Tonight at 5 pm at the Welcome Table community center, 5920 N.
Owasso Ave: dinner and discussion on incorporation of Turley as a city.
Tonight at 7 pm. Harvesting at the Welcome Table
KitchenGardenPark and Orchard, 6005 N. Johnstown Ave., getting food for our food
pantry tomorrow.
Tomorrow, Friday, 9:30 am to noon, Food Pantry. Volunteers
needed. At the Center. Each Tuesday and Friday during those hours.
Tomorrow from 2:30 to 4:30 pm I will be representing us on a
panel about North Tulsa to health department employees who will be working in
our community at the new Wellness Center.
Saturday, at 1:30 pm I will be participating in the Read
Across North Tulsa event at Gilcrease Elementary School, 56th and N. Cincinnati.
Saturday, May 19, from 4 to 7 pm, join us for the kickoff of
our new monthly partnership benefit dinner for each third Saturday, at the
Turley Odd Fellows Lodge, 6227 N. Quincy Ave. this month proceeds go to Susan
Komen for the Cure campaign against breast cancer; each month will benefit a
community group. This month the Odd Fellows will be doing a spaghetti dinner,
suggested minimum $5 for all you care to eat, and $2 for those ten and under.
Every other month A Third Place Foundation will do the meal and use the benefits
for our projects, but this is also a great opportunity to reflect our new
community, to build bridges across ethnic and other lines, by eating together
for and with others. Join us.
Saturday night at Pickles Pub we will be saying goodbye to our
great volunteers and members and board members the Sansone Family as Chris plays
his final concert with the R&B band Built For Comfort, at 42nd and S.
Sheridan, as they take off for the Buffalo, NY area. Concert starts at 8:30 pm.
Next Thursday, May 24, at noon at the Center we will have a
work session to begin building our network of people and resources by specific
areas within our Turley area. Lunch included.
On Tuesday, May 29 there will be the Turley area Town Hall
public meeting at O'Brien Park Recreation Center.
On Thursday, May 31, the neighborhood watch meeting at the
Center at 6:30 pm.
On Saturday, June 2, we have our Board retreat from 9 am to 2
pm, then that evening we will have our annual presence and march in the Tulsa
Pride Parade sponsored by the Oklahoma Equality Center; come join us.
On Thursday, June 7 at 10 am volunteers gather for our next
Food Bank Mobile Van food giveaway, which starts for those with vouchers at 11
am. Come to the pantry to get vouchers for those in the 74126, 74130 and 74073
zip.
Saturday, June 9, I will be giving the keynote address and a
workshop on our work here to the North Texas Areas Unitarian Universalists in
the Dallas area at Horizon Church. The address is called "One Mission, Many
Communities" and will be an introduction to the missional church movement. Our
Sunday gatherings on good weather days have been at the park for study and
communion and common meal beginning at 9:30 am. Check at the Center first to see
if we are there or up at the park nearby, or call me at 9186913223. Eastertide
is continuing. Last week for Mother's Day too we had a great bible study and
conversation on radical women and mothers in Jesus' genealogy, and on the nature
of the bible in our spiritual lives, and the hard passages where we need to
speak back against what is in the Bible in order to uphold its deeper truths.
Thank you for your partnerships and for your help. We need
your support for our work now more than ever. We have finished with phase one of
the gardenkitchenpark, with just a few small projects left, and so we have used
in mission all of our grant funding, and are now back on memberships, on
fundraisers, and special donations. It has been an incredible year of outreach
and expansion for us.
We have given more money away to schools in our area this year
in response to all the cutbacks in public education, and we have and continue to
lobby for keeping the interests of neighborhoods in mind, especially our most
vulnerable neighborhoods, in decisions made about the schools. We want to expand
even further by using Cherokee School which has been closed to the community for
a year. We want to use it for a place of seniors and youth meals and community
events. We want to continue expanding our support of McLain school, of the new
Lighthouse Charter School where Horace Greeley has been which we have been
partnering with this past year especially, and with the Gicrease School where
the regular public school students in our area will now go.
We have expanded the gardenpark of course and with some more
work there we will be ready to move on to raising funds to create a
greenhouse/kitchen/shelter/storage/rainwatercollection building, and other
natural projects for people to use to build relationships while growing food
together.
We have expanded the food justice events and our pantry
program is one of the best in the state; we help people connect to other
resources; we provide a listening ear; we help them with food; we teach them how
to take the food and make healthy meals from it; and we encourage them to give
back to others even as they are receiving from others. Our mobile van food days
every other month reach out to hundreds. We have added a part time staff person
to help us with the pantry. Our clothing room that adjoins our pantry has been
helped by our volunteers who are giving back for what they have received, and it
is looking better and serving more than ever before.
We have held holiday parties and festivals for hundreds this
past program year since last summer. And since the wildfires of last summer we
have taken the lead in reorganizing a planning group to address the deep issues
of our community needs, such as disaster relief and incorporation and attracting
new residents and new businesses and working to help those already here. Because
of that this summer we will begin work on creating and institutionalizing our
Future of Turley work by creating a special development association to Grow
Turley!
In many ways we seek to grow ourselves and our community by
balancing our growth inward and outward. Many of the projects we undertake now
are never known publicly; they are in partnerships and helping others in our
community and their groups to grow with us, or helping one on one people and
groups; much of our planning coming up will be how we can continue to build our
own inner foundations through finances and people power and partnerships in
order that we can sustain the phenomenol amount of outward mission we do in the
community; much of our church work will be geared this coming year to providing
resources for people to grow in their own spiritual formation in order that they
may better serve others. It is such a blessing to have people moving into our
community, or relocating their passions and extra time, to working with us and
becoming a part of us on a regular basis; these leaders will be helping us to
grow more this coming year, through this summer of incubation, both inward and
outward.
Thank you for those of you who have helped with your
individual donations, with getting your churches to take up a plate offering for
our ministry here, or who are sending us opportunities for grants and new
partnerships. In the midst of great scarcity and needs, we hold on to your acts
of abundance with great love and gratitude, and though we don't say it enough,
not nearly enough, all that happens here happens because of you. And if you have
been reading these epistles from an abandoned place of Empire and felt the
calling to send us some resources, or come for a visit, please get in touch with
us, and pass on the opportunity to donate to us at www.turleyok.blogspot.com We shock people
sometimes in our workshops by talking about our radical sense of grace, how we
intentionally go from zero to zero in our bank books month by month, trusting
that more will be given so that we can give it away and show those around us
that our world even in its poverty is a place of great plenty, of enough; we are
in that situation again; we, however, don't like to stay at zero lol; we just
like to end up there each month. Be a part of our adventure in faithfulness and
mission. Help us keep surprising the world.
Finally, our sympathies to a wonderful friend and community
leader, Notes Richardson who worked at O'Brien Park Recreation Center and who
died suddenly at home this past Sunday; we had just visited with him at the
dedication of the Linda Taylor basketball court a few days before, commemorating
another of our community leaders who we have lost in this past year that has
been marked by so many deaths of those working with us and in our community:
Michael Niles, Joe Sanders, Steve Eberle, Gwen Goff, Linda Taylor, my own mother
Mickey, and others in our community, and now Nolan Richardson III; their spirits
continue to deepen our own and turn us to lifting the spirits of others. At this
coming time of Memorial Day, we will have much to remember and re-dedicate
ourselves too.
Thanks, blessings, and more soon,
Ron
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