On Kansas City’s East Side, just off 31st Street, a new building is rising with a clear purpose: to serve as a place where healing is treated as essential infrastructure and where a neighborhood shaped by disinvestment can move forward through a different story.
For nearly fifty years, Ad Hoc Group Against Crime has shown up when violence disrupts families and communities, providing support, advocacy, and guidance through grief and uncertainty. With the development of the Ad Hoc Center for Healing and Justice, the organization is extending that work by creating a permanent, community-rooted hub focused on healing, stability, and long-term resilience alongside justice.
This moment represents more than growth. As Ad Hoc President and CEO Damon Daniel describes it, the Center marks “a new book, not a new chapter,” shaped by lived experience and a clearer understanding of what communities need to heal.
A Legacy Built on Showing Up
Ad Hoc Group Against Crime was founded in 1977 by civic leader Alvin Brooks during a moment of crisis in Kansas City. A series of violent deaths along Prospect Avenue exposed both the danger facing Black women and the absence of systems families could trust. What began as a coalition of concerned residents became a community-based organization willing to stand between residents and the criminal justice system when no one else would.
Over time, Ad Hoc became a trusted presence when violence occurred, helping families navigate courts, hospitals, and unfamiliar processes. That role established the organization as a bridge in communities where institutional systems had often failed to show up with consistency or care.
Under the leadership of Damon Daniel, Ad Hoc’s work has expanded beyond crisis response into prevention, advocacy, and healing, through partnerships with courts, hospitals, schools, and community organizations across the region. That history gives credibility to the organization’s next evolution: its mission opening the Center for Healing and Justice.
Why Healing Has to Be Part of the Solution
For the communities Ad Hoc serves, violence is rarely an isolated event. Daniel describes it as layered, shaped by disinvestment, racism, and limited access to opportunity. Many families who seek support are not encountering trauma for the first time. They are carrying it.
“Eighty-five percent of the people we serve have lost a loved one to violence,” Daniel explains. “Some have lost multiple family members. Violence becomes a constant, not an interruption.”
That reality affects family stability, neighborhood health, and workforce participation. Responding only after violence occurs, Daniel says, is incomplete. A purely punitive approach may satisfy a narrow definition of justice, but it rarely brings resolution to the people left behind.
For many families, justice begins with dignity. It means being listened to, supported, and guided through a process they were never prepared to navigate. Healing is not an add-on. It is foundational.
Inside the Ad Hoc Center for Healing and Justice
As the scope of Ad Hoc’s work grew, it became clear that borrowed spaces and temporary offices were limiting what the organization could offer. The Center for Healing and Justice represents a structural shift in how care, prevention, and community empowerment are delivered.
“We can’t keep doing the same work the same way and expect different outcomes,” Daniel says. “This isn’t a new chapter. It’s a new book.”
The Center is designed as a centralized, place-based hub where individuals and families impacted by violence can access services without navigating disconnected referrals. Trauma-informed counseling, crisis intervention, legal navigation, health partnerships, and community education are coordinated under one roof, allowing people to move forward with continuity rather than fragmentation.
Equally important, the Center creates space for collaboration. By co-locating partners, medical providers, and community leaders, Ad Hoc is shifting from a reactive model to a coordinated ecosystem that treats healing, education, and accountability as interconnected.
This approach reflects a public health understanding of violence that requires sustained investment, shared responsibility, and long-term infrastructure. The Center becomes the anchor for that work.
Public Investment as a Commitment to Healing
The Ad Hoc Center for Healing and Justice was made possible through support from the Central City Economic Development Sales Tax Program. Daniel describes the investment as essential. For nonprofits, raising capital for facilities is often the greatest barrier to growth. Without CCED support, the Center would likely still be years away from opening.
More than feasibility, the investment signals trust. It reflects neighbors choosing to reinvest in people and places long affected by disinvestment. In this case, public dollars support healing, stability, and prevention as core components of economic development.
The Center reflects CCED’s broader understanding that economic development is not only about projects, but about strengthening the conditions that allow families and communities to thrive.
Laying the Foundation for What’s Next
The Ad Hoc Center for Healing and Justice is still under construction, but its purpose is already clear. It represents a commitment to people and to the systems that support stability.
By addressing trauma, coordinating care, and strengthening families, the Center creates conditions where economic opportunity can take hold. Stability becomes the foundation. Healing becomes the pathway. Community becomes the measure of success.
Healing is infrastructure. And infrastructure is economic development.