Blue KC Teams Up with Cornerstones of Care and Build Trybe to Create New Center for Urban Agriculture

Partnership Will Help Students at DeLasalle Education Center Construct a Learning Farm in the Heart of the Troost Corridor

KANSAS CITY, MO. (November 19, 2025) — If you build it, they will come. That is the idea behind a new initiative at DeLasalle Education Center in Kansas City, MO., thanks to a partnership between Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City and the behavioral and mental health nonprofit, Cornerstones of Care. Build Trybe, a Cornerstones of Care vocational program, will work with students at DeLaSalle in transforming an empty field next to the school into a new Learning Farm that will impact hundreds of young adults in surrounding neighborhoods. From garden beds and a market stand to an outdoor eatery and an orchard, the high school students will be the visionaries in the creation of this new outdoor classroom serving the historic DeLaSalle Education Center in the heart of the Troost Corridor.

“You can expect chicken coups, rabbit hutches, produce, fruit trees, orchards and hoop houses,” said Theo Bunch, Director of Build Trybe. “We are working with a really, amazing group of DeLaSalle high schoolers who are going to create a vision for this field where it becomes a learning farm center that will produce food for the Kansas City community, and most importantly, for the students themselves, for their families, for their kitchens and for their school.”

“Our students and our community expressed a need that we have experiential learning,” said Sean Stalling, Executive Director at DeLaSalle Education Center, which is the only alternative charter high school in Missouri dedicated to serving at-promise urban core students. “We had a lot of land, and we decided that this acre of land would be better served addressing some of the societal needs that our kids face. That’s food insecurities, healthy living and having access to healthy food.”

It’s the next chapter for DeLaSalle Education Center and a first step in the school’s long-term vision of becoming one of the leading urban farming schools in Kansas City. The initiative will help address food insecurity, as one in seven people in the Kansas City region are at risk of hunger. Access to nutritious food is critical to health and resilience. 60% of U.S. adults live with one or more diet-related chronic health conditions, underscoring the potential for increased access to healthy foods to improve health outcomes nationwide.

“One of the end goals is that the produce will go back to the community, which is super important because we know that health outcomes are largely driven by things that are related to our social drivers of health, and one of those things is actually food,” said Rebecca Anderson, Director of Community Health at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City. “So, we are super excited to walk alongside these students and learn from them and watch this process unfold.”

“Most importantly for me, it sends a strong message that Kansas City cares about kids,” Stalling said. “The students at DeLaSalle are being embraced, and their ideas are being promoted so their thoughts and their genius are coming to light. I’m just glad being a small vehicle to making that happen and find great partners like Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City, Build Trybe and Cornerstones of Care to make that happen, so it’s overwhelming and it feels really good to have this happen.”

For more information about DeLaSalle Education Center, visit https://www.delasallekc.org/.

About Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City
Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City, the largest not-for-profit health insurer in Missouri and the only not-for-profit commercial health insurer in Kansas City, has been part of the Kansas City community since 1938. Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City provides health coverage services to more than one million residents in the greater Kansas City area, including Johnson and Wyandotte counties in Kansas and 30 counties in Northwest Missouri. Our mission: to provide affordable access to healthcare and to improve the health of our members. Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City is an independent licensee of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association. For more information on the company, visit its website at BlueKC.com.