The United States has the lowest poverty rate it has seen since 2001, the U.S. Census Bureau reported last week. The overall poverty rate dropped from 12.3 percent in 2017 to 11.8 percent last year. The slight percentage drop finally brings the poverty rate below its 2007 number, marking further recovery from the Great Recession. 

WORLD readers know it’s hard work to help those who have spi­raled into drugs, homelessness, and despair. That’s why many of them voted this summer for Watered Gardens in Joplin, Mo., as the 2019 grand prize winner of the Hope Awards for Effective Compassion. The ministry teaches residents to work for their room and board and eventually helps them transition to financial independence combined with dependence on God.

The midsize city of Stockton, Calif., grants some residents an extra special perk: $500 a month in additional income. The money, part of a privately funded poverty-fighting experiment, allows 31-year-old Jovan Bravo to take off from his construction job every other Saturday.

“It’s made a huge difference,” Bravo said. “Just being able to spend more time with the wife and kids, it brings us closer together.”

Court cases against opioid manufacturers are starting to make big bucks for the nation’s hardest-hit states. With potentially billions of dollars coming in, advocates for victims and their families want to make sure the money goes to help the people who need it most.

Opioid makers are dumping hundreds of millions of dollars in state coffers.

Seattle is spending $50 million to build housing for the homeless, but the cash is only a drop in the bucket—and the wrong bucket, at that.

“The homeless problem is more about mental illness and addiction than it is about physical buildings,” said Paul Guppy, vice president of research at the Washington Policy Center in Seattle. “The basic public misperception is this idea that building affordable housing will solve the homeless problem, and that’s just not true.”

Seattle has about 12,000 homeless people.

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.

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.