Mayor G.T. Bynum’s most comprehensive and ambitious plan yet to improve the city will be unveiled Tuesday with the release of the Resilient Tulsa strategy.
The plan includes 41 actions intended to help create an equal playing field for all Tulsans, and in so doing, lift the entire city.
“I view this as kind of the second shoe to drop following on the Equality Indicators coming out,” Bynum said. “That kind of quantified the problems. Now these are meaningful steps we can take to start addressing the problems that were quantified in that report.”
The Tulsa Equality Indicators study, released in April, identified 54 issues of inequality the city needs to address and gave the city an overall equality score 38.93 out of 100.
The Equality Indicators study and the Resilient Tulsa strategy were funded by the Rockefeller Foundation as part of its 100 Resilient Cities program. The foundation also provided advice and technical assistance to the city as it put together the study and strategy.
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Although the 41 actions outlined in the Resilient Tulsa strategy do not correlate specifically with the issues of inequality identified in the Equality Indicators, the documents are intended to complement each other.
The city’s resilience strategy focuses on addressing racial inequities but is not exclusively about that. It also touches on inequities caused by such things as geography and incarceration.
“We are trying to accomplish, at its core, a more equitable Tulsa,” said DeVon Douglass, the city’s chief resilience officer. “Equity is often talked about in terms of race, but we are not only talking about racial equity, although that was the keystone of the strategy.”
A resilient city, Douglass said, is one that ensures that all of its residents are in the best possible position to thrive no matter what challenges they, or the city as a whole, might be facing.
“If we can strengthen our people, our city will automatically become a stronger city,” Douglass said.
The strategy includes four overarching visions, within which are goals, followed by actions to achieve the goals.
The visions call for creating an inclusive future that honors all Tulsans; equipping all Tulsans to overcome barriers and thrive; advancing economic opportunity for all Tulsans; and transforming city and regional systems to improve outcomes for all Tulsans.
For example, one of the actions listed for creating an inclusive future that honors all Tulsans is the launch of race reconciliation conversations in partnership with local faith leaders.
The strategy also calls for conducting implicit bias training for all city employees, including Tulsa police officers, as a means of transforming city and regional systems to improve outcomes for all Tulsans.
Bynum will unveil the complete Resilient Tulsa strategy at a Tuesday news conference.
Douglass said there are some actions the city will be able to initiate and administer on its own, but that most of the work cannot be accomplished without support from individual Tulsans, businesses, foundations and social service agencies.
“This strategy is for people to get involved,” she said. “So many times governments create documents that are inaccessible — they feel far away. We really wanted Resilient Tulsa to be the type of document where people were involved from beginning to end.”
Creation of the Resilient Tulsa strategy began with a series of public meetings to identify the concerns of the community. More than 1,000 people commented, leaving city staff — joined by the Resilient Tulsa steering committee and the Racial Equity Advisory Committee — plenty to work with as they dug deeper into the comments, identified issues and came up with a list of 60 possible actions to address them.
Bynum and Douglass had the final say on which actions became part of the strategy.
“Overall, the greatest challenge that we have is that, to truly accomplish the goals that are set out, the actions, you have to have people in the community believe that they can change things for the better,” Bynum said, “because they are the ones who are going to have to do it, and if they feel that things are so entrenched and so intractable that they have just given up and refuse to pitch in and help, it is going to be a lot harder.”
Bynum described the resilience strategy as a launching point for addressing what ails the city but added that the document should not be construed as a cure-all. New problems will surely arise, the mayor said, and the city will have to respond when they do.
His intent, however, is to get all of the action items implemented while he is in office — a period he hopes will extend two terms.
“To the best I can tell, this is the most comprehensive plan to address inequities that our city has produced in our history,” Bynum said. “And I think it says a lot about Tulsans in 2018 who want to play a role in making it be a city for everybody.”
