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Home / News / Revealing Strength in the Kansas City Community – Reconciliation Services and Thelma’s Kitchen Celebrates Grand Re-Opening

Revealing Strength in the Kansas City Community – Reconciliation Services and Thelma’s Kitchen Celebrates Grand Re-Opening

Reconciliation Services (RS) and Thelma’s Kitchen, hosted a celebratory grand re-opening to the community this July at the corner of 31st and Troost Avenue in Kansas City, MO. BNIM began our work with RS in 2018, conducting community visioning workshops which led to the RS master plan and now transformative renovation and stabilization of the organization’s 115-year-old building, representing a reinvestment by RS in its programs, neighborhood, and history.

RS has served the urban core of Kansas City since 1987, driven by dignity, community, and advocacy to address needs for affordable food access, safe gathering spaces, and building positive connections. RS’s mission seeks to directly confront the charged history of its site on Troost Avenue, where redlining and other forms of racial segregation occurred in the mid-1900s and where disparities of health, education, and income between residents on either side of Troost Avenue persist today. It was vital for this project to manifest a whole-hearted reinvestment in this place.

RS’s renovated space better serves the organization’s operations with offices, spaces for client appointments, and areas for community gathering. A new fifth floor, which replaces the original penthouse lost to fire sometime after 1955, provides staff, clients, and visitors with panoramic views of Kansas City, as seen from within an intimately scaled Greek Orthodox chapel and the rooftop self-care garden above Troost Avenue. The renovation expands Thelma’s Kitchen, Kansas City’s first pay-it-forward café, to include nearly 80 seats and enhances the kitchen with improved daylighting.

In 2022, 31 community members gathered at the corner of 31st and Troost, each of them offering a one-word response to the prompt: “Reconciliation Is…”. Poet Glenn North composed these 31 responses into a poem, which appears in excerpts throughout the building.

Learn more about the project in our blog post ‘Reconciliation Is…”written by Elvis Achelpohl, Project Architect

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