Helping Communities Thrive

Innovative partnerships at work in Helena-West Helena.

BY WILL STALEY

The Mississippi River bridge at Helena marks a major entrance and exit to the state. The longer I live in Helena-West Helena, the deeper and more meaningful my relationship to the city becomes. That’s to be expected, as with every relationship, but Helena is certainly not the same place I once knew as a naïve young professional looking for design work 12 years ago. On the surface, everything is the same, save a couple of Historic Cherry Street storefronts that were damaged during the Easter storm of 2020. Underneath the surface, however, you find a unique, colorful constellation of factors that inspires me, the Thrive team and other local placemakers to amplify the masterpiece that is Helena.

Helena, as most simply call it, is known to the state as a deep Delta locale — a place on the banks of the Mississippi River where if you close your eyes, you can smell the smoked chicken necks on the corner of Sebastian and Plaza and hear both blues and country flowing from open car windows at the same time. Informed by a painful racial

history, those sounds symbolize an intersection of Black and white cultures that have changed the landscape of American music and impacted the world. Evidence of Helena’s global influence can be found each October in the King Biscuit Blues Festival, where it’s hard not to collide with tourists from Denmark, Japan or Brazil, some of whom stay and meet each other at the AirBnB my wife, Misti, operates out of our downtown home. It’s during this long weekend that our downtown infrastructure is put to the test and that Historic Cherry Street becomes the gorgeous brick backdrop for bluesy street buskers, food vendors and both local and international revelers of all ages.

Its rich musical heritage is just one of Helena’s many attributes being used to influence local development. In fact, Helena was chosen in 1989 as the site for Arkansas’s Delta Cultural Center because of its rich stories — both past and present. Other than music heritage, the toolkit that Helena embraces, and will lean heavily on in the future, includes Civil War history, civil rights history, ecoadventures and historic architecture, to name a few. This excites me and others when combining these narratives with national variables, such as a growing investment in rural broadband and the remote work boom we’ve seen during the pandemic. Because of this changing economic environment, Helena, and many places like it, are positioned to play a competitive hand if they work hard to craft and share their unique story. Helena has the stories that many rural cities yearn to tell in the never-ending municipal strategy of growing a population.

At Thrive, we see this demand for community storytelling content from our rural clients on a regular basis, and it’s largely due to the population loss affecting much of rural America. Our solution is to equip these rural communities with the branding, public art, outdoor recreation and youth engagement necessary to create vibrant places for current and future residents. We’re primarily a graphic design firm focused on branding projects while operating after-school creative leadership programs with and for local high school students called the Thrive Design Crew. Even when working with nonlocal city clients on their brands, we advocate for including youth in the conversation. When our clients involve youth in early planning, they encourage these future leaders to begin investing in their city and to become creative problem-solvers, or as we call them: designers. Not only does it make students feel valued to be offered a seat at the decision-making table, it also exposes them to the creative planning process and strengthens their ties to the community, resulting in an even larger set of activated partners to move that community forward.

A benefit of Thrive’s business model is that it allows our small team to apply what we learn from places like Lonoke, Van Buren and Magnolia to our home base of Helena and vice versa. In each of these aforementioned places, there is a downtown historic main street or square where commerce has boomed. Today’s strategy for many of these cities is to redefine what Main Street will provide to

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New major investments on Cherry Street like the Delta Dirt Distillery.

Students of Thrive’s design crew clear the Harbor View Trail in the Helena River Park.

THRIVE / WILL STALEY the community since commerce has moved predominantly online. The push toward defining these locations as arts and entertainment districts is a recurring strategy we see and love. We’d argue that much of any downtown’s unique personality and brand resides in its historic built environment and is therefore a highly differentiating factor when it comes to using the community story for recruitment and community investment.

Thankfully, places like Helena are fighting to preserve their historic downtowns because these buildings and brick streets are where people want to dine, host festivals and make memories. The potential that tourism has to bring an economic boost to Helena’s families has always been central to Thrive’s work and a major reason why we’ve invested over the past three out of 12 years in formalizing our creative placemaking operations and our youth services operations. As a graphic design firm, it makes sense that the way we can best help local economic and community development efforts is by focusing on creating the content that can be disseminated to the world through advertising and promotion dollars. Currently, the content we can best create alongside our design crew students are murals that tell the story of the community and public trails and wayfinding systems that lead people to adventure on or near the Mississippi River. Both are initiatives that we feel simultaneously enhance local livability and attract tourism.

Kevin Pringle was a high school sophomore when we first met in Helena-West Helena’s Central High School. Needing to make a decision for his project focus, Kevin, a student in the EAST Classroom, finally blurted out: “I like to hunt rabbit.” After a small pause, I followed with “well … what if we made a trail?” By the end of the semester we had designed the Harbor View Trail to be set in the woodland marsh of the Helena River Park. Three years later, the trail has been cleared by Design Crew students and marked as a 1-mile loop for hiking and for kayaking and canoeing during flood season.

His simple “I’d rather be playing outside” comment led us to design the first of three trails within the Helena Adventure Trails system, a concept created as of April 2021 but made possible by a host of program partners that collided in Helena between 2019 and today. Did we ever expect Kevin’s initial project to grow to this point? No. Do we believe that things like this can happen? Yes!

The first partner to approach Thrive and a group of Helena stakeholders — including longtime ecotourism advocates Phillips County Judge Clark Hall and Helena-West Helena Mayor Kevin Smith — was the team of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences’ State Physical Activity Network. SPAN is an initiative that helps Arkansas cities make bicycling and healthy outdoor activity a priority. With Helena sharing close proximity to the future United States Bicycling Route 80 to the North, and the Walton Family Foundation’s newly announced large investment in the Delta Heritage Trail to the southwest, Helena has a big opportunity to serve the long-distance bicyclists that will pass through town. SPAN’s effort in Helena was then complemented by Winrock International’s securing of a USDA Rural Placemaking Innovation Challenge grant. Now facilitated by Winrock, this partnership will enable the design and painting of downtown bike murals, crosswalks, a bicycling rest station, signage and an informational brochure for visiting cyclists making the 37-mile journey linking the Delta Heritage Trail State Park to the Mississippi River State Park, with Helena being the midpoint. This trail, the Helena Ridge Ride, is the second of the three trails within the Helena Adventure Trail system.

Last but in no way least, the Big River Loop is the trail project funded by the Arkansas Delta Regional Obesity Program — a project funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and operated by the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture Extension office. The result of a community stakeholder collaboration, this 2-mile walking and biking loop gives our downtown population access to the healthy exercise opportunities of the Helena River Park and the new Harbor View Trail through a robust wayfinding design project. Along the route of the Big River Loop, pedestrians will be alerted of mileage, and essential tourism sites will be highlighted for those visiting off the giant river boats that dock at the boat ramp.

To take credit for the sequence of events that have taken place to date would be fun but also inaccurate. However, what we can say for certain is that because a student at Central High School spoke up about what he wanted to see in his community, we now have additional action taking place on a local level. We consistently hear that “new blood” is key to moving forward and making progress. In many places, it’s the same five to 10 people carrying the heavy load of community development, and they’re tired if not completely burned out. Amplifying your masterpiece may mean seeking nontraditional routes to uncover local inspiration. It could also mean making sure the initial stakeholder workshop is representative of your actual community and not just your frequently utilized “dream team.” In Helena today, we’re hopeful and positive not simply because we’re equipped with incredible stories that are already spurring private and public investment, but because we’re sharing the load of defining our future alongside our community — a strategy certainly worthy of our time.

Will Staley is the founder, executive director & creative director of Thrive.