Mark Your Calendars Now – Our 2024 Anti-Poverty Advocates Summit will Feature Two Incredible Keynotes!

On November 12th and 13th Empower Missouri will host its annual Anti-Poverty Advocates Summit, bringing together advocates from across the state to explore the many ways poverty impacts our neighbors’ lives, and how effective policy change can serve as a long-term solution. The event will feature opportunities to learn from local and national leaders in the field to advance advocacy skills, explore organizing tools, and take an in-depth look at the many issues driving poverty in our state.

Early Bird tickets will go on sale on Thursday, August 1st, so mark your calendars now. We’re excited to announce that the 2024 Summit will feature two incredible keynote speakers, Andrea Elliott and Merideth Rose – and you won’t want to miss it! Read more about both below, and check back often for more updates as the schedule is finalized.

Andrea Elliott is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has documented the lives of poor Americans, Muslim immigrants and other people on the margins of power. She is an investigative reporter for The New York Times and the author of Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City, which won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction.

Invisible Child follows eight dramatic years in the life of Dasani Coates, a child with an imagination as soaring as the skyscrapers near her Brooklyn homeless shelter. Born at the turn of a new century, Dasani is named for the bottled water that comes to symbolize Brooklyn’s gentrification and the shared aspirations of a divided city. As Dasani grows up, moving with her tight-knit family from shelter to shelter, this story goes back to trace the passage of Dasani’s ancestors from slavery to the Great Migration north.

By turns heartbreaking and revelatory, provocative and inspiring, Invisible Child tells an astonishing story about the power of resilience, the importance of family, and the cost of inequality. Based on nearly a decade of reporting, this book vividly illuminates some of the most critical issues in contemporary America through the life of one remarkable girl.

Elliott is also the recipient of the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, a George Polk award, an Overseas Press Club Award and was awarded a 2007 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. In 2023, she joined Princeton University as a visiting lecturer and Ferris Professor of Journalism. In 2015, she was awarded Columbia University’s Medal for Excellence, given to one alumnus under the age of 45. She has also received honorary doctorates from Occidental College and from Niagara University, which cited her “courage, perseverance, and a commitment to fairness for those without a public voice rarely demonstrated among writers today.”

Elliott came to The New York Times from The Miami Herald, where she covered crime, immigration and Latin American politics. Raised in Washington, D.C. by a Chilean mother and an American father, she attended Occidental College before earning a master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

For more information on Andrea Elliott, please visit her on Instagram, Twitter, or at andrea-elliott.com.

Merideth Rose is the President and CEO of Cornerstones of Care, a 154-year-old behavioral health agency that serves over 15,000 youth and families across Kansas and Missouri, annually. She is a dedicated advocate for children and families, a proactive civic leader, and a driving force behind strength-based community transformation throughout metropolitan Kansas City.

Before joining Cornerstones of Care, Merideth was the Chief People Officer at the Community Services League in Independence, Missouri. Prior to that, she was the Director of Neighborhood, Family Services, and Caring Communities for the Independence School District.

Merideth’s extensive experience includes serving as the Public Affairs Officer for the Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), where she was the principal advisor and Deputy to the External Affairs Director. Notably, she led the agency’s largest Community Relations deployment of 1,300 disaster responders following Superstorm Sandy in New York in 2012.

Honored by the Kansas City Business Journal as one of twenty-five honorees in the 2024 class of Women Who Mean Business, Merideth is an alumna of Park University, holding a Bachelor of Arts in Communication Theory and Human Relations (2006) and a Master of Public Affairs (2008). She is also a 2009 graduate of the Mid-America Regional Council’s Leadership Academy for Local Government Executives. Merideth actively participates in several boards and civic organizations, including Park University’s Board of Trustees, Health Forward Foundation’s Community Advisory Council (as a mayoral appointee), the Truman Heartland Community Foundation Board of Directors, the Missouri Alliance for Children and Families (MACF), and the Children’s Alliance of Kansas.

Today Merideth says her most treasured accomplishment is being a young girl once broken by trauma, now restored by grace and the power of caring communities. Courageously, she is proud to share her personal story “Reframing Broken” in whatever opportunities she can. As a byproduct of a successful kinship adoption, a domestic violence survivor and thriver from teenage pregnancy, homelessness, and poverty, Merideth finds it both a humbling and transformative experience to uplift hearts and minds to hear that no life story is so far gone or broken, that it is not worthy of healing, restoration and abundant life.

We’ll be sharing more information about other speakers as details are finalized, so make sure you are subscribed to our Advocacy in Action newsletter to get the latest news!