For more than six years, Empower Missouri has been a part of a new type of funding model with the Missouri Foundation for Health. In 2019 MFH announced their new focus for their advocacy funding, called the Exemplary Advocate Cohort. A new type of experience, this team would meet several times a year over the course of then five years, which was extended an additional 18 months due to the COVID-19 pandemic. 12 organizations were chosen to participate and they sent 2 staff members who committed to 10 meetings together per year, with really with very little direction as to how it would all work out. With a leap of faith, Christine Woody (Food Security Policy Manager) and I jumped in. We are one of only two organizations whose original cohort members both lasted the full six years, and only seven original members from the original 24 participants joined us the full time. We were able to maintain the same two facilitators, and all of the original staff at MFH who dreamed up the EAC had left the Foundation by the end of the cohort. Our final meeting took place in June of 2025; we met together for a final two days at the Angad Hotel where it had all started. Only this time, we didn’t drive home in a blizzard.
Not many professional development opportunities last more than a college semester. To have received six and a half years of growth, resources, relationships, and time together is a gift that I really can’t convey in a final wrap-up article. We spent 55 meetings together, over 110 days in total. Participants got married, had children, got divorced, and lost family members in that time. Participants left jobs, left the field of advocacy, or even left the state. These relationships didn’t end up just professional; many of us became deep and true friends.
I was asked to write a quick Weekly Perspective about the end of the cohort. As you can imagine, it isn’t easy to do that. I’ve written and talked before about the work we did. So instead of even trying, I’m going to share some of the best lessons I learned from this experience below.
Messy things are worth it.
I don’t think anyone who participated in the EAC after the summer of 2020 can be in any conversation without sharing how hard this group struggled in some really serious moments. The summer of 2020 brought some new voices into the conversation around racial equity for the first time. It was messy nationally, in our communities, and in this group. Many of us wanted to throw our hands up and walk away from the entire thing (maybe the entire world).
And we didn’t.
As the pandemic started to settle down and the immediate effects in our communities were passing, we started talking about how to come back together in person. This was a team of folks who worked 60+ hour weeks before the pandemic, and that never got any ‘time off’ during the stay home orders. We did more work, new work, invisible work to try to support our communities. Many of us were vaccinated and coming around to a ‘new normal.’ This was a team that also valued our connections to the disability rights movement, and one who recognized trauma and tried to work in trauma informed ways. The pandemic was trauma. As we balanced different needs and wants and considerations, some of us felt like we’d never find an appropriate compromise.
And we did.
This is a busy team of professionals in a misunderstood field. Different organizations did different types of advocacy, different ways of mobilizing, different communities we focus on. How does a group born out of the uprising after the murder of Michael Brown connect with another organization focused on the needs of rural farmers? There was a moment in this group where we couldn’t even really agree on the meaning of the word ‘equity.’ We were in rooms designed to help us feel supported and I think every one of us had moments we felt entirely unseen. We couldn’t agree where to start, let alone what the final goal was. It all seemed impossible.
And it was possible.
There is phenomenal power in truth telling.
This next sentence may come as a shock to you (no it won’t). There were power dynamics in the room. Some of us were in positions of leadership in our organization, some were not. Some of our organizations were brand new, some over 100 years old. Some participants were with tiny organizations, some didn’t even work full time. Some of the organizations were national (or connected to national groups). We had a diverse group in regards to age, time in the field, job titles, responsibilities, incomes, education, abilities, power. MFH had staff in the room for significant parts of the experience. Some of that experience asked us to identify places our organizations weren’t meeting the mark, or to identify our own gaps, or to react to dynamics at play with funders across the state (and across the table).
I won’t say there was never any inside baseball (this is a group of professional advocates after all). However, the truths shared by some participants really knocked the wind out of the room. It was bold. It was risky. To tell the real, raw truth about our jobs, our skills, the community we lived in, interactions with other people in the cohort, our feelings. Our feelings? At work? We couldn’t have made it without that. I can’t speak for everyone, and I wasn’t in every conversation. I can say this group specifically worked hard to make sure people were safe to say really difficult things. Those statements of truth often changed the entire trajectory of the work we did. That truth telling never ended, with tense and powerful moments up until the last day (ok the day before the last day). It is likely I will never again be in a professional space with this much ‘realness.’ I am positive some of those conversations have changed my career for the better, and they certainly changed me as a human being.
You’ve got people in your corner you didn’t even expect to be there.
Truth telling is scary. It’s terrifying when you expect no one will catch you after. I was surprised often by how our little community of advocates caught each other. Unlikely ally ships worked together on policy wins and administrative advocacy. Over the course of six and a half years, this cohort wrote our own strategic plan with goals and targeted outcomes. We reached most of them, together. There are pieces of that work we each contributed individually. There are pieces we did together. There are pieces that felt painless and some that were frankly, exhausting. There were surprises with each piece.
I am a person who is more comfortable being naturally vulnerable. I bring my full self into this work, and if it isn’t right for my full self then I’d rather not do any of it. I took a few leaps in our time together. I was often caught. Sometimes by people I didn’t expect. I watched others leap. I watched them be caught. Sometimes I did the catching. Professional vulnerability paid off in this cohort in a real way.
Good work is really, really hard.
Some of those last days before we ended bumps were mine. I feel disappointed in the way the current administration is influencing the nonprofit world and the way some are responding. There isn’t one right thing to do, and I don’t like that. I still wouldn’t change the work we did for anything. It was really hard. It was really worth it. This experience impacted the organizations involved and the nonprofit field as a whole. It really benefited the state of Missouri and people who live in it. Finally, I don’t think anyone left on June 13th without recognizing how the EAC had changed them as a person.
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