Gail Melgren traded in three jobs for one this summer, but she’s doubled her geographic responsibilities. In June, she started working as district director for Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-MO, covering 32 counties in southwest and south central Missouri from West Plains to Nevada. The former director of the leadership project at Missouri State University, executive director of the Tri-State Water Resource Coalition and private consultant is succeeding the retiring David Rauch as a local sounding board, communications representative and events planner for McCaskill. Melgren is entering a new phase in a career marked by community engagement and leadership development.
Go Lead “In 2006, I went to work for Missouri State University. Along with a group of community advisers, which was composed of community leaders from the Springfield area, I created and then ran two leadership development programs – one for the nonprofit sector and one for the civic sector. Our overall goal was to increase leadership capacity in southwest Missouri, keeping with the public affairs mission of the university. … Greater Ozarks Leadership Development was the civic program, and on the nonprofit side: Greater Ozarks Leadership Education and Development. GOLD and GOLEAD were two programs that came out of that initiative. … We created and marketed seminars that we thought would increase leadership capacity in the area – for example, on legal issues, on financial issues.”
Water in the Tri-states “I have always done a lot of community volunteer work. One of the things that I had gotten involved with was a little informal group of us who were looking into water supply issues. … John Twitty, who was with (City Utilities) at the time and Dave Coonrod, who was [Greene County] commissioner, both mentioned to various folks that I knew this was something to start paying attention to. We learned about this group – the Tri-State Water Resource Coalition – that had started in the Joplin area. At that time, City Utilities had just joined and the footprint of Tri-State Water became bigger and reached over to the Springfield area. It had always been a volunteer organization, but it was at the point it wanted to hire its first staffer. Through my leadership network, I had been talking about leadership development for years, and I saw Tri-State as a way to become part of a group that would put that information into practice.”
Coming to Claire “Through all of that work and other volunteer work, I had run into David Rauch, who served in this office for six years. David had been here since Sen. McCaskill was elected for her first term and we had known each other. He is segueing into retirement, working two days a week, and they were looking for a new district director. He reached out to me. At first, I said, ‘No,’ because I really felt like I had a good thing going. But the more I thought about it, the more it captured my interest. I like new challenges. … I really thought this might be the next step for me in terms of my interest in community development and engagement and making a difference in the world I live in.”
Eyes and Ears “I have two or three basic duties. The first is to be Claire’s eyes and ears for 32 counties. (Connected) to that is communicating into those counties and communities issues related to Washington, D.C., and the federal government and to communicate about Claire. We also do constituent work here – from individuals to businesses to nonprofits; issues arise for which people look to Sen. McCaskill or agencies within the federal government for help and information. The third thing would be events. For example, a couple of months ago, Claire was in town and had a press conference [orchestrated by] our office.”
An Industrious One “It has been nice to settle into just one job. Although the learning curve is high, it is really fun to immerse myself in just this now. There’s a lot of new people to meet and new territory to cover. I’ve got 32 counties now, where before I had 16. Learning about the federal government is huge. Even for someone like me who has read the paper every day and paid attention to these sorts of issues, it is just a large task to learn about how the federal government relates to state government and local communities. Something like 40 percent of the state’s budget is pass-through money that comes from the federal government. There is enough of this job to take up my industrious self.”[[In-content Ad]]
Springfield event venue Belamour LLC gained new ownership; The Wok on West Bypass opened; and Hawk Barber & Shop closed on a business purchase that expanded its footprint to Ozark.
