Giving Thanks for Giving Time

I just wanted to give a quick thanks to all of my superb volunteers at the University of Tulsa and Professor Diane Potts’ class at Tulsa Community College. These undergraduates are helping us better serve our parents by interviewing them about their employment, educational, and financial situations. It’s a tough topic to discuss with people [...]

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Food Stamps Enrollees Approach Record Numbers

A few days ago I mentioned that Oklahoma was holding somewhat steady in the face of the economic downturn, with several indicators worsening but not horrible. I meant to write that it felt like being in the calm before the storm, to make it clear that I wasn’t arguing that Oklahoma would escape the recession.
So [...]

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Mission-Driven Innovation

When I think of innovation, especially in terms of how it applies to CAP, I see it as a tremendous asset.
CAP’s mission is helping low-income families achieve self-sufficiency—giving people the knowledge and tools to become economically stable. The role of innovation is a way to come up with new and effective strategies to solve a [...]

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No one will go there

Humor my little bit of Friday New Yorker Profile blogging, as it pertains to our work here at the Initiative. Over lunch I was reading a piece on Santiago Calatrava (official website), a world-renowned Spanish architect perhaps known best in the US for his Milwaukee Art Museum. Anyway, in the article he defends his designs [...]

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Becoming a Blogger

I can’t believe I am actually blogging. It feels like riding a bike on two wheels for the first time or getting up for a minute on the wind surfer, which is the best I ever did at that.
It should not be surprising that CAP is the cause for this new development in my [...]

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The Initiative’s 20% of the time Innovator

“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.”
— Howard Aiken

Today is my day to post about my role in TI and function on this blog. For some reason this week, I’ve woken up every morning with a slight panic about this [...]

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Uneducted

So we just got our new, shiny Tulsa Initiative brochures (which we’ll post on here in PDF at some point) after having gone through many many drafts and proofs. Darlene, our executive assistant, hadn’t seen it yet so I gave her one.
And what did she find?
And that my friends, is why you can’t trust [...]

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The Initiative’s Resident Reader

Welcome to the second installment of welcome week. We’ll be here introducing the Tulsa Initiative team throughout the week and sharing our goals for this blog. My piece is about my research role for TI, so let’s dive in.
When I tell friends and old classmates that I’m a researcher at a local anti-poverty agency, I [...]

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Welcome to the Tulsa Initiative blog!

Thanks for checking us out. As you can see, we’ve spent the past couple of weeks posting some (what we think are) interesting items and updates related to two potentially very different topics: fighting poverty, and doing innovation. The Tulsa Initiative was actually born out of a merger of the two. It [...]

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