The block hit the number

On Friday, this paper told you about a number. A free concert was coming to the Wilson’s Pizza parking lot at 18th Street and Quindaro Boulevard. It was week three of northeast Kansas City, Kansas, digging out from the August 18 storm, and the fundraising goal was $1,500. A modest number on purpose, we wrote. The kind a block can actually hit.

On Sunday the block hit it, and then kept going. The concert raised $1,740 for storm recovery, per KSHB 41, which had a reporter, Rachel Henderson, in the lot and then on the block the day after.

The lot belongs to Gary Wilson. His father opened Wilson’s Pizza on that corner in 1989, and Wilson has run it since 1990, long enough that the restaurant carries its own civic history: there was a stretch when the national chains would not deliver to the neighborhood, and Wilson’s slogan was “If they won’t, Wilson’s will,” he told the station. The storm did not spare him. He lost power from Tuesday through Saturday, per KSHB, and he hosted anyway. “I’m big on community, so if anybody’s gonna do anything in the community that’s positive and that’s gonna be a good reflection of the community, I’m with that,” he said.

The organizer is James Donnelson Jr., who performs as J.R. Hoodstar. He told KSHB he had family still dealing with storm damage and neighbors still without power, and that the question he kept landing on, rather than whether somebody should do something, was “how can I do my part?” Sunday’s answer, per the station: live music, a taco truck, fruits and vegetables, and the unglamorous inventory a cleanup actually runs on: bleach, brooms, and household supplies. The mayors of both Kansas Cities came. Donnelson spent part of the afternoon writing down the names of residents still in need, so the money would have somewhere specific to go.

Seventeen hundred forty dollars is not a telethon number, and Donnelson addressed that directly. “Even though some say it might be low, but you have to realize we’re doing this right here where it was affected at,” he told KSHB. That is the part worth sitting with: this was not aid arriving in the neighborhood from somewhere more comfortable. It was the neighborhood, mid-cleanup, some of it still in the dark, raising the money for itself. “When storms like this happen, and tragedy, it feels like nobody cares about us, so that’s why I fill that void,” Donnelson said. “I’m not nobody like that, but imma let you know somebody do care about you.”

The work was still going Monday. Unified Government crews and Kansas National Guard members were still moving debris off homes, per KSHB, and Henderson followed Donnelson down the street as he knocked on doors and took more names. Behind one of them was Tanya Dodson, 43 years in her house, two windows blown in, a storm-damaged tree leaning where neither she nor her neighbor could afford for it to fall. The community support, she told the station, has meant everything. The storm is the thing that needed no explaining: “It came in and went out. It did all this.” The names on Donnelson’s list are the ones the $1,740 is for.

The arc, for those keeping it: week one was The Village Initiative on Quindaro, one room full of people who needed help and people who had come to give it, doing both jobs at once while thousands were still without power. Week two was volunteers in the lot (fifty to seventy-five a day, per Justice for Wyandotte’s count), a church that lost its building holding Sunday service in a hotel, and a woman singing while she cooked, telling KCTV5: “if this is what it takes to bring us together, amen.” Week three was a pizza-lot concert that beat its goal by $240 in the middle of the damage.

Wilson already has the next step scoped, and it is not a bigger check. “I’d just like to see more people doing it,” he told KSHB, “because if more people are doing it, the bigger the wheel can roll. The wheel gets bigger and it collects more, and we’ll be a big helping community and loving each other.”

Sourcing: the concert result, scene details, and all quotes are from KSHB 41's on-the-ground reporting, August 31; the concert preview facts ran in this paper's August 28 digest, per FOX4; week-one and week-two details ran in the August 21 and 28 digests, per KSHB, KCTV5, and FOX4. The Stare was not present and claims no firsthand reporting.