Since its inception, Tulsa Community Foundation has enhanced the quality of life in eastern Oklahoma by providing individualized services to donors, serving as a catalyst for vital local issues, sharing community knowledge with the public, maintaining effective financial stewardship of assets and maximizing return on investment for each grant made.
Today, we steward $6 billion in charitable assets for community good.
In 1998, several charitably-minded leaders joined together to establish Tulsa Community Foundation. Tulsa was the last of the 50 major metropolitan areas to be without a community foundation.
The main architect behind the creation of TCF was George B. Kaiser. According to Kaiser, “In the glory days of Tulsa, we could rely on ad hoc assemblages of major corporate and individual leaders to help pursue significant challenges or opportunities for the city. Because Tulsa had such strength and depth of public-private partnership, we did not have need for a community foundation and were the only major U.S. city not to have formed one by 1998. But after several waves of corporate and individual outmigration and death (another style of outmigration, I suppose), we no longer could rely upon the kind of leadership required on an impromptu basis. To continue the city’s progress, I felt we needed a permanently functioning mechanism to fulfill that role.”
Original Trustees of the foundation included Keith Bailey, Chester Cadieux, Joseph Cappy, Kathleen Coan, Fred Dorwart, Phil Frohlich, Hans Helmerich, George Kaiser, John Kirkpatrick, David Kyle, Robert LaFortune, Bob Lorton, Stan Lybarger, Paula Marshall-Chapman, then-Mayor Susan Savage, Lynn Schusterman, Ray Siegfried, Henry Will and Jack Zarrow.