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In Tulsa, a holistic approach
When visitors arrive at the Plaza Santa Cecilia in Tulsa’s Global District, they will be arriving at the site of the first small-business incubator in Oklahoma state aimed specifically at helping immigrant communities to thrive.
Funded via a public-private partnership between the City of Tulsa and Tulsa County, which contributed over $1 million in American Rescue Plan Act funding, and the George Kaiser Family Foundation (GKFF), which contributed $1,400,000 to the project through its Elevate East initiative, the incubator is just one of several dozen initiatives in Tulsa working to not only improve quality of life for families and communities but also to stoke a sense of pride in the city.
Conversations with grantees and community leaders across the city reveal a commonly-held desire to weigh qualitative outcomes just as heavily as KPIs and other measurable data e.g. tracking a sense of belonging in communities; culture in schools; and the opportunity to see themselves reflected in the built environment.
This holistic approach is at the core of GKFF’s strategy in Tulsa. They invest time and dollars in each neighborhood, in a way that is unique to each community, and with community members, their culture, and needs at the forefront.
“You see a lot more change when you make targeted investments in a neighborhood — the people that live there can feel the actual cumulative effects in their lifetimes, and that has direct implications for life expectancy gaps.”
Elevating Community Action
East Tulsa is a hub for the city’s Hispanic and Latino communities and growing AAPI population and GKFF’s partnership with this growing community is comprehensive.
“The Global District is one of the most multicultural and diverse parts of our city, and so there's a lot of cultural significance to this being the welcoming point to our city,” said Luisa Krug, Executive Director of Tulsa Global District.
According to Krug, the neighborhood’s growing immigrant population is naturally entrepreneurial but also faces specific challenges — including the threat of illegal eviction for undocumented residents and the harmful effects of COVID-19 that were felt disproportionately in low-income communities of color. GKFF has partnered with community-led non-profits like El Centro to address such challenges head-on, creating new channels of communication within Tulsa’s community of new immigrants and creating navigational pathways through what otherwise might be challenging bureaucratic processes, like enrolling children in school for the first time.
Thriving commercial corridors, like Plaza Santa Cecilia, have been anchored by programs like Elevate East — a GKFF initiative that works collaboratively with residents, community-based organizations, and public and private entities to invest and support immigrant families living in East Tulsa.
The partners are focused on lifting up the unique qualities of the area. “You can tell that there hasn’t been a lot of investment in the physical infrastructure, but there's been so much investment by the community and entrepreneurship and just the culture of the area that's really thriving. How can our organization help to develop or catalyze those investments to allow the culture that's already flourishing to grow and get even bigger?” asked Krug.
Quote: Aaron Miller
Unlocking neighborhood potential
In 2006, Pastors Marshall Gordon and Philip Abode teamed up to launch Crossover Bible Church in North Tulsa. What had initially begun as a node to spread the power of the gospel within the community quickly became an opportunity to serve north Tulsa more broadly through an interlocking web of solutions in youth sports, education, health care, housing, and economic development.
“When you get to know people in the community, you're hearing about all of these needs,” said Justin Pickard, Executive Director at Crossover Impact. “Education's a problem, health is a problem, jobs are a problem, dogs running around are a problem, kids need somewhere to go to stay out of trouble, on and on. As we compared, we realized more and more that the needs were all organized together.”
In North Tulsa, the average life expectancy is 14 years less than the rest of the city, making the need for a health clinic that could efficiently serve an underfunded population deeply felt. So was the need for robust education opportunities and youth programming, which came in the form of Crossover Preparatory Academy, which now has expanded to become Crossover Community Impact — a holistic place-based organization that has separate all-boys and all-girls campuses, athletics programs, health services, and a building development arm. GKFF’s InvestNorth initiative supports Crossover and other community-driven organizations that open up opportunities for families and children in historically Black, North Tulsa neighborhoods.
At Crossover Prep’s all-boys school, the motto is “I am my brother’s keeper” — a philosophy that helps to keep young learners accountable to each other in a way that also reflects the neighborhood’s larger theory of change. By cultivating trust in institutions and creating solutions that are directly responsive to real-time community needs, North Tulsa residents are becoming their own brother’s keepers.
Quote: Dawn Hights
Handing over the keys
GKFF is working with the community at every turn; as evidenced by the range of initiatives that the foundation and its partners run and/or support to serve the micro and macro needs of citizens in a specific pocket of Tulsa. In its role as a supporting organization of Tulsa Community Foundation, GKFF fills existing gaps in federal funding and intervenes in the poverty life cycle through the establishment of birth to college to career pipelines. The foundation also helps fund mixed-income housing and a federally qualified health center and has provided support for a myriad of community investments and programs.
The real secret sauce to GKFF’s investment strategy is deep partnership with neighborhood-based organizations, like Growing Together, which focuses on centering and amplifying community voices so they can help steer solutions. While the foundation is highly programmatic and operational in its approach to funding, Josh Miller, a program officer at GKFF, said that “at some point, you want to hand over the keys.”
The role of a place-based funder is to make lasting and sustainable change in a place, involving and being led by the community– setting them up for success so they can continue creating change and building strength beyond a grant cycle.
“When you're intentional and get the buy-in from the community, and also have a neighborhood-based organization that is providing the eyes and ears and feedback and keeping the conferencing strategy in place, you see great results. ”
And the results are backed by data. A recent study found that in Tulsa’s Kendall Whittier neighborhood, property values went up while rent stayed stable, and both graduation rates in college and high school and income levels increased.
In Tulsa, a holistic approach
When visitors arrive at the Plaza Santa Cecilia in Tulsa’s Global District, they will be arriving at the site of the first small-business incubator in Oklahoma state aimed specifically at helping immigrant communities to thrive.
Funded via a public-private partnership between the City of Tulsa and Tulsa County, which contributed over $1 million in American Rescue Plan Act funding, and the George Kaiser Family Foundation (GKFF), which contributed $1,400,000 to the project through its Elevate East initiative, the incubator is just one of several dozen initiatives in Tulsa working to not only improve quality of life for families and communities but also to stoke a sense of pride in the city.
Conversations with grantees and community leaders across the city reveal a commonly-held desire to weigh qualitative outcomes just as heavily as KPIs and other measurable data e.g. tracking a sense of belonging in communities; culture in schools; and the opportunity to see themselves reflected in the built environment.
This holistic approach is at the core of GKFF’s strategy in Tulsa. They invest time and dollars in each neighborhood, in a way that is unique to each community, and with community members, their culture, and needs at the forefront.
“You see a lot more change when you make targeted investments in a neighborhood — the people that live there can feel the actual cumulative effects in their lifetimes, and that has direct implications for life expectancy gaps.”
Elevating Community Action
East Tulsa is a hub for the city’s Hispanic and Latino communities and growing AAPI population and GKFF’s partnership with this growing community is comprehensive.
“The Global District is one of the most multicultural and diverse parts of our city, and so there's a lot of cultural significance to this being the welcoming point to our city,” said Luisa Krug, Executive Director of Tulsa Global District.
According to Krug, the neighborhood’s growing immigrant population is naturally entrepreneurial but also faces specific challenges — including the threat of illegal eviction for undocumented residents and the harmful effects of COVID-19 that were felt disproportionately in low-income communities of color. GKFF has partnered with community-led non-profits like El Centro to address such challenges head-on, creating new channels of communication within Tulsa’s community of new immigrants and creating navigational pathways through what otherwise might be challenging bureaucratic processes, like enrolling children in school for the first time.
Thriving commercial corridors, like Plaza Santa Cecilia, have been anchored by programs like Elevate East — a GKFF initiative that works collaboratively with residents, community-based organizations, and public and private entities to invest and support immigrant families living in East Tulsa.
The partners are focused on lifting up the unique qualities of the area. “You can tell that there hasn’t been a lot of investment in the physical infrastructure, but there's been so much investment by the community and entrepreneurship and just the culture of the area that's really thriving. How can our organization help to develop or catalyze those investments to allow the culture that's already flourishing to grow and get even bigger?” asked Krug.
“15 years ago, the only people who had a say did not necessarily represent the changing demographics of the community. We learned to step back and empower folks in the neighborhoods. That advocacy coalition made change more effective.”
Unlocking neighborhood potential
In 2006, Pastors Marshall Gordon and Philip Abode teamed up to launch Crossover Bible Church in North Tulsa. What had initially begun as a node to spread the power of the gospel within the community quickly became an opportunity to serve north Tulsa more broadly through an interlocking web of solutions in youth sports, education, health care, housing, and economic development.
“When you get to know people in the community, you're hearing about all of these needs,” said Justin Pickard, Executive Director at Crossover Impact. “Education's a problem, health is a problem, jobs are a problem, dogs running around are a problem, kids need somewhere to go to stay out of trouble, on and on. As we compared, we realized more and more that the needs were all organized together.”
In North Tulsa, the average life expectancy is 14 years less than the rest of the city, making the need for a health clinic that could efficiently serve an underfunded population deeply felt. So was the need for robust education opportunities and youth programming, which came in the form of Crossover Preparatory Academy, which now has expanded to become Crossover Community Impact — a holistic place-based organization that has separate all-boys and all-girls campuses, athletics programs, health services, and a building development arm. GKFF’s InvestNorth initiative supports Crossover and other community-driven organizations that open up opportunities for families and children in historically Black, North Tulsa neighborhoods.
At Crossover Prep’s all-boys school, the motto is “I am my brother’s keeper” — a philosophy that helps to keep young learners accountable to each other in a way that also reflects the neighborhood’s larger theory of change. By cultivating trust in institutions and creating solutions that are directly responsive to real-time community needs, North Tulsa residents are becoming their own brother’s keepers.
Quote: Dawn Hights
Handing over the keys
GKFF is working with the community at every turn; as evidenced by the range of initiatives that the foundation and its partners run and/or support to serve the micro and macro needs of citizens in a specific pocket of Tulsa. In its role as a supporting organization of Tulsa Community Foundation, GKFF fills existing gaps in federal funding and intervenes in the poverty life cycle through the establishment of birth to college to career pipelines. The foundation also helps fund mixed-income housing and a federally qualified health center and has provided support for a myriad of community investments and programs.
The real secret sauce to GKFF’s investment strategy is deep partnership with neighborhood-based organizations, like Growing Together, which focuses on centering and amplifying community voices so they can help steer solutions. While the foundation is highly programmatic and operational in its approach to funding, Josh Miller, a program officer at GKFF, said that “at some point, you want to hand over the keys.”
The role of a place-based funder is to make lasting and sustainable change in a place, involving and being led by the community– setting them up for success so they can continue creating change and building strength beyond a grant cycle.
“When you're intentional and get the buy-in from the community, and also have a neighborhood-based organization that is providing the eyes and ears and feedback and keeping the conferencing strategy in place, you see great results. ”
And the results are backed by data. A recent study found that in Tulsa’s Kendall Whittier neighborhood, property values went up while rent stayed stable, and both graduation rates in college and high school and income levels increased.
“Employment is a central tenet for us, but not just employment that takes advantage of the community to extract from it, as West Virginia has done in the past. It’s about bringing along the community in this reclamation process.”
In Tulsa, a holistic approach
When visitors arrive at the Plaza Santa Cecilia in Tulsa’s Global District, they will be arriving at the site of the first small-business incubator in Oklahoma state aimed specifically at helping immigrant communities to thrive.
Funded via a public-private partnership between the City of Tulsa and Tulsa County, which contributed over $1 million in American Rescue Plan Act funding, and the George Kaiser Family Foundation (GKFF), which contributed $1,400,000 to the project through its Elevate East initiative, the incubator is just one of several dozen initiatives in Tulsa working to not only improve quality of life for families and communities but also to stoke a sense of pride in the city.
Conversations with grantees and community leaders across the city reveal a commonly-held desire to weigh qualitative outcomes just as heavily as KPIs and other measurable data e.g. tracking a sense of belonging in communities; culture in schools; and the opportunity to see themselves reflected in the built environment.
This holistic approach is at the core of GKFF’s strategy in Tulsa. They invest time and dollars in each neighborhood, in a way that is unique to each community, and with community members, their culture, and needs at the forefront.
“You see a lot more change when you make targeted investments in a neighborhood — the people that live there can feel the actual cumulative effects in their lifetimes, and that has direct implications for life expectancy gaps.”
Elevating Community Action
East Tulsa is a hub for the city’s Hispanic and Latino communities and growing AAPI population and GKFF’s partnership with this growing community is comprehensive.
“The Global District is one of the most multicultural and diverse parts of our city, and so there's a lot of cultural significance to this being the welcoming point to our city,” said Luisa Krug, Executive Director of Tulsa Global District.
According to Krug, the neighborhood’s growing immigrant population is naturally entrepreneurial but also faces specific challenges — including the threat of illegal eviction for undocumented residents and the harmful effects of COVID-19 that were felt disproportionately in low-income communities of color. GKFF has partnered with community-led non-profits like El Centro to address such challenges head-on, creating new channels of communication within Tulsa’s community of new immigrants and creating navigational pathways through what otherwise might be challenging bureaucratic processes, like enrolling children in school for the first time.
Thriving commercial corridors, like Plaza Santa Cecilia, have been anchored by programs like Elevate East — a GKFF initiative that works collaboratively with residents, community-based organizations, and public and private entities to invest and support immigrant families living in East Tulsa.
The partners are focused on lifting up the unique qualities of the area. “You can tell that there hasn’t been a lot of investment in the physical infrastructure, but there's been so much investment by the community and entrepreneurship and just the culture of the area that's really thriving. How can our organization help to develop or catalyze those investments to allow the culture that's already flourishing to grow and get even bigger?” asked Krug.
Unlocking neighborhood potential
In 2006, Pastors Marshall Gordon and Philip Abode teamed up to launch Crossover Bible Church in North Tulsa. What had initially begun as a node to spread the power of the gospel within the community quickly became an opportunity to serve north Tulsa more broadly through an interlocking web of solutions in youth sports, education, health care, housing, and economic development.
“When you get to know people in the community, you're hearing about all of these needs,” said Justin Pickard, Executive Director at Crossover Impact. “Education's a problem, health is a problem, jobs are a problem, dogs running around are a problem, kids need somewhere to go to stay out of trouble, on and on. As we compared, we realized more and more that the needs were all organized together.”
In North Tulsa, the average life expectancy is 14 years less than the rest of the city, making the need for a health clinic that could efficiently serve an underfunded population deeply felt. So was the need for robust education opportunities and youth programming, which came in the form of Crossover Preparatory Academy, which now has expanded to become Crossover Community Impact — a holistic place-based organization that has separate all-boys and all-girls campuses, athletics programs, health services, and a building development arm. GKFF’s InvestNorth initiative supports Crossover and other community-driven organizations that open up opportunities for families and children in historically Black, North Tulsa neighborhoods.
At Crossover Prep’s all-boys school, the motto is “I am my brother’s keeper” — a philosophy that helps to keep young learners accountable to each other in a way that also reflects the neighborhood’s larger theory of change. By cultivating trust in institutions and creating solutions that are directly responsive to real-time community needs, North Tulsa residents are becoming their own brother’s keepers.
Quote: Aaron Miller
“I feel like there's a sense of hope and a sense of promise that’s been restored in North Tulsa. They're fixing the roads, we have businesses and restaurants coming in the next five years. Now people are proud of where they came from.”
Handing over the keys
GKFF is working with the community at every turn; as evidenced by the range of initiatives that the foundation and its partners run and/or support to serve the micro and macro needs of citizens in a specific pocket of Tulsa. In its role as a supporting organization of Tulsa Community Foundation, GKFF fills existing gaps in federal funding and intervenes in the poverty life cycle through the establishment of birth to college to career pipelines. The foundation also helps fund mixed-income housing and a federally qualified health center and has provided support for a myriad of community investments and programs.
The real secret sauce to GKFF’s investment strategy is deep partnership with neighborhood-based organizations, like Growing Together, which focuses on centering and amplifying community voices so they can help steer solutions. While the foundation is highly programmatic and operational in its approach to funding, Josh Miller, a program officer at GKFF, said that “at some point, you want to hand over the keys.”
The role of a place-based funder is to make lasting and sustainable change in a place, involving and being led by the community– setting them up for success so they can continue creating change and building strength beyond a grant cycle.
“When you're intentional and get the buy-in from the community, and also have a neighborhood-based organization that is providing the eyes and ears and feedback and keeping the conferencing strategy in place, you see great results. ”
And the results are backed by data. A recent study found that in Tulsa’s Kendall Whittier neighborhood, property values went up while rent stayed stable, and both graduation rates in college and high school and income levels increased.
In Tulsa, a holistic approach
When visitors arrive at the Plaza Santa Cecilia in Tulsa’s Global District, they will be arriving at the site of the first small-business incubator in Oklahoma state aimed specifically at helping immigrant communities to thrive.
Funded via a public-private partnership between the City of Tulsa and Tulsa County, which contributed over $1 million in American Rescue Plan Act funding, and the George Kaiser Family Foundation (GKFF), which contributed $1,400,000 to the project through its Elevate East initiative, the incubator is just one of several dozen initiatives in Tulsa working to not only improve quality of life for families and communities but also to stoke a sense of pride in the city.
Conversations with grantees and community leaders across the city reveal a commonly-held desire to weigh qualitative outcomes just as heavily as KPIs and other measurable data e.g. tracking a sense of belonging in communities; culture in schools; and the opportunity to see themselves reflected in the built environment.
This holistic approach is at the core of GKFF’s strategy in Tulsa. They invest time and dollars in each neighborhood, in a way that is unique to each community, and with community members, their culture, and needs at the forefront.
“You see a lot more change when you make targeted investments in a neighborhood — the people that live there can feel the actual cumulative effects in their lifetimes, and that has direct implications for life expectancy gaps.”
Elevating Community Action
East Tulsa is a hub for the city’s Hispanic and Latino communities and growing AAPI population and GKFF’s partnership with this growing community is comprehensive.
“The Global District is one of the most multicultural and diverse parts of our city, and so there's a lot of cultural significance to this being the welcoming point to our city,” said Luisa Krug, Executive Director of Tulsa Global District.
According to Krug, the neighborhood’s growing immigrant population is naturally entrepreneurial but also faces specific challenges — including the threat of illegal eviction for undocumented residents and the harmful effects of COVID-19 that were felt disproportionately in low-income communities of color. GKFF has partnered with community-led non-profits like El Centro to address such challenges head-on, creating new channels of communication within Tulsa’s community of new immigrants and creating navigational pathways through what otherwise might be challenging bureaucratic processes, like enrolling children in school for the first time.
Thriving commercial corridors, like Plaza Santa Cecilia, have been anchored by programs like Elevate East — a GKFF initiative that works collaboratively with residents, community-based organizations, and public and private entities to invest and support immigrant families living in East Tulsa.
The partners are focused on lifting up the unique qualities of the area. “You can tell that there hasn’t been a lot of investment in the physical infrastructure, but there's been so much investment by the community and entrepreneurship and just the culture of the area that's really thriving. How can our organization help to develop or catalyze those investments to allow the culture that's already flourishing to grow and get even bigger?” asked Krug.
“15 years ago, the only people who had a say did not necessarily represent the changing demographics of the community. We learned to step back and empower folks in the neighborhoods. That advocacy coalition made change more effective.”
Unlocking neighborhood potential
In 2006, Pastors Marshall Gordon and Philip Abode teamed up to launch Crossover Bible Church in North Tulsa. What had initially begun as a node to spread the power of the gospel within the community quickly became an opportunity to serve north Tulsa more broadly through an interlocking web of solutions in youth sports, education, health care, housing, and economic development.
“When you get to know people in the community, you're hearing about all of these needs,” said Justin Pickard, Executive Director at Crossover Impact. “Education's a problem, health is a problem, jobs are a problem, dogs running around are a problem, kids need somewhere to go to stay out of trouble, on and on. As we compared, we realized more and more that the needs were all organized together.”
In North Tulsa, the average life expectancy is 14 years less than the rest of the city, making the need for a health clinic that could efficiently serve an underfunded population deeply felt. So was the need for robust education opportunities and youth programming, which came in the form of Crossover Preparatory Academy, which now has expanded to become Crossover Community Impact — a holistic place-based organization that has separate all-boys and all-girls campuses, athletics programs, health services, and a building development arm. GKFF’s InvestNorth initiative supports Crossover and other community-driven organizations that open up opportunities for families and children in historically Black, North Tulsa neighborhoods.
At Crossover Prep’s all-boys school, the motto is “I am my brother’s keeper” — a philosophy that helps to keep young learners accountable to each other in a way that also reflects the neighborhood’s larger theory of change. By cultivating trust in institutions and creating solutions that are directly responsive to real-time community needs, North Tulsa residents are becoming their own brother’s keepers.
“I feel like there's a sense of hope and a sense of promise that’s been restored in North Tulsa. They're fixing the roads, we have businesses and restaurants coming in the next five years. Now people are proud of where they came from.”
Handing over the keys
GKFF is working with the community at every turn; as evidenced by the range of initiatives that the foundation and its partners run and/or support to serve the micro and macro needs of citizens in a specific pocket of Tulsa. In its role as a supporting organization of Tulsa Community Foundation, GKFF fills existing gaps in federal funding and intervenes in the poverty life cycle through the establishment of birth to college to career pipelines. The foundation also helps fund mixed-income housing and a federally qualified health center and has provided support for a myriad of community investments and programs.
The real secret sauce to GKFF’s investment strategy is deep partnership with neighborhood-based organizations, like Growing Together, which focuses on centering and amplifying community voices so they can help steer solutions. While the foundation is highly programmatic and operational in its approach to funding, Josh Miller, a program officer at GKFF, said that “at some point, you want to hand over the keys.”
The role of a place-based funder is to make lasting and sustainable change in a place, involving and being led by the community– setting them up for success so they can continue creating change and building strength beyond a grant cycle.
“When you're intentional and get the buy-in from the community, and also have a neighborhood-based organization that is providing the eyes and ears and feedback and keeping the conferencing strategy in place, you see great results. ”
And the results are backed by data. A recent study found that in Tulsa’s Kendall Whittier neighborhood, property values went up while rent stayed stable, and both graduation rates in college and high school and income levels increased.
Community quarterback
In Tulsa’s historic Kendall-Whittier neighborhood, Growing Together sees itself as the “community quarterback” for neighborhood development — taking a people-first approach to revitalization that prioritizes community needs to avoid negative gentrification.
Kaitlin Garrett, Executive Director of Growing Together, said that this approach to funding has shaped everything about the way the organization functions and organizes itself: “Our founder would always say that if data showed us that selling donuts on the on the sidewalk would change the lives of the families and kids living here, that's what we'd be doing.”
Growing Together works alongside community members to develop a thriving, equitable, and inclusively-grown neighborhood through the construction of mixed-income housing; safe and amenity-rich public spaces; and partnerships with the Tulsa Immigrant Relief Fund (TIRF) to support families that have experienced financial hardship as a result of COVID-19.
“We were not lenders, and now we are. We weren’t housing developers, and now we are,” Garrett said. “The drive comes from a team that's been built to really serve this community, and so we aren't married to any of our strategies, but continue doing the things that we know for sure are successful.”
