HELENA-WEST HELENA — Helena-West Helena’s Cathy Cunningham will be honored as the Women’s Foundation of Arkansas’s 2010 Woman of the Year in Philanthropy at the organization’s annual Power of the Purse luncheon. The event will be held at 11 a.m. Friday, Oct. 15 in the Wally Allen Ballroom of the Statehouse Convention Center in Little Rock.

As community development coordinator for Southern Bancorp Southern Partners, Cunningham is actively involved in helping develop a Civil War interpretation plan. She also serves as chair of the Helena-West Helena Advertising and Promotion Commission, a member of the Phillips County Community College Foundation Board and a Southern Bancorp board member.

Southern Bancorp: an economic engine fueling Delta communities. In the mid-1980s, when the national economy was experiencing a recovery period marked by increasing employment rates and rising personal incomes, empty storefronts, dilapidated buildings, and crumbling infrastructure were sights all too familiar in the Delta region of Arkansas. Along with the physical decay of the region’s small towns, the human price of economic decline was written on the faces of many Delta residents who faced a bleak future of rising unemployment, little access to health care, substandard housing, and failing schools.

In 1986, in an unprecedented move that would change the course of the region’s future, then Governor Bill Clinton and the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation announced an initiative to help stem the tide of economic decline in rural Arkansas with a creative and passionate approach to rural development banking. Southern Bancorp and its nonprofit affiliates, was incorporated as a result of this effort and has set a standard for rural development banking that has made it the largest and most profitable rural development institution in the nation, with over $1.1 billion in assets.

Bank deposits in Arkansas grew by more than 4 percent – officially, almost 5 percent – in the year that ended on June 30 and exceeded $50 billion for the first time, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.’s annual summary of deposits shows.

A few banks in the state benefited from merger and acquisition activity. Southern Bancorp Bank of Arkadelphia, for instance, is now the 15th-largest bank in Arkansas after collapsing the charters of sister banks in West Helena and Blytheville.

Southern Bancorp of Arkadelphia was the recipient of Entergy Corporation’s Making Things Brighter award presented at the Low-Income Advocates Leadership & Community Development Conference recently in Little Rock. The award is given in recognition of individuals and organizations who work on behalf of the poor and, in the eyes of their peers, exemplify the values of self-sacrifice, dedication and the desire to help those in need.

The Sunflower River weir project has received sufficient funding now that all of the interested parties have come on board.

Mac Crank, executive director of Clarksdale Revitalization, Inc., told the Clarksdale Board of Mayor and Commissioners Sept. 13 that the Delta Bridge Project is providing a $150,000 grant and Southern Bancorp has agreed to appropriate some $39,000 to complete the weir project.

The long-awaited Boys Girls Club of Clark County will open its doors September 7th, thanks to funding from local and state sources totaling $700,000 over five years.

Establishment of a Boys Girls Club for Clark County has been a long-standing goal of the Clark County community and specifically the Clark County Strategic Plans Leadership Development Subcommittee. The 9,000 square foot club building is located on the Goza Middle School campus next to the school’s gym and computer labs. Arkadelphia Public Schools also has committed funds to hire a teacher to work with students after school.

A Crime Task Force that brings together the Helena-West Helena Police Department, Phillips County Sheriff’s Office and Arkansas State Police are seeking community support to make their plans for a substation in downtown Helena.

Joe Black, president of Southern Bancorp Capital Partners (SBCP), an affiliate of Southern Bancorp, who’s been ardently involved in promoting tourism, said crime is a deterrent to the growth of tourism and the task force and creation of a police substation has been one of his more pressing goals.

The long-awaited Boys & Girls Club of Clark County will open its doors Sept. 7, thanks to funding from local and state sources totaling $700,000 over five years.

Establishment of a Boys & Girls Club for Clark County has been a long-standing goal of the Clark County community and specifically the Clark County Strategic Plan’s Leadership Development Subcommittee.

Recognizing that Helena and Clarksdale, Miss. have a lot in common in terms of their heritage, history, and music, Delta business and professional leaders gathered here Wednesday to devise a strategy to enhance tourism and economic development for the sister cities.

The midday session at the Delta Cultural Center’s Depot was arranged through Southern Financial Partners with Joe Black as senior vice president.

This month, the Little Rock branch of the Federal Reserve Bank reopened – not to service bank customers, but students. The e-Stem High Public Charter School started its semester last Monday in two newly-renovated buildings listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

But that’s nothing new for this innovative school. Two years ago, they chose a former newspaper building as their first campus. The downtown school quickly had a waiting list of over 1,000 students, which was far more than they could accommodate.

Southern Bancorp CDC, which has provided renovation assistance and financing to other public schools, bought the old Federal Reserve Bank in 2009 and is now leasing the building to e-Stem Public Charter Schools. Despite mechanical and plumbing obstacles, the building’s proximity, historic finishes, and ability to be renovated to fit current educational needs made it a perfect fit for e-Stem’s expansion.