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.

The Arkansas Department of Education awarded a $540,000 five-year grant to Arkadelphia Public Schools to be used specifically for the Boys & Girls Club. Southern Bancorp awarded a $125,000 three-year grant to help sustain the Club. Additionally, the local community raised $35,000 for the project, including donations from the Ross Foundation, the United Way of Clark County, the Cone Foundation and the Arkadelphia Noon Rotary Club.

BOLTON, MISSISSIPPI – Today, United States Representative Bennie G. Thompson (D-MS) announced The United States Department of Housing & Urban Development has awarded $710,900 to Southern Bancorp Capital Partners of Helena, Arkansas to build on momentum for the neighboring Coahoma County, Mississippi by developing a detailed, sophisticated plan for revitalizing the physical and economic infrastructure of the County, including housing, transportation, natural resources, and water systems. The Sustainable Communities planning process will follow on the heels of the county-wide strategic planning process that is currently underway, and will involve stakeholders and members of the general public developing a more detailed, in-depth plan for the areas covered by the Sustainable Communities program.

The Arkadelphia Board of Education has entered an agreement with Southern Bancorp and Clark County Child Care, Inc., to transfer leadership and management of the Clark County Child Care facility and program to the Arkadelphia School District.

According to information from the Arkadelphia School, CCCC has operated as a non-profit organization since it was established 18 months ago as one of the outcomes of the Clark County Strategic Plan. The program currently serves 94 children, aged six weeks to four years.

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.