The challenge

Phillips County, on the far-eastern edge of Arkansas, is known as the gateway to the Mississippi River Delta. The names of Marvell and surrounding communities appear often in the history of racial violence in the Delta, a legacy that continues to touch many lives. Population in Phillips County has dropped substantially within the past decade. While the number of jobs increased 84 percent in the United States between 1969 and 2000, it decreased by 23 percent in Phillips County. Only 62 percent of the area's adults are high-school graduates. Other concerns include higher-than-average health risks, an under-funded education system, a lack of safe and affordable housing, and too few recreational opportunities for young people.

Seeds of commitment

Raised eight miles from Marvell, Beatrice Clark Shelby graduated from Marvell High School in 1966 and obtained a secretary's certificate from Southern Business College in North Little Rock. "I was a daydreamer," she once told a reporter. She read voraciously as a girl. "I didn't see things as other people did. I thought about how I wanted the world to be, not how it was." Ever since graduating from high school, Shelby has worked to improve living conditions for her neighbors. "We must share our blessings," she says. "It is imperative that I and others like me lead by example if we are to produce a generation that understands how to nurture their families." Shelby is the mother of four adult children, and a grandmother. "I am motivated by a vision. Sometimes, I just close my eyes and see a healthy and safe community with affordable and decent housing, accessible and affordable health care...a community that provides living wages for its people and that respects their differences and embraces their creativity."

Accomplishments

In 1978, concerned parents in Marvell resolved to take control of the conditions shaping their children’s future. Out of that effort, the Boys, Girls, Adults Community Development Center, Inc. (BGACDC) was created. Shelby became executive director in 1982. She faced an immediate challenge: The local school district was preventing low-income children from attending class because they were not properly immunized. To solve the problem, Shelby and the director of the Phillips County Health Department agreed to use BGACDC facilities as a satellite health center, offering children free immunizations and other health services. Since then, Shelby’s leadership has led to fruitful alliances with many other organizations, including the Kellogg Foundation, Save the Children Foundation, the Marvell School District, Phillips County Extension Services and Mid-Delta Community Services. With the help of such groups, BGACDC has created a summer day-camp program, job-training services, a community-based restaurant, and a training program to nurture young leaders. Shelby also developed a quality preschool education program, based on a national model, the Home Instruction Program for Preschool Youngsters (HIPPY).

In the late 1990s, BGACDC launched its own housing program. With help from the Kellogg Foundation, it bought 18 rental units and created an innovative program that trained and later employed 13 local people, who rehabilitated several of the apartments. As a result of this program, workers ended up with marketable job skills, and renters found decent and affordable housing. In addition, BGACDC bought 27 homes, committed to building four more single-family units, and developed a process to help low-income women become home-buyers. Shelby personally accompanied discouraged or intimidated women to meet with lenders, helped them fill out the necessary loan papers — and then drove them back home.

Leadership style

Shelby weaves concepts of leadership and personal responsibility into a single fabric. "Leadership is like rearing a child," Shelby says. "When I delegate responsibilities, sometimes I say, 'That is your baby; you need to rock it.' Give a person the responsibility and also authority to do a job, and say to that person, ‘You do not give the baby back to me unless you have done everything you know how for your baby.’" Shelby never suggests that she is the leader; she builds teams that inspire confidence and teach civic responsibility. This objective reflects her abiding ambition to help people learn to help themselves. Through its Youth Leadership Development Training initiative, BGACDC enrolls Marvell youth in out-of-town leadership, management, and organizational training programs.

"What sets Ms. Shelby apart is her creativity, her consummate unselfishness, and her abiding commitment to the task across the years of toil, success and frustration," says Glenn Nishimura, program director, Mid South Delta LISC. "She would tell you that the best thing BGACDC has done is the development of leaders, the capacity-building in youngsters. A presentation by BGACDC is always different from others. It is never a monologue by the director but a series of talks and demonstrations by staffers, volunteers, community residents — and the children, of all ages."

The future

To guarantee organizational stability, BGACDC plans to intensify its resource-development efforts. Shelby also hopes to launch what she considers her most ambitious program yet, one focused on people of parenting age, 18 to 39, the group that will be critical to producing a generation of healthy, self-reliant citizens. "We’re trying to get them to the table, so that they can really understand that they need to actively participate in all areas of their children’s lives. We want them involved in creating the program. Right now, that group — young parents — is the one that is missing when it comes to community involvement; they’re the ones who don’t go to city council meetings. We want parents on the council, and on the school board, as well." Leadership, she says, is their baby, too.

More about Beatrice Clark Shelby and BGACDC

"The first thing you notice as you drive into Marvell is a shoe-box-shaped building made of rose-colored cinder blocks. It used to be an abandoned sock factory with a roof so deteriorated that you could look up to the ceiling and see the sky. Today it's the Boys, Girls, Adults Community Development Center, and it is bringing new hope to Black children.... Beatrice Clark Shelby's strategy is simple: Believe that every member of the community has something to offer. And work, work, work.... 'When I'm dead, I want this work to continue,' she says. And that may mean that the newly vaccinated infant lying in her mother's arms for a well-deserved nap will be one of Beatrice Shelby's successors."
— Essence, December, 1993