When I signed up for this trip, I had zero background for it. I saw a Facebook ad advertising free trips to Tulsa for young Jews and signed up because that seemed like an interesting thing to do. Even when I got to Tulsa, I still had very little context as to why I was there. I had to piece it together over the course of the weekend. To save you from the same detective work, I’ll just present it here.
Tulsa is in a weird spot. It’s a little over 100 years old, and has always been a frontier town. Its fortunes have waxed and waned with the oil and gas industry, which alternately produces millionaires, billionaires, and bankruptcies. The town itself was basically stolen from the Indians a bit over a hundred years ago, laid out on a grid, and then developed in fits and spurts as city tax revenues swelled and declined with its main industry. This means that Tulsa has some beautiful art deco buildings, a strange layout including massive parking lots in the middle of downtown and full on suburbs 5 minutes from the city center, and a still unsettled sense of place.
So, the single largest force in Tulsan civic life is an opaque, unaccountable community foundation funded mostly by George Kaiser and partially by Lynn Schusterman, who are two elderly Jewish billionaires. And what’s really weird is that this is happening in an otherwise normal, Bible Belt city of 1 million people (and a Jewish population of roughly 2000) with a median household income of $60k. Compare this to Silicon Valley, which has a median household income of $140k and no shortage of billionaires, and you’ll understand the Tulsa Community Foundation’s outsized impact.
By all reports, this has been a very positive relationship. The Tulsa Community Foundation (or, more specifically, the George Kaiser Family Foundation and, to a lesser extent, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Foundation, as TCF is just a house for these family foundations) have spent enormous amounts of money trying to make Tulsa a better place to live. They’ve built multiple beautiful parks (including one incredible one called the Gathering Place), a children’s museum, revitalized downtown, launched scores of programs to improve the lives of Tulsa’s underprivileged children, created Tulsa Remote (which offers $10k and relocation assistance for any remote worker to move to Tulsa for one year), and funded a bunch of different business assistance programs. And all of this is just off the top of my head. I’m sure there’s a lot I don’t know about.
The tide that George Kaiser is beating back is, of course, Tulsa’s natural decay as a midwest, Bible Belt city. Throughout the 90s and 2000s, every young person who could afford to leave Tulsa did so. This included Tulsa’s Jewish population, which declined from about 5000 in the 90s to less than half that number today.
And that’s where my weekend comes in. I visited Tulsa through Tulsa Tomorrow, a program that flies out young Jews to Tulsa for a weekend to try to get them to live there. So far, from their own numbers, they’ve flown out about 150 Jews over the last 6 years and about 70-80 have moved.
Tulsa Tomorrow is partially funded by George Kaiser, but it’s mostly funded by the rest of Tulsa’s Jewish community, with the majority coming from a local family who made their fortune as a fabric distributor. The scion of that family, Dave, was, not coincidentally, one of our main hosts for the weekend.
The pitch that Dave and his fellow Tulsan Jews made to us was simple. In Tulsa, your dreams can come true.
Of course, they didn’t pitch it quite like that. Instead, they put it something like this: Tulsa itself has a few natural advantages. It has cheap housing (e.g. $350k for a 4 bed, 2 bathroom house 5 minutes from downtown), mostly warm weather in the winters, and zero traffic. Also, recently, Tulsa itself has become a cute, fun city, thanks in large part to the largesse of George Kaiser. Over the course of our visit, we were shown museums, a Tiki bar, a hip brunch place, and a dueling piano bar. We were also told that we had just missed a Journey concert, and that Lizzo was coming to Tulsa shortly on her tour.
But that’s why to come to Tulsa more generally. More importantly, they wanted to pitch us on why to come to Tulsa as a Jew. Their argument here was basically that the Tulsan Jewish community is insanely well-resourced and organized. If you move here, they can pretty much guarantee you a nice job at a Jewish nonprofit and a social event every week at least. That’s not to mention all the social clubs and volunteer opportunities that are available through those nonprofits.
Meanwhile, if your ambitions stretch farther than that, that can also be accommodated. Over the course of the weekend, I heard from a bunch of people who had taken advantage of just that.
by Trevor Klee, Trevor Klee's Newsletter | Read more:
Image: Playground section of the Gathering Place/uncredited[ed. I hear stories about political relocations (eg. conservatives moving to northern Idaho and eastern Oregon; liberals to blue states/cities) and wonder if this type of targeting might increase, beyond the traditional approach of focusing on specific business sectors - tech, manufacturing, retail, etc.? Or one-off deal?]
