Penny Lorenz THINKFIRST MISSOURI, COLUMBIA

“There’s something to be said for growing up in a small town in Missouri,” says Penny Lorenz. But before you can understand how the hamlet of Harrisburg changed the course of Penny Lorenz’s life, you have to know about the accident that did, too. She was just 17, and just blocks from her home, when a car accident left her paralyzed from the waist down. But the intimate setting of her hometown, she says, “had a lot to do with my recovery. I think 90 percent of recovery through rehab is support you get not just from home, but in your community. I had that—I was never alone, I wasn’t left to deal with this by myself. I don’t know how anybody could.”

From that base, Lorenz has advanced over the past three decades to become a professional speaker and mother. She has delivered thousands of motivational speeches to students in schools all across the state on behalf of Columbia-based ThinkFirst Missouri, urging youngsters—and adults—to do just that. More than raising awareness that way, she draws deep satisfaction from being a mother to 14-year-old Emily. “She only knows me having a spinal-cord injury and being in a wheelchair, but she’d be the first to tell you, you don’t have to be on two feet to be a good parent,” Lorenz says.

Jon Doolittle NORTHWESTERN MEDICAL CENTER, ALBANY

Harvard-educated, Cerner-trained. Those two nuggets on an executive’s resume are rarities in rural Missouri, but Jon Doolittle is wielding them to make a difference in his hometown of Albany, population roughly 1,700. He’s president and CEO of Northwest Medical Center there.

“Harvard prides itself on constructing classes of leaders from all over the world who are focused on using the lessons it imparts to impact the people and places they call home,” Doolittle says. And “Cerner is an incredible laboratory that offered me wonderful opportunities, and I rely on my Cerner training and ‘Cernerized’ world view every hour of every day.” Thusly armed, this mission-driven family man says he wants to use both experiences to take care of his family and friends, “and help raise a generation of kids who will follow my lead in giving back to Northwest Missouri and the people who sacrificed for their betterment.”

When he and his wife, Jeni, moved back, he said, it was a chance to live their values publicly and see the direct result of their actions. Moreover, after 12 years in Kansas City, Albany is a perfect setting for their five children, ages two months to 9 years.

Robert George PHOTOGRAPHER, MAPLEWOOD

A great photographer understands the Heisenberg Principle: He knows that the very act of capturing an image can affect the subject matter in ways that make getting the desired shot impossible. “Oftentimes, photographers attempt to create the moment,” says Robert George. “I prefer to document what is real. I take what’s there. Rather than stepping in and shaping the moment, I want it as it is.”

An embrace of the authentic defines the work of this fine-art photographer, who works from a studio in the St. Louis suburb of Maplewood. His clientele includes Average Joes and celebrities alike, and his work will take him to photo shoots in exotic locales like Morocco and the south of France, or have him orchestrating an exhibition of his images in California.

A favorite place to shoot closer to home, he says, is in the old French town of Ste. Genevieve, on the banks of the Mississippi. George has a keen appreciation for what each of the state’s two largest cities has to offer with quality-of-life assets, finding Kansas City a breath of fresh air in ways unique from St. Louis, which has its an appeal all its own. Branson’s quirkiness is also a lure for George and his wife, college instructor Mary Anderson. They have a son attending college in Chicago.

Mark Laney HEARTLAND HEALTH, ST. JOSEPH

It came out of the blue for lifelong Texan Mark Laney: “I was minding my own business,” he says, “when I got a call from a search firm, a lady that I’d known for a number of years and really trusted. She said, ‘Mark, I’ve got his position open in St. Joseph, Missouri, at Heartland Health.’ ” How impressive was that role? Good enough to land Heartland a man described by Becker’s Hospital Review as one of the 30 Best Physician Leaders of Hospitals and Health Systems. “They won me over,” Laney says. “It’s been everything she told me it would be.”

Laney was all about Texas until getting here, spending 20 years at Cook Children’s Health Care System in Fort Worth, eight years as the president of its physician network. He formed one of the largest pediatric multi-specialty groups in the nation, with 270 physicians. Heartland is a significant step up from that, with more than 400 physicians.

In Missourians, he’s discovered people who exude qualities that make him feel at home. I always thought people in Texas were friendliest people in the U.S.,” he says “but people in northwest Missouri and St. Joseph, Kansas City, are just as friendly as Texans, and so welcoming.” Those assets, he said, are in place at Heartland, too: “Even though we’re not really big, we’re a really good health system, and we’re contributing to the positive changes that need to happen in American health care.”