Mission Statement

Transform rural Southern communities by creating new educational and economic opportunities for people with limited resources.

Our goals are to increase educational attainment, decrease unemployment, and reduce poverty.We accomplish these goals through comprehensive community development, human development, financial services, and public policy change.

Southern works to revitalize the rural mid-South by building communities and changing lives. Most of our communities are located in the Mississippi Delta with a legacy of long term poverty, economic decline, loss of population and many other severe challenges.

Southern builds communities through a comprehensive community-driven strategic planning process that helps residents create and then build local capacity to implement a shared vision for economic recovery. Southern changes lives by directly helping individuals and families build educational, financial, and material assets so they can create better futures for themselves and their families. Southern works to magnify the impact of these efforts by seeking proactive public policy change and providing nontraditional financing to businesses with potential to create jobs and invest in their communities. By building on the financial, social, and human capital that Southern provides, targeted communities can become engines that drive revitalization in surrounding communities and across regions.

Southern is a community development financial institution and a 501c3 nonprofit affiliate of Southern Bancorp (SBI), one of America’s largest community development banks.With resources available to Southern through this long-term partnership, Southern implements its revitalization activities in communities where SBI has a bank presence. Southern’s targets three transformational goals: reducing poverty, decreasing unemployment, and increasing educational attainment in the targeted communities over the next generation. Southern’s award-winning strategic community planning effort engages local residents, business leaders, and other stakeholders in creating a shared vision for revitalization. Southern’s staff then works with local leaders until the goals are achieved and the community begins to turn around. Southern fuels this process by leveraging public and private funding and providing loans and grants to achieve community goals. Southern also offers programs that help low- and moderate-income families build income and assets, such as matched savings accounts, financial literacy education, and housing and credit counseling. These programs help families to improve financial stability, buy and maintain homes, start businesses, and attend college. Southern’s volunteer tax assistance provides thousands of low-income families quality tax preparation services that maximize use of Earned Income Tax and other credits. Successful public policy initiatives, such as putting an end to payday lending in Arkansas and creation of a state Housing Trust Fund, expand Southern’s impact exponentially throughout the region.

Over the last seven years, Southern has generated more than $155 million in funding and over $3 billion in cumulative bank loans in distressed Delta markets, providing capital for new and expanding business, school improvement models, increased access to healthcare services, and other community-initiated enhancements. Southern’s efforts have proven so successful in Phillips County and Clark County, Arkansas that Southern also initiated its strategic development process in Coahoma County, Mississippi. Focused on measuring the impact of its efforts, Southern established a social metrics program that tracks critical indicators related to its three transformational goals and foster continual program improvement. Southern’s efforts have already gained national recognition from organizations as diverse as the Council on Foundations, Bloomberg’s Business Week, Corporation for Enterprise Development, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, and the American Bankers Association. Southern’s vision is to expand this model to additional communities in the next twenty years, creating a strategic cluster of revitalized communities and transforming the region spanning from northeast Arkansas to the Gulf Coast. By focusing on particular pivotal communities, rather than spreading its efforts across a vast region, Southern concentrates its resources to achieve maximum impact.