The Kansas City Defender is a Black-led nonprofit community media platform focused on Gen Zers and Millennials in Kansas and Missouri. It is also an organization devoted to mutual aid and “Black-led power-building.” “Grocery buyouts” have been one of the Defender’s most unique engagement strategies. The news outlet fundraises to give Black community members money for groceries at a store in a Black neighborhood. Founder and Editor-in-Chief Ryan A. Sorrell explains the organizations’ philosophy and methods in “The Defender Handbook,” which was recently published.
Sorrell talked with INN about engaging with young audiences and experimenting with innovative community engagement programs. This Q&A has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
INN: Would you tell us about The Kansas City Defender and your mission?
Ryan A. Sorrell: Formally, our mission is to produce information and programs for the survival and flourishing of Black people in Missouri and Kansas, but also to be a radical and unapologetic voice in our region on behalf of Black people, and to reach demographics that aren’t traditionally reached by news media. And so, a very large portion of our audience is Black youth, specifically between the ages of 13 and 30. We are very intentional about wanting to reach Gen Z with vital information.
That’s half of our organization, the editorial side. And then the second half of the organization is the programs side. We have three committees: mutual aid, arts and culture, and political education.
INN: What led you to start The Defender?
Sorrell: I don’t have any journalistic background. I went to school for [public relations] and for communications. I did that until 2020, when the George Floyd uprisings broke out. I quit my job and moved back to Kansas City, Missouri, to start a community organization and became a full-time organizer.
One thing I saw that was very concerning to me was that there were virtually zero news outlets in our entire region that reached any Black people below the age of 30. I saw the unique value proposition that we could provide in that space. A lot of legacy Black publications, because of various systemic reasons, often have fewer resources to work with than other news publications. Many of them have found it challenging to adapt to digital transformation. A lot of them don’t even have websites or social media, which is where most young people get most of their news.
INN: Were Black youth between 13 and 30 your primary audience when you started, or has that evolved?
Sorrell: I wasn’t expecting as young as 13. When we first started, I would rent this camera and interview people on the street and upload it to Instagram. I was doing that because I wanted to reach younger people, so I was expecting anywhere from 20 to 30.
We started off in culture and entertainment. For me, that was always a roundabout way of engaging that audience, so that later on they would be interested in the actual news that we do put out. Then when we got into education, high school students started to reach out to us on Instagram and tell us about these racist things that were happening in their schools, like students calling them the N-word or teachers saying the N-word. Within three months of us launching, there was a school where 100 students made a petition to bring back slavery. That was one of the first stories that we helped to break. Because we got a lot of attention from that story, students from across Missouri and Kansas started to recognize us as a platform that they could reach out to with these kinds of things. Then from the high school students, the middle students started to reach out, and that’s how the demographic reached a lot of younger people.
INN: How did the grocery buyouts start, and what is the status of them?
Sorrell: That is part of our mutual aid committee. We go directly to a grocery store in a Black neighborhood, and we just stand at the cash register and give cash to Black people while they’re checking out at the grocery line. And we have literature about our organization and say, “Thank you for being Black,” basically.
We’ve had people who have cried because a lot of people just don’t ever have somebody who randomly does something like that. It’s both a way to actually engage people in our community without asking for anything from them. We’re just giving something to them, and then giving information about our organization. A lot of people have started following us or joined our meetings.
Now we’re planning to do fewer grocery buyouts and transition to a full, free grocery program, which would be grocery boxes. We would have a certain number of families that we work with on a monthly or bimonthly basis.
Because when Black people see you in places that a lot of news outlets call the most dangerous place in the city, that really is a way to build trust in a way that solely producing news never could. — Ryan A. Sorrell
INN: What have been the biggest lessons and challenges of the grocery buyouts?
Sorrell: It’s so important to be on the ground, face-to-face, interacting with people in our community, being able to actually see how much that means to people. Even the people who we give $20 to, it might seem like not a huge amount of money, but people have been like, “You don’t know how much this means to me. I was having the worst day ever.”
One of the reasons that we’re transitioning to the grocery boxes instead is that we want to be able to build more long-term relationships with people. A lot of the people we engaged with have followed our platforms, but we don’t have continuous interaction with them. That’s something we have wanted to have more of because we want to be building and growing our community. Having a certain set of families who we work with consistently, we think, will be a more sustainable way of building more long-term community.
INN: What advice do you have for outlets looking to engage Black youth or other communities traditionally underserved by mainstream news outlets?
Sorrell: I think it’s always pretty particular to the community, but I think No. 1 is knowing what platforms they are using. Some use WhatsApp, some use Instagram, some use TikTok. I speak at a lot of high schools about the intersection of race and identity, journalism, and media literacy, and in all of my presentations, I ask them, “Where do you get your news from?” And I take note of that. The community engagement — whether it’s a grocery buyout, a basketball tournament, an open mic night — are ways to build trust. Because when Black people see you in places that a lot of news outlets call the most dangerous place in the city, that really is a way to build trust in a way that solely producing news never could.
We also have The Defender Handbook that I recently published with the Reynolds Journalism Institute at Mizzou (the University of Missouri). It has templates and explains our philosophy. It has an actual guide for how to create a grocery buyout program, how to create a free clothing program, how to do the kind of reporting we do, and how we reach young audiences.
INN: What comes next from you? Other than the grocery boxes, what are you excited for in 2025?
Sorrell: Our Abolitionist Writers School launched in February. Sixty percent of the participants will be high school and middle school students, and the other 40% will be adults. It’s a political education and writing school that will be every Saturday.
