After graduating from William Jewell College, Overland Park Councilmember Drew Mitrisin left the Midwest for Washington, D.C. A Missouri native, Mitrisin says it was a call from his father-in-law about five years later that brought him and his wife back to the area. They settled in Overland Park and now live in the Nall Hills neighborhood with their young daughter. “We knew that we wanted to come home because we wanted to raise our family, we wanted to have access to good schools, and we wanted to have great jobs. And that’s what we found,” he said. A new Kansas Department of Commerce campaign called “Love, Kansas” is designed to create more “boomerangs” like Mitrisin — trying to appeal to more native Kansans and others with personal connections to the region back to the Sunflower State. “We need more people to come to our community, work in our community, buy homes in our community, live in our community,” Mitrisin said at a kick-off event Thursday in Overland Park that included state and city officials, local business owners and members of the Overland Park Chamber of Commerce. (…) Andrew Weisberg, director of talent at the Overland Park Chamber, said the “Love, Kansas” campaign is focused “on attracting skilled talent back to our state” while also “keeping skilled talent” here. Bridgette Jobe, director of Kansas Tourism, said the state has roughly 86,000 open job opportunities in a variety of industries. At the same time, more than half of Kansas’s counties are reporting shrinking populations. While Johnson County doesn’t have the population loss challenges other Kansas communities have, Jobe said she sees “Love, Kansas” as an opportunity to address the statewide need for employees and the general population decline some counties are seeing.
Source: Johnson County Post
