TULSA, Okla. — Every year the City of Tulsa releases the Equality Indicators Report.
The report is designed to track Tulsa's growth in key areas including:
- Economic Opportunity
- Education
- Housing
- Public Health
- Justice
- Service
READ MORE: City of Tulsa releases 2023 equality indicators report
Tulsa scored 61/100 in business ownership by gender. A 14 point jump since the city started tracking.
Lori Nair is a female business owner in Tulsa. She started her shop by chance, 22 years ago her daughter needed a special bag for her wheelchair and Nair made one. Then she started making more.
She expanded to embroidery. She took her business to trade shows, but it expanded so much she started a brick-and-mortar location, Tatermash near 31st and Harvard in Tulsa.
"We love being in Tulsa," Nair said, "I mean, we’ve been all over, we’ve traveled with the business, and we still can’t wait to come home and do this. I still have fun here, I still enjoy it, and I have great people that work with me. If it wasn’t for them, I couldn’t do it by myself," Nair said.
She’s not the only female business owner to see success.
"As long as we’ve been in business, I don’t know if we would have made it without networking with other small business," Nair said.
The report also highlighted one area seeing a significant decline: homelessness by disability status.
"There’s a couple more resources that we could use," Walt Lewis, a homeless man bound to a wheelchair said.
2 News met Lewis in February 2024.
In 2018, Tulsa’s homelessness by disability score was 35/100. Since then, it has dropped by 15 points to 20/100.
"The struggle is real. People take advantage of the struggle and they’re not used to it, cuz they’re not having to go through it," Lewis said.
Mayor GT Bynum said the numbers are part of a larger story for the City of Tulsa.
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