The firm has established a niche position, designing
public participation programs for transportation, design-build,
economic development and other government-initiated projects for
construction, architectural, engineering and community development
firms.
To date, approximately ninety-five percent of
Phillips-West’s work is obtained through referrals.
Before opening the firm in 1988, Carrie E. Stapleton
the firm’s president, worked in a public relations capacity
for several organizations including the Black Archives of Mid-American,
the Kansas City, Missouri School District, the Heart of America
United way and as a public relations assistant to former Jackson
County Executive Bill Waris. Prior to work in public relations,
Stapleton, who holds a Bachelor of Science Degree in Journalism
from Kansas State University, worked as a reporter, columnist
and women’s page assistant editor for the Salina Journal
Newspaper in Salina, Kansas.
Of the many projects Stapleton has promoted,
she is the most proud of her first venture into the public relations
arena as public relations coordinator for the Black Archives of
Mid-America, Inc. While at this organization, her boss and mentor,
the late Horace M. Peterson, the founder and executive director
of the Black Archives of Mid-America, and the inspiration for
the Historic 18th and Vine Jazz District, assigned her project
manager of the Kansas City exhibition of the Emancipation Proclamation,
the landmark document that freed our nation’s slaves. The
document traveled to Kansas City from its permanent home at the
National Archives and Records in Washington, D.C. where it was
displayed at the Nelson-Atkins Gallery of Art for four days where
over 10,000 persons viewed it. The Kansas City visit marked the
only third time the document had been exhibited outside its Washington,
D.C. home.
For the Emancipation showing, Stapleton was responsible
for the negotiations with the National Archives, coordinating
the marketing and exhibit, media relations and the arrangement
of high-level security a preservation techniques that the document
required.
