Hi all. You haven't received an email from us lately because
of the busyness of the season here at A Third Place Community Foundation and the
The Welcome Table missional community in the Turley and Far Northside area. But
we have been grateful for your support, your partnerships, your connections,
your helping to spread the word about our service and social justice actions
here. We hope your own Christmas and holiday seasons have been as blessed, and
if you like many have been struggling during these particular days we hope that
simple gifts of peace and hope will come your way. Know that you are in our
prayers.
I have been thinking of lights amid the darkness lately, and
not just because that is a cliche of the seasons. Here in our area there are big
swaths of North Peoria, as I have written about often, with no streetlights, no
sidewalks, and no holiday decorations lighting up the businesses or public
buildings along our busiest street. In fact, several months ago I attached
photos of various abandoned unhealthy dangerous rundown and burned out buildings
on North Peoria Ave when I sent out a letter from us, and those buildings remain
as they are and have been, untouched, still eyesores right across from Cherokee
School even as we try to attract groups to come relocate and repurpose the
closed school with us. Whether it is utilities, banks, grocery stores,
restaurants, salons, car salvages, I know of only one that has put up lights to
show a little Christmas spirit to the community. It is part of what happens when
people who run our businesses, etc. don't live here anymore, and that we don't
have a group along this corridor to support and encourage one another, and the
community association of residents, like so many of our barely getting by
neighborhood associations in our area, are low on money and energy.
And yet, you know I am going to write "and yet..." I think of
how our group has, in good Charlie Brown Christmas Tree style, put up
decorations by the welcome sign to our area on North Peoria, including a tree
this year; and how we have put up solar lights (so as not to have to use school
electricity) on the community Christmas tree that is still by the memorial arch
at Cherokee School even now two winters since the school is closed, lights that
flash on and off and that cover just half of the tree, a sign of the barely
hanging on life, but that still shines and reminds of its existence, and perhaps
to some unknown child going down to the grocery store in the dark without
sidewalks, or waiting for the bus nearby, it will at least bring some cheer; and
how up on the hill just west of the Cherokee School we have started lighting up
one corner of our Community KitchenGardenPark and Orchard, there where so much
trash and burned out homes once stood amid the grass higher than the roof, like
too many of our homes still in this area just out of sight and out of mind of
most people in the Tulsa area. Just one little corner lighted this season, but
it has inspired us to begin plans for next year when we will have a Garden of
Lights for all in our area there, and weather permitting hold community events
there during the season as people walk through the orchard and around the
gardens and the new shed and enjoy the views and the lights. (if you would like
to donate light decorations or can buy them at after Christmas sales, please do
as we start our planning for this new venture of lights next year). And how we
have put up our own few but meaningful lights at the community center for people
passing by to enjoy, a reminder that we do have enough even though we don't have
enough that we can still share a little generosity of spirit, of beauty.
Of course, these lights are just signs of the many other kinds
of ways we have recently been illuminated ourselves by our neighbors, and how we
help bring light into lives and neighborhoods. Here are a few
below:
---Our food justice pantry continues to expand; we had a great
mobile van food day at the center and gave out 5 tons of food; we continue to
increase by 30 percent our outreach to those hungry in just our own three
zipcodes we serve; we will have given out some 75 turkeys alone. We had great
125 or so people at our Christmas community meal and carols and gift giving when
the kids were able to get about 5 gifts apiece. And our garden has been
producing herbs and peppers almost right up to Christmas. In the new year we are
going to be concentrating our Mobile Van Food Days to connecting with new
residents of our area and those whom are in need but haven't been able to learn
about or get to our pantry; we are going to target school families in our areas
to receive our vouchers for the food on those special days when the Mobile Van
comes, as a way to connect them with our ongoing resources. We will also be
offering meals on those special days too. Our next one will be Friday, Jan. 25
from 10 am to noon followed by the meal.
--In fact at the same time for those whom we already serve
with food and meals we are expanding the food pantry to add being open on the
first Saturdays of each month, beginning Jan. 5, from 11 am to 1 pm besides our
weekly hours. And we will couple the food days with the new Community Art Days,
which is another way this season we have been bringing light of art into
people's lives as well as helping them to make inexpensive and meaningful gifts
to give.
---And we are working on service learning projects with both
OU Graduate Social Work classes to give them experience understanding poverty
and healthy responses to it, and will be working in the new year with McLain
School on a new Smart Choices=Healthy Living grant to expose the students in our
area to how they can help create healthier communities and set good patterns for
their own lives for giving back and growing healthy.
---We continue to be involved in the kind of light-giving that
doesn't show up as much, but that is cultivating the soil of the spirit and hope
here in the 74126. We are working to help the volunteer fire department grow by
becoming a Fire Board independent district; we are working still on abandoned
buildings (see above) and on a Disaster Response Network; we are still trying to
recruit and show groups the vision of what Cherokee School could become rather
than just another large abandoned building attracting criminals in our area, or
arsonists; we are after the first of the year beginning a steering committee to
bring back a Turley Area Senior Citizens Center, one that had been abandoned
years before when funds were cut; now there is no senior nutrition site
available for miles and miles and they are often already full; on the other end
of our hunger spectrum (and remember that in our area half of our population
will soon be either over 60 or under 18, the most vulnerable population groups)
we will be planning the return of our daily summer meal for all under 18, a
program that we had no home for this past summer due to another school closure
in our area. And we are still researching and hoping we can attract in the new
year people who want to help us build relationships and affect lives through
taking on low-income low rent homes in our area in the subdivisions where so
many abandoned homes seem to dominate. And we want to help recruit volunteers to
our partners for their projects, especially the inspiring ground breaking work
being done at Sarah's Residential Living as they try to take more of these
abandoned homes and transform them into intimate group living spaces for those
in need here; and for the North Tulsa Farmers Market. We also want to continue
enriching our partnership with the new Health Dept. wellness center nearby,
using our experience and contacts to connect residents with the emerging care
available there through the OSU Physicians clinic and the health dept programs.
---We are hopeful in the new year of getting grants to make
the gardenpark into a community art space, but whether we get the grants or not,
we will continue creating it as such, tapping into the gifts and lights of the
people who live nearby and who are still finding out about the garden, and that
it is for them, and that they can use it. There will be much growth at the park
which was just dedicated this past summer, and we hope the Garden of Lights at
the end of next year will be the culmination of how the park is a beacon of hope
in the area throughout the year. Planting will be resuming in February by the
way so plan now to bring teams to help.
---Some of our signature events have been the summer festival,
the Halloween and Christmas meals and parties, where we connect with hundreds of
our neighbors in a fun way and provide information and resources. We want to
expand those community parties and find ways to take people on excursions around
town or even as we recently helped to do to take a hike up on Turley Hill to
find the legendary Runestone Rock. We will want to help expand and spread the
word about our ongoing resources we have such as the clothing room, the
computer center, and now with the closure of our community laundramat we need to
hook up and make available at times our own washer and dryer; we are going to be
getting more organized with a new Crafts Co-op and hope to have booths set up at
farmers markets where our folks can have their items sold; we have our Auction
items remaining to bring in needed money for our projects, and so if you can
help sell them on craigslist or help us get them to a consignment auction
somewhere let us know; And we have begun to improve some of the grounds around
our Center and want to do more in the coming year to create a deck, and
welcoming places where people can use our wifi and our space even when the
building itself might not be open, and to help transform the neighborhood, so we
have many building and construction projects on tap right on our own properties,
even as we look to other properties as well.
---And finally I know I have missed out on some of the ways we
brought light into our area this past year, with your help and with your
donations to www.turleyok.blogspot.com, and I
definitely know that there will be many new projects and undertakings and just
simple small acts of justice done with great love that will emerge that I can
not even imagine now, because they are in the imagination and inspiration of
someone reading this, or someone whom we haven't even met yet, but who will find
through us a way to put their gifts and passions into the crevices of a broken
world here.
---For example, I am about to leave to go get things started
for a special Free Christmas Store today for a few hours that just came up over
the weekend as we got so many donations in of toys and turkeys, etc. that we
needed to begin setting up a special time when people can just come and look and
receive. It will be open from 2-4 pm today, but then our Food Pantry will be
open on the day after Christmas too as we continue to help people share in the
holiday, reminding them that Christmas begins, not ends, on Dec. 25. To find
ways that on each of the 12 days of Christmas, the spirit of incarnating the
Holy can be born even here in the burned out places, in the new Nazareths, in
the mangers where the homeless and the addicted and the mentally ill and the
learning disabled and the unemployed and the abused and the just released from
prison felons and the sick, and those who refuse to leave them and live
elsewhere, and those who love this area and its people and return to it, and
those who are drawn here for some reason to be blessed by all here (as surely it
is a blessing to have seen those lines of children at the christmas party we
hosted, to receive their spirit that was much deeper and more beautiful than
anything we could give them), that all of this can be born every day, even here,
even now.
Thanks for your presence with us, and for all you do wherever
you are. We look forward to joining with you in the new year.
And a P.S. to those interested in our missional community: we
have Christmas Eve candlelighting service for the community at large tonight at
6 pm followed by cider and cookies, etc. And on Sunday Dec. 30 we will have a
special Christmas communion and a celebatory fun outing perhaps breakfast at El
Rio Verde and then on to somewhere else to be determined. And on Sunday, Jan. 6
stay tuned for news of a special 10 year Anniversary of our church, first begun
on Jan. 6, Epiphany Day, 2003 in Owasso OK as Epiphany Church then later moved
to Turley and as The Living Room Church and then six years ago we transformed
into the missional church at A Third Place and now January will have been two
years since we moved here into this building and became The Welcome Table.
www.progressivechurchplanting.blogspot.com
to read through the years of history of posts.
We have enjoyed this Advent season watching and discussing the
new monastic DVD called The Awakening of Hope, and it and the anniversary have
spurred us to begin the new year with conversations and prayers and new visions
of what we still are called to become. Definitely more on that as the New Year
and Epiphany draws near.....
Thank you (did I mention end of the year donations are very
very much needed and appreciated and can be made at the new GoFundMe site for us
at http://www.gofundme.com/1msvm8 or
still at www.turleyok.blogspot.com or by mail
to A Third Place Foundation at 5920 N. Owasso Ave. Turley, OK 74126.) and
blessings and more to come,
Ron
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