By Sam Extance, Mother Road Market Event Coordinator Saturdays are my favorite day at Mother Road Market. It’s bustling with events and activity—the food hall coming alive with a cacophony of laughter, conversation, and merchants calling out people’s orders as they’re ready. My day begins early; I arrive to...
By Robbie Wing, Kitchen 66 Program Director One thing that is always evident at Kitchen 66 is that food has a way of bringing people together. While we offer several resources for new food entrepreneurs including sales opportunities and business training, possibly the most important thing we offer is a...
By Jeff Thompson, Mother Road Market General Manager “In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few.” ~ Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind At the Lobeck Taylor Family Foundation, we’ve had the pleasure of spending the past few months with some...
By Cori Ernst, Paige McQueen and Kyle Minden “People who love to eat are always the best people.” Julia Child, the famous red-haired American who taught our grandmothers how to cook French dishes, said this quote. Admittedly, most interns (like ourselves) are part of Generation Z...
By Shanese Slaton, Mother Road Market Project Manager My husband makes fun of the way I plan my schedule around my next meal, but to me all good memories are linked to food, whether the memory is from a certain meal or the experience around it. As a...
By Adele Beasley, Director of Food Innovation Launching a food startup? Here’s how to get started. Food business is not for the faint of heart. For aspiring food business owners, just getting off the ground can be tricky. Right from the start, entrepreneurs face a long checklist...
By Ashley Van Horne, Chief Communications Officer At the Lobeck Taylor Family Foundation, we are hands-on with entrepreneurs every single day. Whether we are working with budding entrepreneurs in the Tulsa StartUp Series pitch competition, culinary dreamers in the Kitchen 66 Launch Program, future business moguls...
By Natalie Deuschle, LTFF Director of Grants & Impact After spending a year working for a social enterprise that supported survivors of human trafficking in Cambodia, I was eager to explore the root causes of poverty and inequity from a systems level view. I also returned...
By Casey Allen, Kiva Tulsa Lead Growing up, I always loved giving away my parents’ money. Any time we passed a table of Girl Scouts selling cookies or animal shelter volunteers asking for donations, I would scrounge around in the bottom of my mom’s purse for...
By Elizabeth Frame Ellison, CEO Driving my kids home from school last week, the song “Humble” by Kendrick Lamar came on from my Spotify playlist. (Side note, this song is not at all appropriate for young children, please don’t report me to the parenting police). My...