SGFF and Southern Bancorp Use RuFES Framework to Organize Efforts

The purpose of the visit was to study how SGFF and its partners are very effectively using the Casey Foundation’s RuFES framework of “Earn It,” “Keep It,” and “Grow It,” to link and integrate their programs and services. The site visit provided time to learn from the experiences of SGFF and then for participants to exchange ideas, review their own progress in light of what they were observing and learning, and refine their action plans to take back home.

SGFF was started in 1988 as a microloan fund modeled after the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh.  It is part of the multi-pronged strategy of Southern Bancorp to help transform rural economies by investing in people, jobs, businesses and property. SGFF works in a multi-county area in Arkansas and Mississippi, and has offices in Jefferson and Phillips County, Arkansas.  The challenges are great:  Jefferson County has a 21 percent poverty rate (31 percent for African Americans), and Phillips County has a poverty rate of 33 percent (45 percent for African Americans).

SGFF was first introduced to the Earn It, Keep It, Grow It framework at a RuFES Institute, cosponsored by Casey and the National Rural Funders Collaborative, and organized by Aspen CGS, held in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in December 2004.  The organization’s president, Angela Duran, and four of her colleagues who also were at the meeting immediately saw that they were already working in all three goal areas, but their efforts were playing out in separate silos. 

They knew that the framework would help them better understand and explain how their programs are interrelated, would help to construct bridges between program areas, and bring new energy and synergy to their work.  Their four SGFF program areas—Asset Builders, Business Development Center, Career Pathways and Public Policy—easily lent themselves to the approach.  Duran and her staff returned to Arkansas and retooled their thinking and program interactions using the RuFES rubric.