The City of Tulsa has received a grant to help with plans to close Tulsa's racial wealth gap.
The Cities for Financial Empowerment Fund awarded Tulsa $20,000 toward that work. The city will not be providing any financial services as a result.
"The city is convening banking institutions, companies in the area, nonprofits … and acting as a leader to set the goal. What’s the goal for our city? What do we want for Tulsans in the financial literacy and empowerment space?" said Chief Resilience Officer DeVon Douglass.
That planning will go toward the Resilient Tulsa Strategy goal of helping Bank$afe Oklahoma reach more people.
"The people who are unbanked and underbanked are folks who live in poverty or who are on the poverty line or folks who we call 'ALICE' — asset limited, income constrained, employed," Douglass said. "These are people who are working hard who are not quite middle class."
Douglass said both unbanked and underbanked Tulsans have a hard time building any wealth. Underbanked Tulsans include those using limited-access products like reloadable cash cards.
"It doesn’t allow people to budget in the same way. You end up having folks taking out payday loans in order to better cover their expenses. You have people who are using check into cash–type places where they’re paying higher fees than people who have banks," Douglass said.
The Resilient Tulsa Strategy calls for the Bank$afe support to begin in the first quarter of 2019.