Tulsa Remote — Remote-Worker Relocation Programme

Tulsa Remote is a philanthropy-funded relocation programme launched in November 2018 by the George Kaiser Family Foundation (GKFF), a large private foundation built on Tulsa oil wealth, and run day-to-day by the nonprofit Tulsa Remote LLC.

To attract remote workers to Tulsa, Oklahoma via a $10,000 relocation grant, conditional on keeping a remote job and staying at least one year.

The programme grew from an initial pilot of a few hundred people to over 1,200 relocated members by November 2021 and 1,600+ by September 2022, drawn from more than 20,000 applications across its first two recruitment waves; roughly 95% of participants meet the one-year retention bar.

Economic Innovation Group (EIG) found the cohort present at the start of 2021 generated an estimated $62 million in new local labor income and supported 592 new jobs, a return of $13.77 in new local earnings per dollar spent on relocation grants. A Brookings-published academic evaluation comparing 411 Tulsa Remote members against accepted-but-not-moved and rejected applicants (2018-2021) found members reported a $26.5k annual real-income advantage, with 54% expecting to stay five or more years. The programme's 2023 Economic Impact Report put cumulative new labor income at roughly $181,000 per member present in Tulsa, with $4.4 million and $6.8 million in added county and state tax revenue respectively, and 53% of that year's newcomers from historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups.

Participants are a self-selected, highly credentialed group (median income ~$85,000; 88% hold a bachelor's degree or higher), so the model has not been shown to work for a broadly disadvantaged workforce, and the programme depends entirely on one foundation's continued willingness to fund $10,000 grants at scale. Less rigorously audited copycat schemes (e.g. in Northwest Arkansas and West Virginia) have since tested the model with more modest results.