Empower Missouri started over 100 years ago as an annual conference, making the job of planning and executing our annual Anti-Poverty Summit even more significant. Ask any nonprofit staff and they’ll tell you that conference execution is no joke. I have to uplift our team and give them a round of applause: 2022’s return to...Read More

This December, join Empower Missouri staff, coalition members, and other advocates for a Holiday Happy Hour! We’ll be previewing legislation that has been pre-filed and discussing our priorities for the 2023 session. You’ll also have the opportunity to be in community with other advocates and learn about the anti-poverty work happening across our coalitions. Happy...Read More

This December, join Empower Missouri staff, coalition members, and other advocates for a Holiday Happy Hour! We’ll be previewing legislation that has been pre-filed and discussing our priorities for the 2023 session. You’ll also have the opportunity to be in community with other advocates and learn about the anti-poverty work happening across our coalitions. Happy...Read More

This December, join Empower Missouri staff, coalition members, and other advocates for a Holiday Happy Hour! We’ll be previewing legislation that has been pre-filed and discussing our priorities for the 2023 session. You’ll also have the opportunity to be in community with other advocates and learn about the anti-poverty work happening across our coalitions. Happy...Read More

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is the nation’s largest anti-hunger program and helps millions of people who are at risk for food insecurity every month. Specifically, SNAP is vitally important to low income seniors across our nation.  In 2020, more than 5 million adults ages 60 and older were food-insecure, meaning they had limited...Read More

In 2018, I read Peter Temin’s book The Vanishing Middle Class. He got a lot of press coverage when the book was released, in large part because of his thesis that households who are working to escape poverty really need about 20 years without catastrophe. He theorized that on an individual level, it is sometimes...Read More

Just a few weeks into the new school year, many families are learning that after two years of all Missouri public school children receiving free school lunches, the School Lunch Program has returned to pre-pandemic form. Back in March of 2020, many Federal child nutrition waivers were offered as a form of COVID-19 relief. These...Read More

The governor has called a special session next week for the legislature to debate the largest income tax cut in Missouri’s history. The governor’s proposal would:  Reduce the top rate of income tax from the current 5.3% to 4.8%. Increase the standard deduction by $2,000 for single filers and $4,000 for joint filers. Eliminate the...Read More

Over the last six weeks, we have described Missouri’s practice of outsourcing probation and supervision services to private businesses and introduced why it is a problem and why we seek to make this a priority. For another brief summary of the issue, Human Rights Watch produced a short video describing how for-profit companies impact us....Read More

This past spring, as the school year was winding down, nonprofits across the country began working on plans to implement their summer feeding programs for kids. Planning was harder than usual though, as nonprofits were unsure what this summer would look like. The waivers that were put into place in March 2020 in light of...Read More