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. It offers remote workers a $10,000 grant to move to Tulsa, Oklahoma, conditional on keeping a remote job and staying at least one year (roughly 95% of participants meet that bar). The programme is run day-to-day by the nonprofit Tulsa Remote LLC and 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 in its first two recruitment waves.

Independent economic-impact analysis commissioned from the Economic Innovation Group (EIG) found that the cohort present at the start of 2021 generated an estimated $62 million in new local labor income and supported 592 new jobs (394 remote-worker jobs plus 198 local jobs), a return of $13.77 in new local earnings for every dollar spent on relocation grants — one new local job for roughly every two remote workers relocated. A separate academic evaluation (published via Brookings, comparing 411 Tulsa Remote members against accepted-but-not-moved and rejected applicants over 2018–2021) found members reported a $26.5k annual real-income advantage and a small but measurable rise in community engagement, with 54% expecting to stay five or more years. The programme's own 2023 Economic Impact Report, summarized by SSTI, put cumulative new labor income at roughly $181,000 per member present in Tulsa and reported $4.4 million and $6.8 million in added county and state tax revenue respectively, with 53% of that year's newcomers from historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups.

The evidence has real limits. Participants are a self-selected, highly credentialed group — median income around $85,000 and 88% hold a bachelor's degree or higher — so the model has not been shown to work for a broadly disadvantaged workforce, and 'expected to stay' figures are self-reported intentions rather than observed long-run retention. The programme also depends entirely on one foundation's continued willingness to fund $10,000 grants at scale; without GKFF's endowment, replication elsewhere requires either comparable philanthropic capital or public subsidy, which several copycat schemes (e.g. in Arkansas and West Virginia) have since tested with more modest, less rigorously audited results.

Sources: https://eig.org/tulsa-remote-release/ ; https://www.brookings.edu/articles/work-from-anywhere-as-a-public-policy-three-findings-from-the-tulsa-remote-program/ ; https://ssti.org/blog/recent-research-tulsa-remote-study-shows-strong-economic-returns

Read the full analysis: https://tulsaremote.com/