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In an economy when many banks are hardly able to maintain respectable balance sheets, a strong Triad bank is not only growing, it has donated two properties to a group that hopes to help troubled women and girls.

First Bank, which operates in several area cities including High Point, Mayodan, Archdale and Asheboro, has reached out from its headquarters in the Montgomery County town of Troy by donating two of its repossessed buildings to Unity Builders in High Point.

The $3.5 billion bank with 87 branches in North Carolina and 15 others in South Carolina and Virginia, has done a good job of staying ahead of the bad loans that have swamped or threatened other banks.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. has turned to First Bank twice to help it take over the assets of two failed banks during the financial crisis. Those banks are: Bank of Asheville, which was closed in January, and Cooperative Bank in Wilmington in June 2009. Those banks added more than $1 billion to First Bank’s assets.

First Bank was able to do this because of a conservative policy on loans — the bank moves to quickly foreclose or write off bad loans from its balance sheet — which helps it to maintain a spotless record on delinquent loans.

The bank is increasing its charitable profile in Guilford and Alamance counties.

Unity Builders is a nonprofit group that works with communities and banks to build houses and offer them to needy people.

The group has built five homes in High Point in the past 18 months and has plans for eight more. In addition, it has built 30 homes in Burlington, one in Lexington and one in East Spencer, said Pastor Terry L. Young, Unity’s executive director and pastor of Morningstar Baptist Church in Burlington.

Unity plans to create two group homes to help girls and women at risk for mental health or delinquency problems, Young said. The first home will house several girls younger than 18 in Burlington and will be called My Sisters Love, Young said.

He hopes the second group home, in High Point, will help the same people when they turn 18 and are no longer legally able to live in group homes for juveniles. That will ease their ultimate transition into independent housing, he said.

First Bank said the two properties it donated need renovation and Unity Builders is the ideal group to do the work and offer a true community service, said Jerry Ocheltree, the bank’s president and CEO.

“Our city executive in High Point has a relationship with Unity Builders there,” Ocheltree said. “We had these two distressed properties we had taken back into foreclosure.”

Young said Unity has cultivated relationships with a variety of banks, including Greensboro’s NewBridge Bank, which provides construction loans through High Point for Unity’s houses, especially in the Southside neighborhood.

Unity Builders can then sell the homes to people who need help by providing down payment grants and affordable mortgages.

“We’re trying to help partner with other agencies and banks to help give people an opportunity that normally they won’t have,” Young said.

His program differs from such national groups as Habitat for Humanity, he said, because it reaches out to people in some of the worst circumstances to rehabilitate them first and get them into permanent housing.

Now that Unity has established a variety of lending arrangements with the city and a variety of banks, Young hopes First Bank will stimulate other banks to donate properties that are clogging their balance sheets.

“We are accepting donations of all kinds, and we want more banks to release homes that may be on their books,” Young said.

Contact Richard M. Barron at 373-7371 or richard.barron@news-record.com