TulsaNorth/Turley Food Statistics: Why We Need The Miracle Among The Ruins Welcome Table GardenKitchenPark

Back to the basics of why we do what we do...According to a survey of our service area residents living in our zipcodes, which we partnered last summer to do with the OU Graduate Social Work Department, and are now publishing the results of....

...55 percent worry about the amount of food they have
...6 percent use spoiled food
...29 percent use a food pantry
...31 percent receive food from church
...35 percent borrow food from family
...25 percent borrow food from friends
...25 percent adults skip entire day from eating
...29 percent adults skip meals
...26 percent did not eat and are hungry at time of survey
...43 percent eat less than they should
...60 percent eat low cost foods
...52 percent cannot afford nutritious meals
...57 percent run out of food
...60 percent cannot afford healthy food

The Food Environment:
...29 percent have no affordable source of food in community
...63 percent know about a food pantry
,..56 percent rate the food quality in Turley area as fair or poor
...59 percent indicate food in Turley area expensive or very expensive relative to budget

Overall Health:
...56 percent not currently healthy
...41 percent health is fair or poor
...54 percent are overweight
...66 percent should weigh less
...47 percent smoke or use other tobacco

Nothing too surprising, of course, but sometimes the statistics are needed to make especially visible and in our face what we know from our anecdotal experience.

While it is true in our short life as a community within our community we have begun to provide a food pantry, offer meals, a one morning a week health clinic, a daily summer feeding program, beginning community gardens and orchard, classes and workshops on nutrition, providing community health and food resource information, and more, it is all a small drop in the bucket compared to what we can effect physicially, psychologically, spiritually, with the creation of the planned The Welcome Table Community Garden Kitchen Greenspace Park where we can raise from the ground up, from the grassroots, a major project to change our landscape, to bring people together to grow their own healthy food, saving money and saving lives, teaching how to grow and how to cook and how to eat healthy right here in our neighborhood in a fun park environment we will make in a place with a great view of Tulsa downtown and Tulsa county stretching out to Bird Creek bottomland in one direction and Turley Hill in the other. See the other posts here for all the vision and details and our Aug. 31 fundraising deadline. See the donate button above. Safe and easy and you don't have to have a paypal account to use the online giving form. Or send checks of support made out to A Third Place Community Foundation to us at 6514 N. Peoria Ave. Turley or Tulsa OK 74126.

We don't wait for a governmental agency to come in from the outside, with employees who don't live in our area providing services to us in our area, to do this; we don't wait for the perfect time and perfect economic climate to do this; at a time when everyone is cutting back, here where things have been cut back for years, we come together to start something new, something with a safe environment in the midst of an area others seek to make unsafe or to stigmatize and stereotype; here on the ground in solidarity with supporters in other places, we can dream big again, and make them real, one block at a time, modelling and inspiring others in their areas.

We have these past three years created an indoors A Third Place Center, from which we have created small projects elsewhere across our area; now we are moving toward creating the gardenkitchenpark as an outdoors A Third Place Center, where even bigger dreams will be dreamed and connections made to pull them off too.

We can over time, and by changing the culture from the grassroots, turn those statistics on food and health and justice around; they have not always been true of us living here; they don't have to be true for us and our children in the future. Perhaps there is no one miracle cure for these social and political and personal problems underlying the statistics, as I believe there is not, but I know the Miracle Among The Ruins transformation is one miracle that will make a difference.