Written by Kari Keefe
KC Digital Drive and Linwood Property, Inc., recently received support from the Missouri Technology Corporation and Greater KC Community Foundation’s Kansas City Federal and State Matching Grant Fund to advance Emerge @ LAMP, a new community technology initiative at the historic LAMP Campus at Linwood Boulevard and Woodland Avenue.
The investment gives us an opportunity to improve the physical space and elevate programming that supports emerging technology, entrepreneurship and learning in Kansas City’s urban core.
We’ve been working at LAMP for several years through our digital inclusion work, and that experience has helped shape how we think about digital equity more broadly. Our framework extends from network infrastructure and access to full participation in digital life, and ultimately to excellence, innovation and growth. Those dimensions are increasingly important as AI and other emerging technologies change how people work, learn, create and build businesses. Emerge @ LAMP gives us a place to explore what it means for more people and communities to participate in and benefit from that change.
The Kansas City region has a growing collection of assets supporting technology and entrepreneurship, including universities and research institutions, startup programs, investors, industry partners, coworking spaces and innovation hubs. Emerge creates an opportunity to connect those assets more intentionally to people and places across the region.
The LAMP Campus already provides a unique foundation. The former Linwood Presbyterian Church and surrounding campus have been redeveloped by Linwood Property, Inc. as a community asset on Kansas City’s East Side. Emerge builds upon that work with technology-ready spaces that can support emerging technology education, applied AI learning and experimentation, entrepreneurship, digital skills, community programming and convening.
Plans for the campus include new and improved classrooms and seminar spaces, digital and technology upgrades, program and office space, improvements to the historic sanctuary for larger gatherings, and better access, signage and wayfinding throughout the facility.
In downtown Kansas City, we’re helping build Tech Central as a shared home for Kansas City’s tech innovation ecosystem. At LAMP, the context is different. Emerge is rooted in a neighborhood campus and can develop around the people, organizations and opportunities already present there.
We see innovation infrastructure across the region as a network of places, programs, institutions and relationships that give people different ways to participate in the economy we’re collectively building.
For LAMP, this investment also creates an opportunity to make some of that work visible in the campus itself. LAMP has been a longstanding community asset and home to organizations serving the surrounding neighborhoods for years. The planned improvements will bring new investment into classrooms, gathering spaces, technology, signage and other parts of the campus that people use every day.
We’re especially excited about what that will mean for the people who already know and value LAMP. There is something meaningful about seeing a place that has served its community for generations receive the attention and investment it deserves, while creating new capacity for what comes next. We’re grateful to MTC and the Kansas City Federal and State Matching Grant Fund for investing in that future, and to LPI for its longstanding stewardship of the campus.
Read MTC’s announcement and learn more about the 2026 Physical Infrastructure Grant awards.
