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Turley Community Garden Seeks Online Voting Help

The unincorporated community of Turley north of Tulsa needs your help earning $50,000 in grant money from the natural personal-care products company Tom’s of Maine.

The grant would go to creating a community teaching kitchen and greenhouse, as part of Turley’s A Third Place Community Foundation’s “Miracle Among the Ruins” project, which is tackling the area’s severe food insecurity problem.

It has already built a community garden and orchard through the help of other grants.

“Our zip code, 74126 in the Tulsa area, is among the lowest life-expectancy areas,” said Ron Robinson with the Foundation. “We have a 14-year life-expectancy gap between our area and just six miles south in Midtown.”

“That’s reflected not only because of the low income, where per capita income is around $13,000 a year,” he said, “just the amount of food insecurity—healthy food particularly.”

Though part of the area the Foundation serves is in the City of Tulsa, Turley is an unincorporated community, which makes it ineligible for many grants.

Robinson says it relies heavily on the type of private grant Tom’s of Maine is offering.

The poverty of the area means that many residents don’t have Internet access, which presents problems in an online voting competition.

“We really need other people’s … support,” Robinson said, “to vote for all the people here who just don’t have the means and the access or the experience in some ways to do online life and voting.”

You can vote once a day on the Tom’s of Maine Facebook page. Voting lasts until October 9.