Kansas City, Kansas
Human Investment Plan

Camiros. Ltd. was retained to provide consulting services to the Neighborhood and Community Services Department of Kansas City during their strategic and comprehensive planning effort named Forging Our Comprehensive Urban Strategy (FOCUS) Kansas City. Camiros' assignment was to write the Human Investment Plan component of FOCUS. To accomplish this, Camiros worked with a citizen based work team to facilitate identification of the community's critical needs, priorities for action and strategies to attain plan goals.

The work team developed a list of 32 critical needs including increasing the affordable housing supply and improving existing housing stock safety. The key question Camiros helped the Work Team answer was "What are we going to do about it?" This led to the next step in the FOCUS process - developing specific strategies for accomplishing the human investment goals. These strategies occupied two levels. First, the baseline strategies, general in nature, applied to all three FOCUS components - physical planning, governance and human investment. For example, simply making affordable housing available is not enough. These residents also needed accessible public transportation, which is a physical planning consideration. Second, the Human Investment Strategies concentrated specifically on improving the human environment through actions targeted toward improved housing, economic development, human-service delivery, arts and culture, and citizenship.