…The idea was formed to “take a bank and make it more than just a bank,” Baldwin said. The bank’s main shareholders are nonprofits. It moved into the Delta and began focusing on community development in the most impoverished areas. In Phillips County, Ark., the bank paid to bulldoze a dangerous abandoned downtown building and turned it into a park for kids to play in. The bank also paid for low-housing development projects and paid poor families to move into better housing so that their old, intolerable homes – which Baldwin described as not having running water or electricity and smelling like sewage because the infrastructure was so bad that the pipes had all burst – could be bulldozed. The bank also engaged the community to create a set of strategic goals for itself, and economic development followed. The county decided to focus on sweet potatoes and biodiesel; the bank helped raise money for a $2 million sweet potato storage facility and a $25 million biodiesel facility, and the entire area is working on building the Delta College Preparatory Charter School…
