Last year the financial website 24/7 Wall St. declared the Waterloo–Cedar Falls, Iowa, area America’s worst place for African Americans to live. White people there have higher employment and earn almost twice as much as blacks, who have less education and higher arrest rates. Sarah Helleso, 25, is a member of Orchard Hill Church in Cedar Falls. She said residents have noticed the divide for a long time: “There are people in Cedar Falls who won’t go to Waterloo, and then people in Waterloo who have no interest in going to Cedar Falls.”

When Emma Lazarus wrote her iconic poem “The New Colossus” in the 19th century, no public welfare system existed in the United States to help needy immigrants. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” she wrote, with no expectation that the tired, poor, huddled masses would get a handout from the government.

Two years into his first pastorate, Mark Looman sat down to lunch with his wife Dorothy and their two girls. From Mark’s perspective, everything was normal, but over the last eight years, Dorothy’s frustration had been silently building. At that lunch, it became too much: She told Mark she did not love him anymore and walked out the door. “I wasn’t sure if I’d even see her again,” Mark says.

A large-scale immigration raid on seven food processing plants in Mississippi last week sparked concerns about the welfare of the children of the 680 adults arrested. The raid took place on Wednesday, the first day of school, and reports circulated that children were coming home to find their parents gone. I called sources on the ground in Mississippi to find out what happened and who is taking care of the affected children.

Contrary to claims by those on the far left, including Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, America’s shrinking middle class is nothing to complain about. A recent analysis by Mark Perry at the American Enterprise Institute shows more people are moving up in income, and wealth, not poverty, is diminishing the size of the middle class.

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This story is part of our 2019 Hope Awards contest. To vote for your favorite regional winner, go to wng.org/compassion.