For the last several months we’ve been celebrating our 125th anniversary year. This fall, our Anti Poverty Advocates Summit will be the height of celebrating. Our organization started as an annual conference, the Missouri Conference on Charities and Corrections, with our first-ever event being held on January 10 and 11 in 1901 at the Downtown YMCA in St. Louis. There were 41 individuals in attendance. The early format for the conference was very simple—a Presidential Address followed by the presentation of papers on key issues of the day. The ten papers presented at the conference were all on topics related to local and state institutions or the treatment of prisoners, the mentally ill, or the poor, within those facilities. In the 125 years that followed, the conference has evolved into what is now our Anti-Poverty Advocates Summit, but the goal of bringing Missourians together to strive for a better state has remained the same.
During the 1930s through 1950s, many hotels refused to allow Black conference participants to stay in their rooms or eat in their dining halls. Conference organizers were forced to make separate accommodations for Black participants to stay and dine in private homes, although they were able to negotiate with hotel owners to allow all participants to attend sessions at hotel facilities. In 1951, MASW published a report entitled “Racial Discrimination in St. Louis Hotels,” endorsed by twenty civil rights organizations in St. Louis. After nearly two decades of leadership striving to find conference locations that would fully include participants of all racial backgrounds, Empower, then named Missouri Association for Social Welfare (MASW), hosted its first fully integrated conference in 1953 at The Elms hotel in Excelsior Springs. This was the first fully integrated conference held in Missouri. In the years that followed, many St. Louis hotels abolished their discriminatory practices, and conferences were able to be fully integrated moving forward– a full decade before the Civil Rights Acts was passed in 1964.
For more than a century, Empower Missouri’s summit has hosted some of the most brilliant and recognized names in our state. In 1961, Harry S. Truman attended our conference in Kansas City at the Hotel Muehlebach. More than 1,100 people attended the three-day conference, the largest conference ever in Kansas City, and second in size only to Empower’s 60th annual conference in St. Louis the year before.
Though the organization has grown and changed over the years, we have continued to host annual conferences, and in 2026 we will do that again. Our Summit is an opportunity to bring together advocates, impacted community members, policy nerds, deep thinkers, and concerned neighbors in fellowship and learning.
We asked a few long time Empower Missouri supporters to share some stories with us. Three voices, Vickie Riddle, Deb Prat, and Larry Leip joined me and recorded a podcast, available to listen to here. Below some others provided written responses:
Don Love wrote these kind words: “I got involved with MASW about 2000 when Peter DeSimone was director. What I liked most is that the organization was driven by input from social workers who had first hand experience with people who were failed by policies and the social workers knew the sorts of policy changes that were needed.”
Brian Colby shared about his many years connected to Empower:
What was the first MASW/Empower MO Summit or conference you attended?
2006 My father was involved in the KC Chapter and they needed a part time coordinator and he volunteered me to do it. I really didn’t know anything about MASW back then. I liked the work and continued with MASW. I was given the job of Health Care Policy Director and began the work of passing the Affordable Care Act and eventually Medicaid Expansion. I would work on healthcare reform in one way or another for 20 years. It all began with MASW.I learned a great deal about multiple issues but the thing that stuck out were the people, the community of people that came together to give their time, energy and intellect to solve problems that were not their own. That is really rare and at the heart of the mission of Empower.”
We hope you’ll join us this year for our 125th Anniversary Summit on October 1st & 2nd in Columbia, to celebrate all Empower Missouri has done in the past and all that is coming in our future. You can find more information and register here.
Spanish 
English