The Circle of Life

If you didn’t learn about the Circle of Life as a young child, you surely did from Disney’s The Lion King. But that’s not the Circle of Life I’m talking about. I’m referring to the “Circle of Quality of Life”. The dictionary defines quality of life as the degree to which an individual is healthy and able to enjoy life.

When you look at it from an economic development perspective, quality of life includes a matrix of factors like housing, job growth, education, healthcare, arts and entertainment, taxes and infrastructure.
As a community bank, we are part of this quality of life circle and can really make a difference for our customers. When we support local farmers, entrepreneurs and businesses, we give them the ability to create revenue and jobs, which generate income for housing and entertainment. This in turn, boosts local and state taxes that fund and improve education and infrastructure. Here are a few real “Circle of Quality of Life” examples from some of First PREMIER Bank and PREMIER Bankcard’s community investments.

The Denny Sanford PREMIER Center

Aging facilities made it difficult to attract popular or national acts to Sioux Falls, home to our corporate headquarters. This meant many of our residents were supporting the economies of other cities and states. We were missing out on entertainment and Sioux Falls lost potential revenue.
In 2011, residents voted to build a new event center and we saw an opportunity to invest in the title sponsorship. We wanted to ensure that our community and surrounding region could enjoy world-class concerts and events right here at home. Since opening in 2014, the Denny Sanford PREMIER Center has hosted millions of spectators and brought tens of millions of dollars to our community.

Watertown Softball Complex

According to a 2017 article in Time Magazine, youth sports has become a $15 billion industry. A single
weekend tournament can bring hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, to a host community.
When presented with the opportunity to help Watertown (home to two First PREMIER Bank branches
and a PREMIER Bankcard location) build a softball complex— we jumped at it. We partnered with the city (at the time of giving, this donation was the largest private-public venture in the community’s history) to build the PREMIER Softball Complex. Today, the state-of-the-art facility draws dozens of softball teams from all across the nation for summer tournaments. Those teams bring families who stay in hotels, eat at restaurants and purchase gas and supplies at local stores. This generates local and state taxes that are reinvested into the Watertown community. The circle continues.

Build Dakota Scholarships

Low unemployment and a shortage of skilled labor has created a workforce issue in South Dakota. To help combat this problem, First PREMIER Bank CEO Dana Dykhouse and our founder, T. Denny Sanford, partnered with the State of South Dakota to create the Build Dakota Scholarship program. Build Dakota provides full scholarships to technical school students entering a high-need field like construction, engineering, healthcare and precision manufacturing. In exchange for the scholarship, the
recipients commit to three years of employment in that field in South Dakota. Mr. Sanford provided the initial $25 million gift. That was matched by former South Dakota Governor Dennis Daugaard (2011-2019) with resources from the State’s Future Fund. The program began in 2015 and continues to this day. Roughly 300 scholarships are provided every year, resulting in more skilled workers for our state. More workers means more production and more profits to invest in salaries and future expansions – adding more fuel to the economic engine and more dollars to local economies.

Dakota State University Cybersecurity

Worldwide spending on data security products and services is expected to top $124 billion in the year 2020. The demand for cybersecurity experts has never been greater. That’s exactly why we partnered with Dakota State University to boost its cybersecurity education and research programs.
T. Denny Sanford and PREMIER Bankcard CEO Miles Beacom and his wife Lisa have given a combined $35 million to DSU to help with the construction of The Beacom Institute of Technology and Madison Cyber Labs (MadLabs). These two gifts are helping make DSU a cybersecurity hub – attracting federal and private partnerships from all over the world. This will one day result in more jobs and new economic development opportunities in the community of Madison.

We All Win

As a community bank, it’s more important than ever to invest in our local economies, whether its
sponsoring events and festivals or providing resources for larger improvements. If our communities don’t succeed, neither do we. We live, work and do business in the same places our customers do. We are raising our families, attending events and utilizing the education, healthcare and infrastructure systems. I think you see where I am going. Even the smallest investment can bring a return. It’s the Circle of Life!

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