A Third Place Community Foundation

http://www.turleyok.blogspot.com/ 

A Third Place Community Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to community renewal in a struggling low income, low life-expectancy area of Tulsa. We currently operate a community center and a community garden-park and orchard in two sites, and partners with many organizations in the area on projects to improve the quality of life for residents.

The Center needs a van to help folks get to doctors and shopping and even just to our pantry (many come by bike or on foot). A good used 7- or 8 passenger van is about $10,000, and we already have a $5,000 challenge offer if we can match that amount. Request: $5,000.

Other projects:

Located in the unincorporated census designated place of Turley, OK, but serving also the far north of City of Tulsa adjacent to it, the Foundation is located in a former, and long-abandoned, United Methodist Church building where it runs its community center and food pantry, computer center, clothing room, community art studio, and library. The Center's sole mission is to serve and advance the people of Turley and the surrounding area. With a budget of about $2500/month, half from tithes by our Board members, our accomplishments to date include a twice-weekly food pantry which serves about 150 clients/month, a community garden, "guerilla beautification" efforts (e.g., flowers and shrubs in neglected areas like road intersections), and special events like Halloween and Christmas gatherings, which attract up to 300 participants. We aspire to do much much more and better. Specifically, in order of cost:

We have an opportunity to take over management of a number of homes in far north Tulsa in our service area from a social service agency. Those would initially be rentals but our plan is to convert some or all of them to home-ownership. However, the logistics and sheer bureaucratic paperwork mean that we cannot pursue that opportunity without hiring a full-time administrator. Need: $25,000 for year one.

Our biggest long-term goal is to obtain title to the abandoned Cherokee School in downtown Turley from the Tulsa ISD. Our use of the Cherokee School as a community center has the potential to be transform many lives. Need: $375,000.

We also need to renovate the former abandoned church building, 10,000 square feet, that we are currently using for a community center; even if some of our programs expand into the Cherokee School vision proposal, we will need to finish renovating and making the building as sustainable as possible for our outreach to the community. Renovation costs: $250,000.

At our GardenKitchenPark and Orchard, we are expanding our food production areas and also planning to create a new kitchen and greenhouse and rainwater collection and community eating spaces and community artspace and public entertainment venue, and make all the spaces into educational outlets for sustainability and urban agriculture and healthy living and eating. Estimated costs: $100,000.