Confidence, Coding, Community: Patricia Ashanti’s Journey to Lift the Delta

By David Hehemann

March 6, 2025 – As CEO for Delta Circles, a non-profit organization based in Helena, Arkansas, Patricia Ashanti works to bring positive change to the community she grew up in. Founded in 2011, the organization has a number of focuses, including ending generational poverty, expanding science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education among youth and fostering creative entrepreneurship in the Delta.

In recent years, the Walton Family Foundation has supported Delta Circles, funding initiatives that align with its mission to foster community-led growth and highlighting the organization’s impact on the community.

Ashanti said her mission to help others on a personal and community level began with a car accident that occurred as she was driving her newly purchased car. While on the way to class at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff (UAPB), she was hit by a vehicle driving the wrong way on a one-way street.

“When the impact happened, all I could hear was my mom’s voice saying, ‘Make sure you pay your car insurance. Make sure you pay your car insurance.’ And I had not paid my car insurance,” she said. “Now I’m dealing with everything that comes with trying to repair a new car without car insurance.”

The harrowing experience opened Ashanti’s eyes to how little she knew about personal finances at the time. Not only did she realize that she needed to budget for car insurance and balance her studies while holding down a job at McDonald’s, but she also began to reflect on other related challenges including credit card debt, the importance of savings, and ways to seek better financial and career opportunities.

“I spent that really dark time of my life learning the ins and outs of finances,” she said. “The more I learned, the more I knew I wanted to go back to my community and teach others.”

Seeking ways to complement knowledge gained from earning a degree in accounting at UAPB, Ashanti found several training programs to learn how to provide outreach to others. She completed the “Bridges Out of Poverty” curriculum, which dealt with developing economic equity in communities, as well as “Getting Ahead in a Just-getting’-by World,” which serves as a guide for getting out of poverty at the individual level.

“These courses opened my mind to the realities of generational poverty, because even though we were living it, no one talked about poverty – that was not part of our vocabulary,” she said.

Equipped with new insights and outlooks, Ashanti began searching for others in her community who she could teach about developing financial independence.

“I started out with a class of four women, and we would meet on Sunday afternoons,” she said. “It was really therapeutic to take some time to examine our lives – where we’ve come from and where we want to go. There were moments of crying, there were moments of laughter. The experience made me realize that this was something I wanted to share with the larger community.”

Ashanti’s outreach efforts began to expand as she acquired grants that allowed her to teach at the community college and housing authority. After gaining more experience and conducting more research, she realized her best option for reaching the greatest number of people was turning her community organization into a non-profit.

Helping women achieve financial independence

In its 11 years of service, Delta Circles has worked to change the trajectory of communities in the Delta through financial literacy, entrepreneurship, technical innovation and agricultural and health initiatives, Ashanti said. New projects arise as she has the time to contemplate new possibilities and the direction she wants to take the organization. Around seven years ago, Ashanti launched the Women Increasing Net-worth (WIN) Savings Group.

“This is essentially a forum for women to strengthen their financial literacy and increase incomes,” she said. “Participants collectively saved approximately $10,000 and increased their credit scores by an average of 89 points during the first year. They have seen measurable success in saving money and achieving personal goals, and some have gone on to pursue entrepreneurial opportunities to further increase their savings.”

In her work with Black women, Ashanti encourages participants to change the way they think, helping them understand their own potential and apply a sense of self-confidence and self-worth to money management.

“I have an entrepreneurial spirit, and I had a period in my life where, in addition to my day job, I utilized my accounting skills to make money on the side and support my family,” she said. “I use this as an example for other women and encourage them to recognize what they are good at. They can utilize those skills to increase their income and quality of life.”

Coding a brighter future for youth

“Delta Circles has worked to change the trajectory of communities in the Arkansas Delta through financial literacy, entrepreneurship, technical innovation and agricultural and health initiatives.”

Delta Circles should not feature programming solely for adults, she said. It is important to consider where the community should be in the next 10 or 20 years. That is why the organization is introducing youth to technology and working to responding to the demand for tech talent in Arkansas and across the nation.

“In order for our students in the Arkansas Delta to be considered as prepared and ready to join the technical workforce, they have to be introduced to technology just as students in other parts of the state are,” she said. “And we are seeing that when our youth are introduced to tech, they blow it out of the water. Their progress has been incredibly swift.”

Delta Circles’ first foray into instilling technical skills in local youth came in the form of a STEM camp in partnership with Google. Over the course of 12 weeks, middle and high school students had the chance to immerse themselves in technology, physics and related topics through engaging hands-on activities.

“At the beginning of the class, the students took a preliminary assessment test and scored in the 35th percentile,” Ashanti said. “By the end of the course, their scores had drastically improved to the 90th percentile. Our partners at Google, as well as partners at a local tech company, were blown away – they said they had never seen such a significant improvement.”

Delta Circles recently launched a coding academy to equip students with problem-solving skills and prepare them for a technology-driven future. This has allowed Helena youth to showcase their tech talent on a national level. In the fall of 2024, two teams participated in the Youth Coding League, a national program that runs every fall and spring, engaging students in grades 5 through 8 in coding challenges and projects.

“At the beginning of the competition, both our teams were ranked somewhere in the 20s out of 32 teams,” Ashanti said. “By the end of the season, however, our 7th and 8th graders had made it to the top 10. This semester, now that we know the rules better, they started off at number 12 right off the bat. And our group of 5th and 6th graders are already in the top five.”

Ashanti said watching these young students grow creatively and intellectually through competition has been a rewarding experience. And though her students have been working and studying hard, they still have time to have fun being kids.

“After the students complete coding exercises at our center, they can go to the game room,” she said. “We transformed a classroom into an interactive gaming center, complete with comfortable gaming chairs, video game consoles, virtual reality headsets and a big screen TV. So, once the day comes to an end, parents literally have to drag their children out of our gaming facility.”

Ashanti said the popularity of the gaming room is indicative of the success of the Eliza Miller Opportunity Hub.

“After all, the idea behind the community center was to create a place where people could escape,” she said. “Now we see this has grown into a space where people want to be. Our students and participants are creating memories – in five or 10 years, they will be reminiscing about the days at our space.”

Roots of service: How Calico Bottoms shaped Ashanti’s mission

Ahanti traces her passion for service back to Calico Bottoms, the small rural community she grew up in. Nestled in the Arkansas-Mississippi Delta, it is characterized by expansive cotton fields and a close-knit community atmosphere. She said she was influenced in particular by her experience at Pleasant Joy Missionary Baptist Church, where she attended church and participated in the choir. She recalls that the church’s location on a small dirt road discouraged some members from attending.

“Not everyone wanted to drive their cars down that dusty road to get to the church, especially when it wasn’t regular church time,” she said. “But there were three women, including the youth and choir directors, who were always there. No matter if they had to come pick us up from our house, no matter whether they had to work odd hours, they were at the church. They showed me – through sacrificing their time for others – what community service is.”

Ashanti’s three mentors – who did not have children of their own – were committed to helping others grow a little every day.

“Seeing how they worked has stuck with me over the years,” she said. “They taught me that going to great lengths to help others isn’t ‘overdoing’ it. It’s just what we do in this community. Giving up your time to help others grow is our calling.”

Ashanti said the land that the historical church she attended as a child was actually donated to the community by her family.

“This place is very comforting to me, because when I’m there, I think about my ancestors and their efforts to build the community,” she said. “I think about the work it took to clear the land – the type of collaboration, leadership and vision it took. I reflect on the fact that I am a descendant of these people, and I remember that collaboration is key in getting anything important done.”

In her free time, Ashanti likes to occasionally watch science fiction films on Netflix. But if she’s being completely honest, she most likes to spend time on her laptop thinking about the possibilities that lie ahead for Delta Circles.

“My happy place is peace and quiet, being in a place where I can think and dream,” she said. “When I asked my daughter if she wanted to come with me on a recent trip to Nashville, she said, ‘Mom, I know you won’t want to go out and have fun.’ I suppose she’s sort of right because fun for me is spending some time in my hotel room getting work done, knocking things off our to-do list.”

As she thinks back on her history of community service, Ashanti recalls the moment that she realized her dream of helping others was coming true.

“My desire for years had been to make a difference, and for years I held on to the faith that if I kept doing the work, I would come in contact with women that needed that work,” she said. “One day, when I went to teach another class that was full of women ready to learn, I realized the successes we were achieving. All the participants were there because our organization kept moving forward, putting in the work. This moment helped me dive even deeper into using philanthropy to help individuals and families prosper.”

She said that she increasingly sees the value of storytelling and relating what one does in the present to their past. She thinks back to cotton fields of Calico Bottoms, where she was born, and reflects on poverty that her family was living in – something she occasionally forgets about.

When she was three months old, Ashanti was rescued from a house fire due to faulty wiring.

“The things that were happening with my mom working in the fields, my young siblings caring for me home alone, the electrical wiring that caused the fire – these are all evidence of poverty,” she said. “Of course, my parents didn’t call it poverty. These were just facts of life.”

Her mission to help others out of poverty is strongly rooted in this trying past.

“Attempting to eradicate poverty is serious – it’s something that goes deep,” she said. “And so, I have to take it seriously. I have to move very strongly as I do things to help elevate people of my community.”

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