© 2024 Public Radio Tulsa
800 South Tucker Drive
Tulsa, OK 74104
(918) 631-2577

A listener-supported service of The University of Tulsa
classical 88.7 | public radio 89.5
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

City of Tulsa, Goodwill Industries Release Blueprint to Improve Residents' Financial Health

Matt Trotter
/
KWGS

Leaders with Goodwill Industries and the City of Tulsa unveiled a plan Friday to help residents improve their financial situations.

The City of Tulsa’s Blueprint for Economic Prosperity details how the city can best financially empower all its residents.

The plan calls for city programs to help with "stabilizing individual financial health." Those include increasing affordable housing and supports for people experiencing homelessness, boosting public transportation access, and supporting naturalization for eligible immigrants.

It also includes steps like embedding financial counseling into city services and fee systems, adopting policies that connect more residents with better paying jobs, and supporting small businesses by fully implementing a commercial revitalization strategy.

Approaches in the blueprint were based on data from the Gallup-Tulsa CitiVoice survey and the Tulsa Equality Indicators. They include both existing policies and programs and future plans.

The CitiVoice survey revealed Tulsans often have trouble meeting basic needs for their families. Roughly one-third of residents said there have been times in the past 12 months when they did not have enough money to buy food, nearly double the proportion of residents nationally in 2017 who did not have enough money to buy food at some point in the year.

More than one-third of Tulsans have experienced a time in the past 12 months when they did not have enough money to pay for healthcare or medicine for themselves or their families. More than one in 10 report times in the past 12 months when they were unable to provide adequate shelter or housing for themselves and their families.

In addition to the blueprint, the City of Tulsa and Goodwill Industries of Tulsa will open a Financial Empowerment Center in late 2020. The center will offer free, professional one-one-one counseling to the public.

For those looking to help design what the center will look like, the city is forming a Financial Empowerment Center Advisory Board.

Funding for the Blueprint for Economic Prosperity, as well as funding for the Financial Empowerment Center comes from a CityStart Grant from the Cities for Financial Empowerment Fund.

Matt Trotter joined KWGS as a reporter in 2013. Before coming to Public Radio Tulsa, he was the investigative producer at KJRH. His freelance work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times and on MSNBC and CNN.