After graduating from William Jewell College, Overland Park Councilmember Drew Mitrisin left the Midwest for Washington, D.C.
A Missouri native, Mitrisin says it was a call from his father-in-law about five years later that brought him and his wife back to the area. They settled in Overland Park and now live in the Nall Hills neighborhood with their young daughter.
“We knew that we wanted to come home because we wanted to raise our family, we wanted to have access to good schools, and we wanted to have great jobs. And that’s what we found,” he said.
A new Kansas Department of Commerce campaign called “Love, Kansas” is designed to create more “boomerangs” like Mitrisin — trying to appeal to more native Kansans and others with personal connections to the region back to the Sunflower State.
“We need more people to come to our community, work in our community, buy homes in our community, live in our community,” Mitrisin said at a kick-off event Thursday in Overland Park that included state and city officials, local business owners and members of the Overland Park Chamber of Commerce.
Overland Park is one of nearly 20 pilot cities and counties in the state participating in the “Love, Kansas” campaign. The list also includes places like Dodge City, Salina, Wichita and Manhattan, as well as Miami County, just to Johnson County’s south.
“Love, Kansas” is focused on bringing talent back
Andrew Weisberg, director of talent at the Overland Park Chamber, said the “Love, Kansas” campaign is focused “on attracting skilled talent back to our state” while also “keeping skilled talent” here.
Bridgette Jobe, director of Kansas Tourism, said the state has roughly 86,000 open job opportunities in a variety of industries. At the same time, more than half of Kansas’s counties are reporting shrinking populations.
While Johnson County doesn’t have the population loss challenges other Kansas communities have, Jobe said she sees “Love, Kansas” as an opportunity to address the statewide need for employees and the general population decline some counties are seeing.
“We don’t have a lack of job opportunities in the state, what we have is a lack of people; we need people to come to Kansas to fill these jobs,” she said.
During the event on Thursday, attendees were encouraged to send written correspondences — postcards with the sights and scenes of Overland Park to be specific — to the people they know who have left the state to entice them to return
How will “Love, Kansas” work?
- The initiative is aimed at attracting people with connections to the state of Kansas, primarily those who grew up or went to school here — those potential so called “boomerangs.”
- The campaign is also working with higher education institutions in Kansas to try to keep new members of the workforce in the state.
- Additionally, “Love, Kansas” hopes to attract people to the state who are looking for a change of scenery or a fresh start.
How can you get involved with “Love, Kansas?”
Jobe says the heart of the “Love, Kansas” program is capitalizing on existing “personal connection.”
That includes tapping into the connections people have with the state of Kansas, but it will also include people using their own relationships to encourage people they know to come back.
“Do write letters or text them, call them — any way,” Jobe said. “It’s that personal connection that will bring people back to Kansas.”
For more information about the program, how you can get involved or to share your own “boomerang” story, visit LoveKansas.com.
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