On Tuesday evening, I went to the prison in Bonne Terre to stand in solidarity with our colleagues at Missourians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty in opposing the execution of Kevin Johnson. I honestly didn’t attend in my official capacity as a staff member at Empower Missouri. As I had learned the details of...Read More

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

In just over two weeks, Missouri voters will head to polls for the midterm elections. In addition to voting for federal, state, and, in some cases, local leaders, Missouri voters will weigh in on four constitutional amendments. Three of these amendments were proposed by the Missouri legislature, and one, Amendment 3, was proposed by the...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

At Empower Missouri, we know that we can change lives through effective and targeted policy change. Too many of our neighbors struggle to get their everyday needs met. Housing insecurity, hunger, over policing, historical exclusion: these negative outcomes we see today are a result of intentional, targeted, often racist policy decisions made generations ago. We...Read More

How can we promote smart sentencing in Missouri in order to reduce the number of incarcerated individuals, ease some of the demands our penal system imposes on the state budget, and attain better long-term outcomes?Read More