Mason Pashia: If you listen to this show regularly, you know I’m a huge fan of sharing stories of what’s possible. Unfortunately, our media landscape has a negativity bias, often summed up with the term “if it bleeds, it leads.” Journalists around the globe are uniting under the umbrella of “solutions journalism” to shift this paradigm, capturing stories of what’s possible through publications and outlets that have a bias toward what works, rather than what doesn’t. 

I was recently researching some of the upcoming Solutions Journalism events and came across some work being done by the Kansas Leadership Center. And their journal. Now, I grew up in Kansas, pretty much on the state line, so the name pulled me in, and as I looked further, I found a trail of breadcrumbs, including the term “civic imagination” and “civic leadership” which they discussed over a decade ago in a book called For the Common Good. 

These things came to a head, and I decided I needed to learn more about how the Kansas Leadership Center is engaging in both solutions journalism and building capacity for civic capacity and civic leadership. We’re at a time where it’s more important than ever to lead with intention and invite others in. 

Today, I’m joined by Chris Green, as the Executive Editor of The Journal and Civic Information Officer for the Kansas Leadership Center (KLC), and Kaye Monk-Morgan, as the President and CEO of KLC, They are deeply involved in KLC’s work, which aims to foster healthier, more prosperous communities by nurturing civic leadership. 

Chris, Kaye, thanks for being with me today.

Kay Monk-Morgan: Good to see you.

Chris Green: Great to be here.

Mason Pashia: Chris, did you have a formative civic or leadership experience in your youth? Can you tell me a little bit about it?

Chris Green: I don’t know how old I was, but I was old enough that I had to tuck my knees up to lean over the table. I was reading the Wichita Eagle at the time, so I was a young kid reading the newspaper every day.

The newspaper was really strong. It had this wide range of coverage, and I learned all these things about what was going on in the country and the state. Opinion columns shaped this world for me. That got me interested in journalism, how the world works, and how people engage in their communities and do things.

A really interesting thing as I was growing up—the Wichita Eagle was a leader in this movement called public journalism, rethinking where journalism was going and how it could serve the public better and serve readers better, versus just adding kindling to the flames.

And so it’s interesting to see that connect to what I’m doing now with solutions journalism, which is different from public journalism but has some of the same themes and some of the same purposes. I didn’t really realize how deep those were connected in my life until you asked the question.

Mason Pashia: I love to hear that. That’s a podcaster’s dream. All right. Kay, how about you?

Kay Monk-Morgan: Yeah, I had a similar experience thinking about this particular question. I’d say yes, I might have been a little bit older than Chris. I remember distinctly, I was in the fifth grade. My mom had a rule that we went to school every day, and if you were too sick to go to school, that meant you pretty much had to stay in your bed ’cause you were really sick.

So we almost had perfect attendance until one day there was going to be a march that our church was participating in to make Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a federal holiday. In the fifth grade, my mom allowed us to miss school, created the opportunity, and required us to march from our church all the way down the street to make the point of: you have the community that you want and that you’re the community you’re willing to fight for.

As a vestige or lineage from civil rights and the movement that she had seen her parents participate in, she handed us that gift in the fifth grade. That has been a formative activity for me in helping shape, you know, at some point you gotta do something if you want something to be different.

Mason Pashia: Yeah. Super powerful. Thanks for sharing that. I mentioned that the Kansas Leadership Center is both really interested in leadership but also civics, which I think, Kay, you just gave a really great demonstration of. How do you all at the center define those terms? So maybe we start with leadership and then go into civics.

Kay Monk-Morgan: Yeah, we think leadership is mobilizing people, and usually, it requires mobilization around something really difficult. It’s not positional at all. Oftentimes people think of leadership as authority or influence. In fact, we think contrary to that. We think it’s about actually doing something.

When we democratize it to an action verb, everyone has the opportunity and, in some cases, the obligation to exercise leadership and to get close to really tough issues. Civics, we think, is the idea of creating community and the context in which we each live. We grew up in high school and middle school and thought of civics as government.

That’s a part of government, but so is volunteering and Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts and going to your synagogue or connecting to your PTO. So I really think of it as anything that we do to help build community and the types of environments we want to live in. Chris, what would you add to that?

Chris Green: Throughout our history, we’ve been trying to get a better definition of the term civics. When KLC first started, we would have people come to leadership programs, and we would expect you need to have a civic challenge. Whatever your job is, you need to have something civically that you’re working on.

And over time, we evolved to see just about everybody has a civic challenge within their sector—not just in the government sector or the education sector, but the for-profit sector, the corporate sector. And so I think it’s this very broad definition of civics that it’s like what you have to do.

Engaging with others when you step outside your door—that makes society function or progress in a way that’s good for us.

Mason Pashia: That’s great. Thank you. So we’ve kind of touched on the name of the Leadership Center a few times now—KLC, as Chris just called it—but, Kay, what is the Kansas Leadership Center like? What are some of the programs you offer? Who are you serving? How do you show up?

Kay Monk-Morgan: Chris calls it a big school with lots of students all over the globe. We have served almost 30,000 folks, and we do that in myriad ways. We provide leadership development and coaching and support for folks who are working on adaptive challenges.

We engage in civic information, and Chris and his team lead a diverse portfolio of ways that help folks have access to really good information. And we have a research center that researches adaptive leadership and what is required for behavior change and systems that need to make progress on really difficult things.

And so, it’s a conglomeration of services. Every day there’s something a little bit different. We meet people where they are across industries and up and down hierarchical structures.

Mason Pashia: Love that. Thank you. So you mentioned adaptive challenges, which I think is really fundamental to how you all view leadership. I think you contrast it with technical problems. Is this primarily an assertion you make after the fact, or is this something that helps as a leader or a person actually navigate what they need to apply to what situation?

I’m thinking of a school leader who has all these things coming up with them all the time. I guess what would the advice be for: this is an adaptive problem, this is a technical problem. How do you think about that?

Kay Monk-Morgan: We think both technical and adaptive challenges show up in any environment. Probably 80 to 90% of what your listeners are exposed to fits in the technical column. That’s problems that are well-defined with answers that are also well-defined. There’s an expert or an authority who can show up and help make progress on whatever that issue is.

It’s done pretty expediently, and we have a level of confidence and skill that the behaviors we deploy will help us solve the problem. Adaptive stuff really is 10 to 15% of any person’s work, and it looks different because we may not know exactly what the problem is or the solution.

If our educators knew how to graduate 100% of students, they would’ve done that by now. The fact that they haven’t is because we don’t know why students don’t graduate. We have lots of reasons that we can attach to it. We’re still learning more about the problem. We’re still learning a lot about the solutions, the stakeholders.

There’s no one expert that can solve it. You gotta get a lot of people in a room to have a conversation around it. These are problems that have been persistent. When things persist, that’s one indicator that it might be adaptive. Those types of things that, if our grandparents could have solved them, they would have. If they haven’t, the likelihood is it’s an adaptive issue.

And so we encourage folks to think on the front end: Is this an adaptive challenge or is it a technical problem? Because it will define the approach that one might take going forward.

Mason Pashia: Got it. I wanna transition a little bit away from leadership—not that we’re ever really abandoning it—and get into the Journal for a second. So, Chris, this is kind of your domain. You mentioned a term, public journalism, earlier, and it sounds like it has compounded into this thing that now I’m calling solutions journalism as a part of this larger umbrella.

Was that transition a conscious effort? Like, have you been involved in this network-building process? Or talk about your role a little bit in that broader movement.

Chris Green: Our relationship with solutions journalism began when we helped start a collaborative of other media outlets here in Wichita around a solutions journalism frame. But it had interested me several years before that happened, in part because adaptive challenges are so hard and complex that it can get discouraging to talk about them. And so I was looking for ways to tell stories that might give people some hope or some sort of sense that progress can be made. Some adaptive challenges are solvable.

They require different approaches. And then there are other adaptive challenges that are more like wicked problems—navigating this threshold between better or worse. But I think a question when you’re training people is: if stuff is hard, what’s the roadmap for figuring out how you make something better?

What I like about solutions journalism is it focuses on who’s doing it better and how. It doesn’t say this is a perfect solution. It’s not a puff piece. It’s not that everything has been solved because part of it is just looking at a response to a social problem. What’s the evidence that that’s working—both qualitative and quantitative?

What are the limitations, which I think is really important? And then what are the lessons? What are the insights? What can other people take? That wisdom is really important, so it’s become a core strategy for us because it helps us get some of that wisdom that might be missing from the world to people and spread that civic knowledge.

We do investigative reporting as well as solutions reporting, and we’re finding that they’re converging in a way because it allows us to talk about both problems and solutions. I think you have to talk about both.

And as you mentioned earlier, sometimes in the media, we are way problem-oriented. This is bad, this is terrible, and here’s the next thing that’s bad and terrible. Solutions journalism helps us pause and think: if this is not working, where might it be working?

Or what can we learn from this failure about what might need to work for progress to be made? It felt like a really perfect fit with KLC’s leadership competencies and the brand we’re trying to bring out into the world.

Mason Pashia: You’ve started to answer this question a little bit, so we can move on if you don’t have more to add, but I’m curious—from a storytelling, technical storytelling perspective—is there a toolkit that you would say is different for a solutions journalist than a standard journalist?

Is that in the blueprint of a story? Is it where you choose to land at the end? You mentioned, I found this article of yours called We’ve Done It Before, which is like this conversation between Trump and Biden voters.

Ultimately, they go deeper, and that opens up more space for understanding. But there’s a practice of looping that they demonstrate to get to that place. Is that a part of the solutions journalist toolkit? Is knowing reflexive dialogue structuring and conflict resolution? I’m curious if there’s a difference to you.

Chris Green: I think it’s really important. I learned solutions journalism first, and then through engagement with the Solutions Journalism Network, that led me into complicating the narratives and the looping approaches. Solutions Journalism Network and Amanda Ripley, who wrote the book Good Conflict, have these 22 questions that complicate the narrative, and they’re just like perfect questions for addressing an adaptive challenge.

Questions like: What’s dividing us on this issue? How do you decide which information to trust? Where do you feel torn? Is there any part of the other side’s position that makes sense to you? These are really great tools and questions for seeing the world in a broader way—seeing different interpretations, seeing different angles, seeing the adaptive nature of things—that it’s not just a quick fix.

And then looping is the skillset that you use to really listen to people’s responses to these questions. It’s an interviewing technique. We taught it to those five Biden and Trump voters, and then they interviewed each other about their views on immigration. It created these really much deeper conversations where they built connections with each other. It’s not like they agreed or changed their mind after the fact because those positions are deeply ingrained in their values, but they came to understand similarities or connecting interests that really connected them together.

I think there’s something about just practicing listening and practicing questions that force curiosity and authenticity. Those really feed back into solutions journalism because I think you’re trying to, with solutions journalism more than any other journalism I’ve been a part of, tell a story that no one’s ever tried to tell before and tell it at a level of depth and nuance that no one’s ever gone to. So it very much feels like uncharted waters.

Mason Pashia: That’s great. I get how much this has overlap with the curriculum you use for leaders. Like so much of leadership is listening. It sounds like there’s a lot of overlap in what it means to be a solutions journalist and what it means to be a leader in some ways. What do you see as similarities there?

Kay Monk-Morgan: There’s a lot of overlap, Mason, and the work that our civic information team, solutions journalism, and any number of articles that they’re doing—even the investigative stuff—are cases for when we can look at adaptive challenges where people are trying to exercise leadership.

We believe that we need the right people with the skills—the leadership skills and behaviors, levels of awareness—really good information, and a good process in order for communities to make progress on really difficult things. It’s not enough for us to develop folks and have skills where they have an awareness about how they’re showing up in the public square. We also need them to have good, actionable information when they get there.

And to know how to interpret that information and to make meaning of what it is that they’re seeing in those spaces in order for policy or action or the PTO minutes to be correct. All of these things come together to make a more whole civic culture. If folks are educated and their behavior is enlightened, and they have good information, those things are in tandem.

Mason Pashia: That’s great. Both frameworks lean into this idea that Chris has alluded to of experimentation, which is like this uncharted waters territory. It’s how do you act when you don’t have a guarantee of success, and how do you share about that in a way that is positive?

I am curious—from a leadership perspective—how do you encourage experimentation like that? That feels so, it’s so scary to so many, and I think K-12 is on the hook for a lot of the fear-of-failure mentality. But I’m curious how you all go about reprogramming folks to not fear that as much.

Kay Monk-Morgan: I think it starts from a place of curiosity and inviting people to suspend what they think they know to make room for what can be learned. If we acknowledge it’s an adaptive issue, and we don’t know the—we haven’t quite diagnosed the problem, and we certainly don’t know the answer—we’ve gotta then get curious about that. And if we’re curious about a thing, that gives us an opportunity to kind of lean in and say, what will it take for us to learn something? Well, we’re gonna learn something. We’ve gotta do something.

And so crafting experiments or small pilots or showing up slightly differently, I think, is the way to do that. I have children who are now young adults. They’re 27 and 26, but when they were in elementary school and middle school, I, every Monday morning, showed up at school and made photocopies for their classroom workbooks.

My kind of corner volunteerism, where to be an active parent and work a nine-to-five type of deal. The type of work that was happening in K-12 around innovating and about learning and about learning science—I worked at a higher ed institution. That type of learning wasn’t happening there, and so the number of times that I would take a printable from the third-grade class and take it to my university job and replicate that and use it in a freshman or sophomore English class or civics class—it happened a lot because there’s a lot of innovation there. They see kids at the beginning of their educational journey and have the requirement to make things relevant in ways that, at higher ed, you may not have to do as often.

The spirit of innovation and continuing to make modifications is really embedded in what leadership looks like. Chris, how do you see that?

Chris Green: To pick up on the curiosity and innovation part, I think the thing I would stress is experimentation to achieve success. Sometimes you hear about a scientist who accidentally plays with mold and discovers a wonder drug, but the truth about experimentation is we should do it to learn over time so that we can achieve success.

We’re experimenting to get data about what works and what doesn’t. Smaller experiments, or experiments where we can live with failure to learn more, are generally a better path to progress than trying to swing for the fences and hit that grand slam because the chances ratchet up the significance of failure.

Most problems aren’t solved easily. You have to learn and develop new capacity over time. And that is what experimentation is about. It isn’t just trying things; it’s trying things for a purpose—to learn something specific. And Kay’s a scientist, so I think that will resonate with her.

Mason Pashia: Yeah, that’s great. I heard, a couple of months ago, I was listening to, I think, the Ezra Klein Podcast. He was saying at the beginning that the episode was kind of about fear. It was at a moment of a lot of fear in the world, and he was saying that he’s been trying to figure out what the opposite of fear is because it’s not hope.

He thinks the opposite of fear is curiosity. And then yesterday I was reading something, and somebody asked someone, “Have you ever been afraid?” And the person said, “Not more than I’ve been curious,” which I thought was a really interesting way to reframe that. Like, if you are curious in a moment, it’s pretty hard to be afraid. You can be cautious, but you also have this sort of bias toward “what if” or “what could be” that I think is really wonderful.

I’m curious about the landscape of Wichita because you all are there, you’ve been doing this for some time. You’re sharing a lot of really good stories about Wichita and showing what’s possible and nuancing the people that live there and the projects that are underway. Have you noticed a difference in how people approach media? It’s going to be a blanket statement—I’m sure you don’t have the qualitative data necessarily on media literacy and feelings about the media—but I am curious how that manifests in a place.

In a culture of solutions journalism, is change visible in how people hold each other? How people approach conversation?

Chris Green: So I just wrote about this today in our newsletter, but we’ve done a mixture of coverage related to homelessness that uses both solutions journalism and some investigative reporting and more traditional developments as they go over time. What we’ve found is a change in how people talk about meeting the needs of homeless residents. More voices are now in the conversation in our community, in part because of our efforts to bring those voices into the conversation.

And we see more and more people recognizing those voices and trying to learn from what people who are homeless in Wichita are experiencing when they go into a shelter. That’s sort of alive for me—that we’ve seen a change in what people are talking about as a result of what we’re covering.

That, I think, would not have happened if we wouldn’t have done a mixture of things. If we just would’ve done investigative reporting, I think we would’ve made people tired or frustrated or angry at us. And if we would’ve just done reporting about what happened, I don’t think we really would’ve engaged people. And it just feels like something has shifted as a result of that stuff being brought up on a routine basis in a variety of ways.

Mason Pashia: That’s helpful. I want to start bringing us to a close here. I’m very curious about how this shows up in the K-12 classroom, like wherever young people are. Chris, I know you have a 6-year-old. How are you practicing what you’re preaching with solutions journalism with them, and how would you both like this to show up in the younger generations as we’re developing leaders who can lead from anywhere and respond to anything?

Kay Monk-Morgan: I love it. I spent 20 years working with high school students, and when I first became familiar with the KLC framework, I took it back to a group of students that I worked with because I felt like this is stuff that young people need access to right away—middle school, high school. We certainly need adults to show up in ways to exercise leadership.

But if we don’t get 15-year-olds to exercise leadership, we’ve got a problem. Taking these ideas and helping students see that they have an opportunity to change the environment they live in. Young people would say, “My number one issue is school safety. And then kids prop doors at our school, and the principal doesn’t do anything about it.” That’s an opportunity for us to say, “Well, the principal’s the authority, and they have a role, but you have a role to exercise leadership as well. What would be an exercise of leadership for you as a person who saw the door open and did nothing about it? Who says they care about safety? What are the implications for you? How do you get to show up? How do you elevate, protest, or discontent in a way that the system can hear you and have respect for what it is that you’re saying from your point of view?”

And so we are taking our framework now and making a high school, middle school program out of it. We’ve actually piloted it in four different middle school and high school settings over the last year and really look forward to launching in 2026 a full-fledged youth development program because we believe strongly that young people have an opportunity to exercise leadership just like anybody else, and we need them to do it.

Chris Green: We’re looking to figure out what’s the information part of that and how does civic information in the Journal support that, and how do we translate our content for a K-12 environment? There might be some opportunities coming around that will allow us to do that.

We want people to understand that they have agency—that they have power to shape things and that their actions matter. They aren’t going to totally change anything 100%, but what you choose to do and don’t do makes a difference. What I’ve learned from a 6-year-old is that being a human being brings conflicts.

There are always conflicts that are coming, whether it’s in a classroom between students or in this big classroom we call our country. We have to learn how to resolve conflicts in a way where we advance our values and don’t sacrifice ourselves, but we’re not stomping over other people in the process.

That’s such an incredible balancing act. Someone in school now is going to have to do that—not just in politics or government or as a civil servant, but in a business. You’re going to have to manage those things across people for whom you can’t always tell them exactly what to do.

I think KLC’s curriculum helps prepare people to do that, and solutions journalism helps give them a roadmap for ideas they might be able to follow to do it better.

Mason Pashia: So much of what you both just described resonates with the way that we talk about something called contribution or social entrepreneurship. That’s something we’re really bullish on, specifically in middle school and high school environments, to help equip young people with the tools to spot a problem in their community, frame the problem, put enough scaffolding on it that you can hold it and act on it, and then go the extra step and start to deliver contribution into that space.

That shows up a lot of times in a civic way. If you are serving the community, that is a civic act. But oftentimes, entrepreneurship ends up becoming a finance class, and while a useful skill, it’s super different than spotting problems and delivering on them. I wonder if, in your pursuit of embedding some of this in the classroom and making it more entrepreneurial and project-based, we would love to highlight some of the students in the work that you’re doing on our platforms. That sounds right up our alley.

Kay Monk-Morgan: We’d love to do that because ultimately, the curriculum is awesome, but it’s only living into its best promise if people do something with it. It’s not enough for us to teach you what to do. You need folks to find applicable situations.

I remember when my oldest kid came home one day talking about water and that you’re not supposed to let the faucet run when you’re brushing your teeth because you waste water. One day, he measured how much water was going down the sink while we brushed our teeth.

My kid is 27 years old, and he had to have been maybe eight at the time. I got chastised about not being a good steward of Mother Nature’s resources ’cause I didn’t use water right. Now we don’t turn the shower on 10 minutes before we get in because we’re wasting water.

School systems absolutely have a role to play in helping our kids have access to information, and those children have opportunities to influence the behaviors of adults. When they do, that is an act of leadership.

Mason Pashia: Okay. And last question. Let’s end on something that’s giving us hope in this space. I’m curious if you think over the last 15 years—or maybe longer, but I’m thinking of like the Brene Brown-ification of leadership—there’s a big movement in leadership that I think is touching on some of the competencies that you all have defined.

Do you think that the arc of what a leader is, is starting to go in the direction that you all are advocating for? Is that a cause for hope and celebration? How do you feel about the general pulse check on where leadership is today?

Kay Monk-Morgan: Yeah, I think there are divergent answers to that. Anytime you have nature abhors a vacuum, right? And where there’s a positive ion, there’s also a negative ion. Those things have to exist.

Mason Pashia: You are a scientist.

Kay Monk-Morgan: I’m a scientist for life.

Mason Pashia: Not wrong.

Kay Monk-Morgan: There’s a check and balance. Part of the response we’re seeing in society all over the world is a desire for more certainty and less conflict and a narrative that is a singular truth.

When you’re living in a pluralistic society, that’s much harder to have. As we make progress helping people see that they can see and seize moments to behave differently, to move things, there’s also a flip side to that where there’s a desire to have more structure and less diversity of thought and engagement.

I think we’ve gotta keep doing the work to ensure that folks see their place and that they’re implicated in the community. They have this notion of social entrepreneurship—that we all have something to do with the community we live in. We’re co-creators, and if it works, it’s because we did the work. If it doesn’t work, it’s because we didn’t.

Mason Pashia: Chris, anything you want to add to that?

Chris Green: I mean, I feel like it’s moving both directions. I feel like the capacity of individuals to be heard and to shape things is growing. It also feels like, through the accumulation of wealth and power, there are these entrenched things that are emerging as well.

And the thing that’s kind of falling in the middle is institutions and things that can sort of mediate between, like, to sort of balance out power. So I wonder if maybe the challenge in leadership isn’t just informing people to use their power, but like what KLC does—helping them figure out how to build the networks and institutions necessary to find a better balance.

Mason Pashia: Yeah, I think that’s really smart. All right, I’m going to bring this to a close ’cause I just asked an investigative journalist/solutions journalist and a scientist to just speculate wildly with no ability to cite sources. So I’m sorry to both of you, but Chris, Kay, with the Kansas Leadership Center, thank you so much for being here today and for teaching us a little something about leadership and civics.

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Guest Bio

Kaye Monk-Morgan

A third-generation Kansan, Dr. Kaye Monk-Morgan is the president and CEO of the Kansas Leadership Center (KLC), an internationally recognized center of excellence for leadership development and civic engagement. She previously served as the inaugural chief impact officer. Her work fosters civic leadership for stronger, healthier, and more prosperous communities in Kansas and beyond.

Service and education have been hallmarks of Monk-Morgan’s personal and professional story for decades. Prior to her time at the KLC, Monk-Morgan dedicated her talents to higher education. Over 30 years, she served in roles ranging from residence hall director to Assistant Dean of Fairmount College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and ultimately the Vice President for Strategic Engagement and Planning. Her areas of responsibility varied over the years and included community and economic development, strategic planning, assessment and accreditation, and coordination of WSU’s First-Generation student services. Her longest appointment was as director of the TRIO Upward Bound Math Science program.

An active community servant, Monk-Morgan has served on non-profit and corporate boards at the local, state, regional, and national levels. She currently serves as a board member for NXTUS, a non-profit that catalyzes startup ecosystems, the Kansas African American Museum, and Emprise Bank. She is a trustee for the Wichita Land Bank and advisor to the Ulrich Museum at Wichita State University.

Her professional service record includes service as the board chair of tri-state, regional, and national boards, including Council for Opportunity in Education, a Washington-based college access and success professional association and advocacy group. She is an advocate and faculty member for NASPA’s Center for First Generation Success, faculty for the Higher Learning Commission’s Advancing Strategy Institute, anda  member of the International Leadership Association.

A proud first-generation college graduate, Kaye has earned a Bachelor of Chemistry/Business, a Master of Arts in Public Administration, and a Doctorate in Educational Leadership. Her research interests center on women in leadership and first-generation student success. She presents internationally on both topics.

While all of this is important, what really counts to Kaye is that she is a teacher, student, mentor, mentee, daughter, sister, auntie, wife, and most importantly, a mother. She is a lifelong learner, aspiring yogi, wannabe long-distance runner, and tried and true girlfriend. She lives in Wichita with her husband, Derek. They share two Wichita-based young adult sons, Payton and Cameron.Source: https://kansasleadershipcenter.org/team/kaye-monk-morgan/

Chris Green

Chris Green blends the techniques of investigative, data, civic and solutions journalism to provide trustworthy information that fuels impactful dialogue. He began his career with Kansas newspapers, first covering local government and then the Kansas Legislature. As the executive editor of The Journal, a civic issues magazine published by the Kansas Leadership Center, he draws on a wide range of influences to shape a nationally award-winning publication that productively tackles hot-button issues.

A native Kansan and graduate of Baker University in Baldwin City, Chris also earned a master’s degree in international politics from Scotland’s University of Edinburgh. He and his wife, Sarah, enjoy exploring both inside and well beyond Kansas and have begun a quest to visit all 50 U.S. state capitols. They are the parents of a son, Calvin, born in 2018.