Truman School of Government and Public Affairs

The Women’s Foundation is partnering with IPP as they expand their geographical reach across Missouri. The Foundation aims to increase its public policy outreach by undertaking a baseline study of the status of women in Missouri. The baseline study will center around six dimensions of women’s lives – age, diversity, earnings, education, marital status, and poverty. The Foundation’s previous work examined the state of women in the Greater Kansas City Area and determined that many barriers to success exist for women.

This brief synthesizes research on paid family leave policies and practices and highlights the current status of paid family leave legislation in Missouri.  Paid Family Leave programs allow a portion of the employee’s wages to be paid if he or she takes leave from work for the birth or adoption of a child or to care for an ill or injured family member. In some cases, paid family leave has been extended to include leave taken for situations related to domestic violence such as court proceedings or relocation, or in support of a family member who is on active military duty.

This research analyzes occupational licensing in Missouri and identifies remedies that could be implemented by the community, administration, or legislature to reduce the barriers to women entrepreneurs without sacrificing safety.

IPP contracted with the Women’s Foundation in Kansas City to conduct research on best practices for reaching gender pay equity in Missouri. The first phase of this project includes:

Each year, the City of Columbia and County of Boone contract with local social service agencies to provide a wide range of social services to citizens of Columbia and Boone County. Providing funding for needed services is intended to improve the quality of life for the recipients of services and the community as a whole.

For the 4th year the City/County have contracted with the Institute of Public Policy to provide a capacity evaluation of the agencies which are being considered for funding.

The goals of the provider capacity evaluation process are to:

IPP provided professional strategic planning services for a local nonprofit – Mid-Missouri Legal Services – from February through April 2017. Through courses of strategic planning and action planning sessions with members of the organization, IPP developed a three-year strategic plan for the organization.

Deliverables included:

The Missouri Housing Development Commission (MHDC) contracted with the Public Policy Research Center at the University of Missouri-St.

The Enhanced Re-Entry Project (E-REP) was designed to reduce recidivism for 224 recently released, high-risk offenders in Boone County. E-REP implements promising practices and evidenced-based principles in an outpatient re-entry program addressing key risk factors for recidivism. These risk factors include: substance use, employment, retention, and access to recovery support services.

IPP contracted with Epworth Children and Youth Services to conduct an evaluation of an adapted version of the Teen Outreach Program (TOP), and evidence-based teen pregnancy prevention program.

While women represent about half of Missouri’s population, the government charged with representing their interests does not reflect this.  Engaging women in government is not only important in legislatures.  The work of local and state boards and commissions also affects women.  However, gender parity in these bodies remains a problem.  The Women’s Foundation has created the Appointments Project to address this challenge.  By helping women apply and submitting them as candidates to state and local boards, the Women’s Foundation hopes to appoint more women and, in t