Jewell County Revitalization

Specific Need

JCR's funding is necessary to continue to focus on things like business support, housing, workforce incentives, and other things that improve the quality of life in Jewell County. We will use the funds to help make sure this service is available to Jewell County for many years to come.

Mission

Our Mission is to improve the economic diversity and quality of life in Jewell County.

Profile

We benefit Jewell County in many ways by working to enhance the quality of life, economic
diversity, tourism efforts, and business development. First, for quality-of-life initiatives, we’ve
helped connect prospective grant recipients with BlueCross Blue Shield for their Pathways grant
dollars for community projects like the fitness center, Mankato Splash pad, Formoso and Burr
Oak City Parks, and others. Previously we have been awarded the SIGNS Grant to help Owen
Chiropractic with upgrading their sign, Network Kansas Community Solutions Grant in
partnership with Jewell County Strong and Jewell County Foundation and also a grant to
implement being the newest Love, Kansas community. We work with groups such as Network
Kansas, a statewide nonprofit dedicated to helping entrepreneurs and small businesses grow.
This partnership allows us to access extra grant funding for programming, events, or
businesses. We also engage our youth through YEC, the Youth Entrepreneurship Challenge,
which we put on each year in partnership with Rock Hills and see students pitch their business
ideas. Ultimately, this partnership gives us access to extensive resources through Network
Kansas. For tourism, where our efforts began with our partnership with the Jewell County
Historical Society to renovate and reinvigorate the county museum to help drive tourism
surrounding the Columbian Mammoth discoveries in Jewell County. These efforts also
expanded to a kiosk project at Lovewell Lake. These projects were completed in time for the Big
Kansas Road Trip in May 2023. Community Development partnered with the Mankato Chamber
of Commerce to coordinate the Big Kansas Road Trip in Jewell County. Since the success of
BKRT, community development has continued to increase its efforts to promote Jewell County’s
tourism opportunities. We took on the lead role of being a stop for Bike Across Kansas in 2025
and successfully hosted over 500 bikers in Mankato overnight with planned activities and food.
We recently used grant funding to redo the JCCDA website so it can serve as a tourism/quality-
of-life website. As part of that campaign, we released a tourism/quality-of-life video with over
19,000 views on Facebook, which is featured on our website and was used on the remote
worker recruitment tool, MakeMyMove.com, for Jewell County, in which we gained one new
Jewell County resident from. We have also been awarded grant money from the Economic
Innovation Center for the local movers incentive program. We look forward to continuing to
impact Jewell County for many years to come!