generally works a 70-hour work week tending to matters of the court, but when he does have free time he spends it with his wife or outdoors.

“Whether I’m carrying a fly rod or whether I’m carrying a bow and arrow or a rifle, I just like being outdoors like that. And then when I have the time, I like to go pistol shooting,” he says.

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His appreciation for firearms came largely from his family including his grandfather, who raised cattle near Dodge City.

His resume includes selection in the Henry Toll Fellowship program and a stint as a judge for the national cowboy poetry contest. If you ask, he’ll also tell you he milked cows and took odd jobs on a farm as a young man. “I’m not too good to put up hay or shovel manure,” he says.

PROPRIETY AND AN ADMONISHMENT

As a justice, Nuss says he has gone out of his way to avoid the perception that he might be biased on cases. He doesn’t meet attorneys for a round of golf. If an attorney corners him to talk, Nuss wants it to be in a public place with others around to hear. He avoids cocktail party conversation about subjects that could come before the court. Mostly he avoids places where those types of conversations flourish. It rules out a lot of avenues for friends.

Despite those efforts, a brief conversation Nuss had with two lawmakers 10 years ago left a mark on his record. It’s an incident that added fuel to the fire of distrust some lawmakers had in the court, divisions that are once again raw.

The Commission on Judicial Qualifications, which upholds ethical standards for judges, formally admonished Nuss – a first for a Kansas justice – in 2006 for violating the judicial code of conduct. It determined that Nuss had met for lunch with two Republican senators, including a longtime friend. The commission ruled Nuss had a side conversation that was “less than five minutes” about school finance.

“I was trying to better understand some financial numbers printed in the Topeka newspaper and asked two senators for an explanation,” Nuss says. “I later realized this might give the appearance of impropriety, so I self-reported the conversation to the Judicial Qualifications Commission for its review.”

The Kansas Supreme Court hears oral THE JOURNAL 45 arguments in a case earlier this year. Five of the court’s justices are scheduled to stand before voters in retention elections this November.

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“WE OPERATE AS A SEVEN-MEMBER BOARD OF DIRECTORS BASICALLY. YES, I’M THE CHAIRMAN, BUT EVERYBODY HAS AN EQUAL VOICE.” LAWTON NUSS Kansas Supreme Court Chief Justice

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Nuss apologized and recused himself from the case. He was retained by voters in 2010, but the admonishment had an immediate impact on him.

“It made me keenly aware that as a public figure any interaction I have with people – no matter how innocuous — could be perceived as improper,” he says. “I’m more mindful as a result.”

Some conservatives at the time suggested that Nuss escaped with little more than a slap on the wrist. But former GOP gubernatorial candidate Jim Barnett, who as a state senator helped bring Nuss’ conversations with the two senators to light because of its potential effect on school-funding deliberations, says he considers the admonishment a settled matter.

“I can say that no one is perfect in life, me included,” Barnett says. “And if that was the outcome of the judicial qualifications review, then I certainly respected that. And I think at the time others accepted that for the most part. And it’s a matter of the past.”

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Judiciary Committee, wonders if that admonishment has affected how Nuss approaches the Legislature, making it more difficult for him to work across factions.

UNDERSTANDING THE KANSAS COURTS:

Where do the justices and judges come from?

“I think only Justice Nuss knows how that has impacted his dealing with the Legislature,” King says. “I know he has been the least hands-on chief justice in dealing with the Legislature in recent memory. He has delegated that responsibility to others and really shied away from a personal interaction from the Legislature whenever possible.”

Most judges and justices hail from the state’s urban areas, especially Wichita, Topeka, and Olathe and Kansas City.

L E AV E N W ORTH

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3

SALINA

H U G OTON

Senate Vice President Jeff King, an Independence Republican and the chairman of the Senate

The current political and media climate presents a temptation, he says, to see everything in black

Efforts to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot that would change how justices are selected were thwarted because of opposition from Democrats and moderate Republicans. Rep. Ponka-We Victors, a Wichita Democrat, joined a group of lawmakers who considered the change a “power grab by those who disagree with decisions made by the court.”

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The connections might, he says, alleviate conflicts based on misunderstandings.

But the event was significant enough that it might still be producing ripples a decade later.

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“I would relish more direct contact between justices, especially between the chief justice and members of the Legislature,” King says.

“You’re going to have conflicts based on differences of opinion; that’s inevitable. But it’s conflicts based on misunderstanding that I think we have the greatest duty to avoid,” King says.

KANSAS CITY

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King says previous chief justices sat down for lunch with legislators at least once a year.

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More than 90 percent of the justices and judges on the state’s appellate courts come from one of two law schools.

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OPPOSITE PAGE CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: Kansas Supreme Court Justice Caleb Stegall hears a recent case. Stegall joined the court in December 2014 and is the only justice to have been appointed by Gov. Sam Brownback; Brownback (right), accompanied by staff member Matt Goddard, has been critical of the Kansas Supreme Court and has supported changes in how justices are selected. The current system allows the governor to appoint one of three finalists screened by a nonpartisan committee. One of the proposed alternatives would have the governor directly appoint a nominee, subject to approval by the Kansas Senate; Rep. Nancy Lusk, an Overland Park Democrat, says the Pledge of Allegiance prior to the Kansas House’s February debate over changing how Kansas Supreme Court justices are selected.

and white, good versus evil. But it’s not that simple. And conflicts between the branches have been around since the founding fathers created three equal branches of government.

“YOU’RE GOING TO HAVE CONFLICTS ... BUT IT’S CONFLICTS BASED ON MISUNDERSTANDING THAT I THINK WE HAVE THE GREATEST DUTY TO AVOID.” SENATE VICE PRESIDENT JEFF KING Independence, Republican

“Are there times I read Supreme Court opinions and they make me angry? Yeah. Are there times I express my disagreement with an opinion?

Sure. Are there times judges express disagreements with bills we vote on? Of course. That’s part of the process, and that doesn’t weaken the process if we handle it correctly,” King says.

“I believe it makes it stronger.”

More communication, he believes, might ensure that disagreements are productive.

“If there are ways in the state that we could tone down the rhetoric and turn down the temperature – a little bit of the ‘us versus them,’ ‘courts versus Legislature’ dynamic – I think it would be to all of our benefit,” he says. “We’re going to disagree, and sometimes we’re going to get upset during those disagreements.”

REAL-WORLD CONSEQUENCES

Divisions, though, run deep. For several decades, there’s been a sharp judicial divide over the proper ways to interpret constitutions, especially at the federal level. Are constitutions fixed documents to be interpreted based on the time they were enacted, or do their meanings evolve over time with changes to society and the culture? How much deference should courts show to popularly elected officials such as legislatures or to the decisions of lower courts?

In rulings totaling dozens – and sometimes even hundreds – of pages, justices and judges apply legal principles and previous decisions in sophisticated ways that may be hard to explain in a simple soundbite. Opinions express views about how the law applies to the circumstances

of a particular case, not public sentiment or personal opinions.

Yet it’s safe to say judges aren’t robots either.

And their rulings have real-world implications that profoundly affect and stir deep emotions in others.

For instance, ordering a re-sentencing in a death penalty case, as with the Carr brothers, reopened wounds for friends and family members of the victims, who faced the prospect of a new sentencing hearing more than a decade after the murders. Declaring a school funding law unconstitutional meant legislators must again make difficult decisions about balancing competing interests and put together a political coalition to pass a new law that aims to be constitutional even as they stand for re-election. Settling a legal dispute creates ripple effects that go well beyond the scope of the case itself (and cases themselves live on to affect legal decisions in the future).

Justices in their writings and public statements express understanding of that tension but also maintain they must focus on the law. Nuss, for instance, talks about the difficulty of dealing with cases involving the sexual abuse of children. But that may be of little solace when a case involves your friends or family.

When the court conducted its evening session at Topeka High School, a group called Kansans for Justice responded with a written statement.

The group is made up of relatives and friends of the Carr brothers’ victims and was active in seeking the ouster of two justices in 2014.

The group’s website is encouraging a “no” vote again this November.

Spokeswoman Amy James, who dated Brad Heyka, one of the five people the Carr brothers murdered in 2000, applauded the justices for holding an evening session outside the Kansas

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Judicial Center, where it normally hears cases during the day, and exposing more Kansans to their process.

But she also noted an invitation from Nuss that encouraged Topekans and those living nearby to attend the special session. In it, Nuss described how the court must decide cases based on the U.S. and Kansas constitutions. “However, in five different death penalty cases, they did not follow Kansas law and instead were reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court each time,” James said in the statement. “This shows error in the Kansas Supreme Court decisions repeatedly.”

She also mentioned that the public session was a timely occurrence for an election year in which Nuss and three other justices who ruled in the Carr brothers death penalty case were up for retention. “We urge the justices to stay after the event and talk with the public directly, answer questions, and let everyone get to know them better.”

THE PEOPLE’S WILL?

The governor and Legislature have also made their displeasure with the court quite clear at times. With justices present during one of his State of the State addresses, Brownback argued forcefully that the Kansas Constitution empowers the Legislature to determine how schools are financed.

And as he began his term in his office, House Speaker Ray Merrick, a Stilwell Republican, turned down a request from Nuss to address the 2013 Legislature on the State of the Judiciary, saying that the House’s time could be better spent on other matters. While such speeches hadn’t always been an annual occurrence, it hasn’t been out of the ordinary for chief justices to be granted permission to address joint sessions of the Legislature over the past 40 years.

In recent years, Nuss has delivered his report from the court’s chambers. Yet during this year’s speech, the House speaker scheduled a heated debate on changing how justices are selected that overlapped the chief justice’s remarks.

The current method of filling Supreme Court

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vacancies was enshrined in the constitution

by Kansas voters in 1958 following a scandal in which a lame duck governor worked with others to manipulate the previous political appointment system so he could become a court justice. The present system requires that the governor appoint one of three finalists screened by a nonpartisan nominating committee.

But what Kansans adopted 58 years ago has come under withering attack by critics, even as defenders of the system say it produces the most competent and best qualified nominees.

“Well, does it?” state Rep. John Rubin, a Shawnee Republican, asked during the House debate on judicial selection. “In recent weeks the United States Supreme Court in an 8 to 1 decision ruled that the Kansas Supreme Court completely misconstrued the Constitution of the United States in its decision to throw out the death sentences of the Carr brothers.”

In Kansas, just about every high-profile case or controversial decision is at risk of becoming a political football. The judiciary is the last branch of government not controlled by conservative Republicans. Only one of the current justices was appointed by Brownback, the most conservative Kansas governor in decades. The others were appointed by former Gov. Bill Graves, a Republican, and former Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, a Democrat, who had very different views about what the state’s priorities should be than the current administration.

A view that the composition of the state Supreme Court is a holdover from an earlier time in Kansas politics also seems to be driving the divide between the court and the other branches.

Legislators have put the judicial branch’s funding in doubt, tried to change the selection method, suggested lowering the mandatory retirement age and proposed allowing justices to be impeached for such things as “attempting to subvert fundamental laws and introduce arbitrary power.”

This year, an already tense situation escalated when the justices ruled that the state’s block grant school funding plan, passed last year at Brownback’s behest, was unconstitutional.

Article VI of the Kansas Constitution requires the Legislature to “make a suitable provision for finance” of public education. Prior decisions have mandated that the funding provision must be equitable across the state, so poorer districts receive similar levels of funding. The unanimous opinion included a clear deadline: Fix the problem, “or the schools in Kansas will be unable to operate beyond June 30.”

the “courts have a gun to the heads of the schoolchildren on closing the schools,” according to The Kansas City Star.

Nuss is adamant that although even judges have their own personal views, he didn’t sign up to extoll his personal ideology in his rulings.

Two justices, Beier and Caleb Stegall, did not participate in the ruling and District Judge David L. Stutzman and Senior Judge Michael J. Malone were assigned to fill in. The court gave the Legislature options that included creating a different plan or returning to the previous formula.

Response was swift yet again.

“It’s important for me to remember that although I have my private personal opinions about certain issues, that it’s not my private opinion that counts. It’s what the people’s constitution says.

And although politicians might want me to come out a certain way on a decision, that’s not my job. That’s not being true to the people. Special interests might want me to come out a certain way. That’s not my responsibility to them. It’s to the people,” he says.

“And if I don’t do that, then who is going to make sure that the people’s will in the constitution is upheld?”

“Kansas has among the best schools in the nation and an activist Kansas Supreme Court is threatening to shut them down,” Brownback said in a statement.

But different judges, with different backgrounds, viewpoints and judicial philosophies, can end up in different places on what the law really calls for. Hence the ongoing debate over whether the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate should vote on Democratic President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee in an election year,

Some lawmakers cast the court as putting the Legislature in a hostage situation. Sen. Jeff Melcher, a Leawood Republican, was quoted by the Associated Press as saying, “It’s kind of one of those things, `Give us the money or the kid gets it.’” The Senate’s budget chairman, Andover Republican Ty Masterson, later said

Supreme Court Margin of Retention UNDERSTANDING THEAverage KANSAS COURTS:

Retention votes for Kansas Supreme Court justices have become increasingly close over the past 15 years. The trend, most noticeable in mid-term elections, comes as courts across the country weigh in on divisive issues.

Increasingly close retention rates RETENTION VOTES

(By average margin)

474,545

500,000

397,384

392,969

391,221

400,000

373,135 300,000

246,891 200,000

180,742 100,000

40,591 2000

2002

2004

2006

2008

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2012

2014

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an appointment that could significantly shift the ideological balance of the court to the left.

The removal of any justice from office in this November’s retention election would be unprecedented, and the removal of all four non-Brownback appointees would give the governor the opportunity to appoint a majority of the court for his final two years in office.

As a result, Kansas is expected to join a growing number of states where interest groups launch fierce election battles over justices.

The phenomenon is new enough that Kansas’ sunshine laws are not set up to address it. The state’s campaign finance laws do not govern appellate court campaigns. It means Kansans don’t have a right to know which groups back or oppose a judge. And they won’t know if a group were to pour millions of dollars into ousting a judge.

“If they spend tens of thousands of dollars or more than that, we’ll never know who they are, where their money came from and how much they actually spent to either support or oppose,” says Carol Williams, executive director of the Kansas Governmental Ethics Commission.

“You’re just never going to know because they’re not required to (report).”

But even when they stand before voters in an election, judges face ethical restrictions that require them to engage the public in very different ways than a politician might. The state’s judicial canons require judges to “act all times in a manner consistent with the independence, integrity and impartiality of the judiciary.”

“Even when subject to public election, a judge plays a role different from that of a legislator or executive branch official,” the canon states.

“Rather than making decisions based upon the expressed views or preferences of the electorate, a judge makes decisions based upon the law and the facts of every case. Therefore, in furtherance of this interest, judges and judicial candidates must, to the greatest extent possible, be free and appear to be free from political influence and political pressure.”

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Nuss says that he won’t personally be soliciting campaign contributions. It would run counter to the career he has spent his life building. However, a former colleague at his Salina law firm, John W. Mize, launched “Friends of Chief Justice Lawton Nuss,” a nonprofit corporation registered with the Kansas secretary of state that can raise funds on his behalf.

Such efforts are becoming common this year.

At least three other justices up for retention have similar corporations working in their names, with Beier and Stegall playing direct roles in the incorporation of the groups behind their retention efforts. Another group, Kansans for Fair Courts, is organzing a broader campaign to accept contributions with a goal of maintaining fair and impartial courts. The group was started by the Kansas Values Institute, a nonprofit issue advocacy group operated by moderate Republicans and Democrats opposed to Brownback’s governing agenda.

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DEEP QUESTIONS ABOUT LEADERSHIP AND THE JUDICIAL BRANCH Conflict surrounding the role of the judiciary is reaching crescendos at both the state and national level. The Kansas Supreme Court faces heavy criticism from the conservative Republicans who dominate state government and our nation is divided over whether President Obama should be allowed to appoint a Supreme Court justice during his last year in office.

Iowa Supreme Court Justice Mark Cady knows about the quandary that judges in Nuss’ position face. Iowa voters ousted three state Supreme Court justices in retention elections after the court ruled in 2009 that the state’s law barring same-sex marriage was unconstitutional. But tempers quickly settled.

What do you think is at the root of our conflicts related to the judiciary? What connections, if any, do you see between the situation in Kansas and what is going on nationally?

What do you value most related to the role of the judiciary? When you think of who believes differently than you, what do you think they value? In what ways do you see values coming into conflict in this situation?

“It’s kind of interesting when judges are thrown into controversy like Lawton is; you have to remember why you became a judge and how you want to be known for the work that you do,” Cady says. “And I think Lawton understands that it’s very, very important for him to maintain fair and impartial courts and for him to do anything that would compromise that would be against the very principles that he has been building throughout his career.”

What kind of leadership do you think would be necessary to bridge our divides? Who might need to provide this leadership? What kind of leadership do you think is required from those most likely to agree with you?

But standing on principle doesn’t come without risk for Nuss. It certainly doesn’t mean that everyone is going to agree with his principles or how he has carried them out. The ultimate ruling on whether Nuss and his colleagues have done their due in upholding the people’s document, the Kansas Constitution, will rest in the hands of the people themselves this November.

In the story about Chief Justice Nuss, law professor Richard E. Levy remarks that “more and more hot-button issues are brought to the courts and resolved.”

What, if anything, does this say about our current political system? Is this situation something that can be addressed through the exercise of leadership?

Join the Conversation: Leadership, the Kansas Judiciary and the Public What leadership issues do you see at play in the story about Chief Justice Lawton Nuss and the increased scrutiny of the Kansas Supreme Court and its rulings? How might he and other justices exercise more leadership? What acts of leadership might be necessary from lawmakers? Is there a leadership role for the general public?

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Once an entrepreneur himself, 22 60Radley THE JOURNAL Steve has been the president and CEO of NetWork Kansas since May 2005.

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The Power of Partnership By: MELINDA SCHNYDER

STEVE RADLEY LEARNED ABOUT THE CHALLENGES OF STARTING A BUSINESS THROUGH EXPERIENCE. NOW HE’S HELPING FOSTER A MORE ENTREPRENEURIAL CULTURE IN KANSAS THROUGH HIS WORK AT NETWORK KANSAS.

It might sound like a strange thing for a chief executive to say, but Steve Radley believes that change starts at the bottom, not the top.

It’s an entrepreneurial attitude toward leadership that is rooted in Radley’s past, before he became president and CEO of NetWork Kansas, a nonprofit organization that has helped more than 16,000 small businesses and entrepreneurs with free access to education, expertise and economic resources.

Growing up, Radley learned lessons about owning a business from his father. He went on to work for a start-up technology company and experienced both success and failure as a small-business owner.

Together he and longtime friend and business partner Erik Pedersen tried and failed at owning a bakery before starting and selling a profitable manufactured-housing business. But despite his somewhat uneven business track record, Radley’s focus at NetWork Kansas has been to energize

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others throughout Kansas around the importance of entrepreneurship to economic development rather than having members of his organization be the experts on the topic.

“We have to be willing to live and die with the people that we are partnered with and the results in each community, rather than trying to do too much ourselves.”

STEVE RADLEY

“I believe the No. 1 issue with executive leadership at any level is thinking they can solve the problems from the top,” Radley says.

It’s an approach that goes back to the earliest days of NetWork Kansas, a program created by the Kansas Economic Growth Act of 2004. When Radley and Pedersen were hired by the state in May 2005 to launch the organization, they first set out to gather resources for entrepreneurs.

The pair conducted 18 town hall meetings in 45 days at community colleges across the state. At those meetings, they asked partners – accountants, lawyers, chambers of commerce, for example – to join the network and be a resource for anyone in their communities wanting to start or grow a business.

Those meetings resulted in NetWork Kansas starting with 246 partners in 2006 and helped Radley understand that giving the work back to communities would be the best way his organization could help build bridges locally to allow for the sharing of education, expertise and economic resources.

His vision took further shape with the start in 2007 of Entrepreneurship Communities, or E-Communities. This program brought businesspeople in a town, a group of towns or an entire county together around the concept of using

entrepreneurship as a primary tool for economic development. These days, NetWork Kansas earns $2 million per year in entrepreneurship tax credits and allocates the funds among the E-Communities, allowing each local leadership team to make lending decisions that help build an entrepreneurial mindset in their communities.

NetWork Kansas By the Numbers

“A loan program in itself is a technical solution.

It helps one business and it makes you feel good, but it’s not going to change the culture of a community,” says Radley, an alumnus of one of the Kansas Leadership Center’s first training classes. “The reason I get so excited and why I think we’re doing something that’s different is we are taking our assets and giving them to the communities, empowering them to make decisions.”

$280 million

PAYING IT FORWARD

The NetWork Kansas philosophy has paid off in places such as Rice County in central Kansas.

The Sterling/Alden E-Community was among the first groups launched in 2007. The success of the program inspired the formation of a second E-Community in 2013 to cover the remainder of the county.

Over the past 10 years, more than 50 loans have provided $1 million to support start-ups, expansions or businesses that were set to close if new owners didn’t buy them, Rice County Economic Development Director Jill Nichols says.

“Economic development and entrepreneurship became a high priority, became visible, became something that was encouraged. And that wasn’t the case before,” says Nichols, who serves as the fiscal agent for both E-Communities.

Nichols says the loans have had a huge impact because they financed worthy projects that banks would have been unwilling or unable to lend money to. A tire repair shop, a flower shop, a breakfast restaurant and a used car lot are among the businesses that have received help recently.

Since its inception and through June 2015, NetWork Kansas has leveraged more than

supporting more than 515 businesses

Provided assistance to more than

16,000

entrepreneurs or potential entrepreneurs since 2006

55 E-Communities led by

550+

local team members

12

full-time employees

500+ partners

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JOINING THE CULTURE CHANGE CLUB: Leadership Lessons from Steve Radley

1.

DON’T TRY TO ADDRESS ADAPTIVE CHALLENGES WITH A TOP-DOWN STRATEGY.

Radley and his organization have put their faith in developing partnerships that will lead to culture change rather than trying to control what others do.

2.

IT’S CRUCIAL TO DISTINGUISH BETWEEN TECHNICAL AND ADAPTIVE WORK.

As Radley says, a loan program can help one business but it won’t change the culture of a community. Approaching a problem adaptively means thinking about how you can empower others to make their own decisions.

3.

DON’T BE AFRAID TO STAY IN DIAGNOSIS MODE LONGER WHEN NECESSARY.

In trying to adapt their programs to serve more communities, NetWork Kansas has found one-size doesn’t fit all. Radley says taking more time to diagnose the situation has resulted in better decisions for long-term cultural change.

4.

STAYING CLEAR ABOUT YOUR PURPOSE CAN HELP YOU PROSPER.

Radley seized the opportunity to control his own destiny and stay in Kansas.

In energizing others around the importance of entrepreneurship to economic development, he hopes to create the same opportunities for others.

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“You just can’t lose those businesses,” Nichols says.

stay in diagnosis longer but that often results in better decisions for long-term cultural change.

“You lose one business in a small town and people start going out of town for that business, then you lose those same people for buying groceries and getting gas.”

Already though, those communities are seeing progress. Radley says Lawrence has shifted part of its economic development budget from attracting businesses to start-ups and expanding existing businesses. In Wichita, Metro Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Gary Plummer and Wichita State University President John Bardo have backed up public pledges to make entrepreneurship a priority with actual resources.

JILL NICHOLS

NetWork Kansas’ focus on culture change and empowerment has earned it admirers beyond Kansas.

Dell Gines, senior adviser for the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, is focused on community development in rural and inner-city communities within the Kansas City region’s seven states, including Kansas. While other states have strategies, the way Radley and Pedersen set up NetWork Kansas is special, he says.

“NetWork Kansas is the example I use when I speak across the nation. I think right now NetWork Kansas has the most effective statewide strategy for fostering entrepreneurial communities out of any state I’ve been in,” Gines says. Last year, NetWork Kansas launched pilot metropolitan E-Communities in Lawrence and Wichita to target distressed areas in each city.

But the organization is facing challenges as it works to adapt the model it has used in rural settings to urban areas. NetWork Kansas officials have found that it’s more difficult to recognize which organizations to connect with when it comes to helping entrepreneurs in struggling urban areas. Radley says this has forced his team to

Radley sees this as a sign of a statewide shift in the culture toward entrepreneurship. “There’s an increasing awareness not only in this state but across the country of how important entrepreneurs are to our DNA,” Radley says.

That’s important to the state’s economic future, because Radley could have just as easily been one of those entrepreneurs who bypassed the state for greener economic pastures. Had he been looking for the easy route in business, Radley could have moved to Dallas, Seattle or Boston when he was making a job change in the mid-1990s.

After all, those cities had jobs readily available at his level and in his field of interest.

Instead, Radley took the risky route of starting his own business because it allowed him to stay in Wichita, where he lives among family, friends and his faith community, all of which are dearly important to him.

Now Radley is trying to pay that same opportunity forward to others.

“I became one to control my destiny and stay in Kansas. I want others to do the same,” he says.

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FEATURED POET

New Guitar By: KEVIN RABAS

That winter, I shopped for a guitar.

I visited Chris, who taught at a guitar shop.

We played in a band, Hester & the Jazz Puritans, and Chris knew what a guitar could do – with chords, with voice, with a string of arpeggio notes.

He ran his pointed fingers over Spanish guitars, folk Martins, the black Ibanez and red Gretsch and sea foam Stratocaster.

What would Lisa want? Lisa, who sang songs, hands on the guitar, for her potted plants, wanted to play out. Banjo Bob brought a wood Seagull down, and we knew that was it; $600, and I had that axe in hand, a surprise for Lisa when she returned through those studio windows and sat by the board, Rainmaker Steve Phillips with his hands across the knobs, and Lisa, Lisa with her hands across the neck and the strings. Her nails short, purple nail polish, her voice crisp, her fingers hot with new touch. How she’d make it sing.

Kevin Rabas teaches at Emporia State University, where he leads the poetry and playwriting tracks. He has six books, including “Lisa’s Flying Electric Piano,” a Kansas Notable Book and Nelson Poetry Book Award winner.

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FEATURED ARTIST

WHIRL By: REBECCA HOYER

The longer I paint, the more I realize that for me, painting is seeing.

When I begin a painting, I look closely at the scene — the patterns, the shapes, the relationships between objects. As I focus, the obvious falls away. Subtle and interesting details emerge, and eventually a completely new landscape manifests itself – one that didn’t exist when I started, that wouldn’t have existed had I not started.

Rebecca Hoyer was born in Chicago but has moved about, living in Philadelphia, St. Louis, Boston, New York and now Wichita. She studied graphic design at Washington University in St. Louis, painting at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and with Knox Martin at the Art Students League of New York.

Her practice is to abstract the chaos of the world into a simplified visual system that highlights the relationship between the natural and the manmade. Since arriving in Wichita, she has been working with the local landscape, trying to identify what makes it both distinctive and beautiful. She paints familiar things — trees and houses — in a style that is both pastoral and radical.

A resident of Wichita’s College Hill neighborhood, Hoyer is an active member of the creative community. She recently completed two paintings commissioned by the Wichita Art Museum to promote its new Art Garden, and her work has taken up residence in the collections of the Wichita Center for the Arts, Emprise Bank and the Kansas Health Foundation.

Working in both watercolor and oil, the essence of her art is the drawing. She draws a scene numerous times, establishing the framing and arranging and elaborating the individual elements. When the drawing is complete, she turns to the surface, experimenting with colors and textures until the work is complete. Variations are created as she commits the painting to different media.

New work can be seen in Wichita at the Reuben Saunders Gallery; in Manhattan, Kansas, at the Strecker-Nelson Gallery; and on her website, www.rebeccahoyer.com.

WWW.REBECCAHOYER.COM

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Shattering the unnatural quiet By: MARK MCCORMICK

In a scene from the 2015 motion picture “Chi-Raq” (an amalgam of Chicago and Iraq), two women sit in a living room bathed in natural light. The older woman is scolding the younger woman for consorting with a reputed gang member.

Suddenly, bullets shatter the windows. They scramble into the dining room. They don’t call the police. They don’t rush to the window to see who might have been hit. They don’t cry.

They simply move their conversation into the next room and continue.

There’s a tragic normalcy about Chicago violence that the film’s screenwriter, Kevin Willmott, sought to illustrate in that scene and also in the consciousness of a society strangely tolerant of carnage.

This unnatural quiet operates as an invisible yet omnipresent antagonist, a masterful display of Willmott’s ability to create provocative films that not only dare to touch the third rail, but glide unapologetically upon it.

Whether it’s violence or race, Willmott has a penchant for raising the heat through his art.

In “Chi-Raq,” Willmott, a film professor at the University of Kansas, and celebrity filmmaker Spike Lee repackage the ancient Greek comedic play “Lysistrata”

by Aristophanes in brutal, black Chicago, creating a piercing social commentary.

He spoke about the film and his career at the Wichita Art Museum recently.

“When we were filming there (in Chicago), I don’t think I met anyone who hadn’t lost someone,” he said. “They talked about it like somebody getting a cold.”

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had just been shot.

Willmott said he wondered, “Who is Dr. King?”

The next day, he asked, only to be told, “’We won’t be talking about that.’”

He’s not exaggerating.

In 2010, 700 Chicago children were shot and 66 of them killed – and that was a “good” year in which homicides fell to a 45-year low, according to NPR.org. Since September 2011, at least 97 people under age 17 have been killed in shootings and 1,068 people in that age group have been shot, according to The Chicago Tribune.

“It is so overwhelming and so insane,” Willmott says. “You can’t do justice to how bad it is.”

He’s addressed injustice in films such as “The Only Good Indian,” “Destination: Planet Negro,” and the critically acclaimed “C.S.A.: Confederate States of America,” a satire re-imagining America had the Confederacy had won the Civil War.

“That has stayed with me my whole life,” he says. “When you tell someone they can’t talk about something, that’s all they want to talk about.”

He has, and he has been branded an “angry black man” because of it.

“I am angry, and I am a black man,” he says. “I’ve always been angry. Anger is not a bad emotion.

You should be angry at the fact that all these young people are dying, especially when you know there are things we could do.

I care. How can you care about this stuff and not be pissed?”

This predilection began in his hometown of Junction City as a fourth-grader.

He was playing on the floor with army men when a television news bulletin shattered the calm.

His mother started screaming.

Hysterical, she ran out onto the front porch. He remembered his older brother hugging his mother, trying to contain her grief.

Mark E. McCormick is the executive director of The Kansas African American Museum.

“Lend me the stone strength of the past and I will lend you / The wings of the future, for I have them.”

ROBINSON JEFFERS

325 EAST DOUGLAS AVENUE

ON M

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KLC PRESS

GOOD

WICHITA, KANSAS 67202