Evergy Hometown Grants: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Evergy Hometown Grants program is and who runs it

Evergy Hometown Grants is a community grant program run by Evergy, the electric utility serving customers across Kansas. The program exists to fund organizations that address basic needs, and it puts the final funding decision in the hands of the public rather than a closed panel. Each cycle, Evergy invites applications, its Community Relations team narrows the field, and the shortlisted projects compete for votes online.

The structure is simple. Three winners are chosen in each cycle, and each receives a grant of up to $10,000 for community impact work. The ballot itself lives on Evergy's own newsroom site, at newsroom.evergy.com, not on any third-party balloting service, which means the rules, dates and finalist list all come from the company's own pages.

For supporters, this makes the program unusual among Kansas public votes. Most ballots in the state are reader's choice contests run by local publications, where businesses compete across many categories. Here the vote is a single funding decision about ten community projects, and the reward is grant money for basic needs work rather than a title or a plaque.

The dated record for Evergy Hometown Grants

The 2026 cycle is fully dated. Applications were open from February 2 to March 4, 2026, and are now closed. Evergy's Community Relations team then selected the top ten projects, and online voting takes place March 16 to 25, 2026. After the window closes, Evergy announces the three Hometown Grants winners, the projects that finished with the most public support.

Confirmed editions ran in 2023, 2024 and 2025, with 2026 the most recent, which makes the program an annual fixture on Evergy's community calendar. The 2026 announcement is the latest confirmed cycle, and the next expected edition falls in 2027, though Evergy has not yet printed application or voting dates for that year.

Two things about the ballot remain unstated. Evergy has not published the list of project categories the finalists compete within, nor any per-supporter voting limit or eligibility text for the public round; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The announcement page carries the dates, the finalist count and the award amount, and stops there, so anything beyond those facts has to be read off the current ballot itself rather than assumed from an earlier year.

How a supporter votes in the Evergy Hometown Grants round

Voting in the 2026 round is a plain online action during a ten-day window. A supporter visits Evergy's newsroom announcement, which is the page linked from this guide, reviews the ten finalist projects, and casts a vote for the project they want funded. The window runs March 16 to 25, 2026, and the three projects with the most votes at the close are named winners.

Because the ballot sits on Evergy's own site, there is no third-party platform to learn. The announcement page is the single destination for both information and voting, and Evergy promotes the round through its own channels while it is open. Supporters who want a specific project to win should act early in the window rather than waiting for the final days, since a ten-day window leaves little room to recover from a slow start.

The organizer has not printed instructions about account requirements, repeat voting or vote verification on the announcement page. A supporter who wants certainty about how often they may vote, or whether a login is needed, should read the live ballot during the window, because those details sit with the current round rather than with any summary of it.

How this ballot sits beside other Kansas public votes

Evergy Hometown Grants is unlike the reader's choice ballots that dominate the Kansas public-vote calendar. Those contests, run by local publishers, ask audiences to pick favorite businesses across dozens of categories, and they run on dedicated balloting platforms. Evergy's program is a single-purpose grant vote: ten projects, one question, and grant money of up to $10,000 for the top three.

Its closest comparisons on this site are the state's best-of contests. Best of Wichita and Best of Lawrence cover city-level business voting, while Best of Johnson County and Best of KC (Kansas City Magazine) serve the metro side of the state. CommunityVotes Overland Park and CommunityVotes Topeka round out the set with nominate-then-vote formats.

What separates the Evergy ballot from all of them is the organizer and the stakes. A utility runs it, the field is pre-screened by staff to ten projects, and the outcome is direct funding for basic needs work rather than a marketing title. For a Kansas nonprofit, that makes the vote worth treating as a funded grant application with a public popularity round attached, and the outreach plan should reflect the short, fixed window in March.

Strengthening support for a project in the Evergy vote

A project's best asset in this ballot is a clear, specific ask. The window is only ten days, March 16 to 25, so supporters need to know exactly which project to choose and where to click. A short message with the project name, the link and the closing date of March 25 outperforms a general plea for support, especially for organizations whose audiences only hear about the round once.

Evergy has not published rules covering coordinated voting pushes or outside assistance for the Hometown Grants round, so a project planning any coordinated effort should read the live ballot and its terms first. The mechanics that matter here are ordinary ones: early outreach, a reminder near the close, and making the vote action effortless for the supporter. Our votes guide covers those tactics in detail, and our award votes page explains the options for competitive ballots generally.