Good advocacy takes many forms. Sometimes it looks like changing a law. Sometimes it means making sure a person doesn’t lose their home. Sometimes it means showing up at a city council meeting, organizing a community, or making sure the voices of people most affected by a policy are heard. This year, Empower Missouri is...Read More

An interesting question crossed my mind the other day – What would Missouri look like without Empower Missouri? Empower Missouri is the oldest and largest anti-poverty advocacy organization in our state. In 1901, a group of 41 Missourians came together at the YMCA in St. Louis to discuss critical, deep-rooted societal issues. This group continued...Read More

Last week Empower Missouri was joined by almost 200 advocates, community members, and supporters for our Day of Action at the State Capitol. It was a fantastic day of advocacy, camaraderie, and community. Attendees reached every corner of the Capitol, and it seemed like every time I turned a corner or stepped onto the elevator,...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 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