Ten years ago, fresh off his loss to Bush/Cheney as John Kerry's running mate, John Edwards returned home to open a center on poverty at the University of North Carolina School of Law, his alma mater.

Today, that move looks downright prescient: Ranked better than average in poverty in 2005, North Carolina has since experienced the greatest increase in concentrated poverty in the country. Charlotte has the worst upward mobility of America’s 50 biggest cities. In the east, hundreds of black agricultural towns are neglected and abandoned, and in the west, the Blue Ridge Mountains of Appalachia are suffering from a meth and prescription drug epidemic.

The Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity was formed by Edwards—the son of a mill worker—and UNC Law School Dean Gene Nichol with a stated mission to “advocate for proposals, policies and services to mitigate poverty in North Carolina.” Edwards used the center to hone his “Two Americas” platform for 2008, and an early bipartisan event featured former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp. Then Edwards left to run for president.

After a controversial stint as president of the College of William & Mary, Nichol took over the Poverty Center in 2008. The following year, the Great Recession forced education cuts that ended public funding for the center, which carried on with a $117,000 budget made up of private grants from the UNC Law Foundation and Z. Smith Reynolds.

Then Republicans swept the 2010 midterm and won the governorship in 2012, giving the GOP control of Raleigh for the first time since the Reconstruction. Despite the state's fifth-highest unemployment rate in the nation, legislators cut unemployment benefits, refused to expand Medicaid, slashed taxes on the rich and raised them on the poor. North Carolina fell to eleventh worst in poverty.