Localcode Kansas City
LocalCode Kansas City (LCKC) is a minority, woman-owned business based in Kansas City’s East Side. The company is focused on helping low income East Side communities build wealth and wellbeing through local ownership of businesses and real estate. Kansas City is a deeply divided city with a long history of structural inequities along racial and geographic divides. LCKC aims to counteract these adversities and create the conditions for East Side communities to transform themselves.
Kansas City is the heart of America.
East side of Kansas City
Impact Focus
At the heart of our mission is local ownership. We believe that structuring development so that long term ownership is in the hands of the community directly counteracts some of the deepest structural challenges that Black communities have faced in Kansas City and across the country. Not only are we designing local ownership into the real estate development, we are creating a support system for locally owned businesses to fill the commercial space, generating flows of wealth staying within the community. These combined commitments build intergenerational wealth and help reverse the downward spiral so common in urban communities, driven by centuries of unjust treatment and neglect.
WEALTH AND WELLBEING
Employment opportunities
Local business ownership
Local real estate ownership
COMMUNITY
Affordable housing and home ownership
Health services
Healthy, affordable, local food
NEIGHBORHOOD
Rehabilitate vacant and blighted buildings
Redevelop underutilized and brownfield properties
BUSINESSES
Locally-owned and operated businesses
Dynamic & resilient local commercial sector
Project Pipeline
The company is in negotiation on its first project, a mixed use site in the Oak Park neighborhood where the company’s cofounder, Ajia Morris, resides. Ajia is working with the community on the programming, which includes plans for contemporary apartments to attract young Black professionals into the neighborhood, commercial space with health and beauty services, anchored by a much needed pediatric urgent care facility, a food hub with a cafe bookstore, commissary kitchen, and a food truck incubation center, filling the void in restaurant options in the neighborhood. LCKC along with local partner organizations will support the community with an urban farming program that provides food sovereignty with healthy food, educational programming for youth, and reactivation of empty lots in the neighborhood.
Photo Credit: Rick Usher
LEADERSHIP TEAM
Ajia's career has been dedicated to empowering disenfranchised populations. As an attorney, she served in several roles, including as legal counsel for small businesses at various stages of growth. As a non-profit executive, she led organizations responsible for workforce development (Executive Director, Dress For Success- Northwest Arkansas) and was directly responsible for creating programming to better prepare marginalized populations throughout the greater Kansas City metropolitan area to earn a livable wage (VP Mission Advancement, Goodwill Industries of Western MO and Eastern KS). Her work inspired her to run and be elected to the Kansas City Public Schools Board of Directors where she served on the Governance Committee and focused on legislative advocacy. In April 2020, Mayor Quinton Lucas appointed her to the Health Commission for the City of Kansas City.
She recognizes that as the leader of a social enterprise with a values-driven purpose each decision has multiple impacts on her community. She is many things, but most importantly a wife, mother of four, business owner, and resident of the urban core. She looks forward to leveraging resources to positively impact as many vulnerable groups as possible.
Jeff founded LocalCode in Jan 2019 with the mission of helping revitalize communities across North America with locally owned enterprises and vibrant main streets. Jeff spent his career building, advising and investing in companies designed to help humanity live in greater harmony with each other and with living systems. Jeff first venture, New Leaf Paper, was focused on transforming the paper industry toward sustainability. In 2010, Forbes recognized Jeff as one of the 30 top social entrepreneurs. He was an early champion of B Corporation, signing the B Corporation Declaration of Interdependence in 2007.
