Iowa has a bigger refugee and immigrant population than most people give it credit for, and a new media project launching this month wants to make sure it stops being an afterthought in state news coverage.
Common Thread Iowa, a new social-first reporting effort led by journalist Jazari Kual, launches as one of the first community-specific programs under New Day Iowa, a new organization built by Liz Fleming and Pat Rynard. [Disclosure: Rynard founded Iowa Starting Line in 2015. He left the company in 2025 and has no current editorial involvement with the newsroom.]
Kual, who is based in Lincoln, Nebraska, has spent the last several years building an audience on TikTok by covering stories most American outlets skip—a fuel blockade disrupting Mali’s economy, a water crisis in South Africa, and the ripple effects of the Strait of Hormuz conflict on both Kenyan flower exports and Nebraska farmers’ access to nitrogen.
“I really try to look at what is happening and how it’s affecting people without making it about myself, but also just seeing how these local communities could be impacted,” Kual said.
Kual’s path to this work wasn’t a straight line. He studied computer science and worked in student loan quality assurance before falling into photojournalism during the 2020 protests following George Floyd’s murder. He later transferred into journalism school and did a fellowship at Arizona State’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, where he contributed to a Webby Award-winning documentary project on abortion access after the fall of Roe v. Wade.
Rynard told Iowa Starting Line he’d wanted to launch something like Common Thread Iowa for years but lacked the resources.
“Iowa’s refugee community, like in many upper Midwest states, is much larger than most realize, and many are now US citizens,” Rynard said. “But they’re frequently overlooked in state and political conversations.”
Roughly 204,000 immigrants live in Iowa today, about 6.3% of the state’s population, according to 2024 Census data compiled by USAFacts. And it’s not a new phenomenon: Iowa has actively recruited immigrants to live here since the 1870s, when the state published a booklet — literally titled “Iowa: The Home for Immigrants” — to attract German, Swedish, and Dutch settlers, later drawing Italian coal miners and, more recently, Latino workers into the meatpacking and agricultural industries that still rely heavily on immigrant labor today.
Rynard, who worked on political campaigns before founding Iowa Starting Line, said that experience shaped how he thinks about reaching immigrant communities.
“On every campaign I worked on, I made sure to do outreach to refugee and immigrant communities, even if their turnout numbers weren’t high,” he said. “I always found that if you actually talk with people and engage them, you can get them involved relatively easily.”
Rynard said he met Kual earlier this year and was looking for a way to work with him on a project. For Kual, the mission comes down to something simpler: making sure a story doesn’t go untold just because it’s inconvenient to cover.
“Just learning more about different cultures and experiences … feeds into the thread and the weaving of Iowa,” Kual said. “The one thing that I always hope that any of my reporting does is get people much more engaged in whatever process they feel passionate about, where they feel like they could make the most difference.”
Common Thread Iowa can be followed on Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook.
