Rebuilding communities together

Across the country, Eastside neighborhoods share a familiar reality—disinvestment by design, environmental harms, and systems that limit opportunity. But they also share deep resilience, cultural power, and the capacity to redefine their future. This national pattern is what guides our work, and our commitment begins where we live.

Eastside Opportunity Ventures focuses on the Eastside of Kansas City, Kansas and Wyandotte County because this is our home—our people, our responsibility, and our story. While our work is rooted locally, we stand in community with Eastside residents across the country, learning from one another and advancing a collective movement to restore power, pride, and prosperity in historically excluded neighborhoods

At EOV, we bring residents, leaders, organizations, artists, and partners together to turn vision into action. Through education, advocacy, and community collaboration, we support the revitalization of neighborhoods, expand opportunity, and ensure Eastside communities thrive for generations to come.

The challenges facing Eastside communities didn't emerge by chance—they were engineered through decades of policy decisions that pushed environmental burdens, limited investment, and reduced opportunity to specific sides of our cities. Understanding this history is essential to understanding why Eastside-led solutions are so urgent today.

Our work focuses on shifting those long-standing conditions: rebuilding what was systematically undermined, opening access where it was intentionally restricted, and ensuring that community vision—not past inequities—guides what comes next.

The video below from our friend, anthropologist and venture capitalist Stephen DeBerry, offers a powerful explanation of how these patterns were created and why they persist. His framing of "disparity by design" provides important context for the work we carry forward every day.