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Kansas City: From BBQ to ‘Black Silicon Valley’?

Vewiser Dixon, a successful businessman in Kansas City, wants to turn 22 acres of vacant land into a startup community tailored toward black and brown entrepreneurs.
Lisa Rodriguez
/
KCUR
Vewiser Dixon, a successful businessman in Kansas City, wants to turn 22 acres of vacant land into a startup community tailored toward black and brown entrepreneurs.

There’s been a lot of chatter in recent years about inclusiveness in the tech world.

Companies like Google, Twitter, and Facebook have all been called out for their mostly white and male staff. And a lot of them have vowed to get better, though results have been mixed.

But what if, instead of an afterthought, diversity was hardwired into the core of a new start-up scene?

That’s what this week’s installment of We Live Here is all about. And we’re not taking you to the coasts or San Francisco to look for answers.

Instead, the show goes to Kansas City to tell the story of one man's ambitious plan to build a more racially inclusive tech scene from the ground up.

Kameel Stanley co-hosted and co-produced the We Live Here podcast—covering race, class, power, and poverty in the St. Louis Region—from 2015 to 2018.
Tim Lloyd was a founding host of We Live Here from 2015 to 2018 and was the Senior Producer of On Demand and Content Partnerships until Spring of 2020.