T-Town Tacos (T-TT) in Tulsa, Oklahoma with Team MPower
Our last week on the road was in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We were sad to say goodbye to Chloe, who started her internship in Austin, but we continued on with a team of three. We worked with T-Town Tacos (T-TT), a social enterprise that is a part of Youth Services of Tulsa. T-Town Tacos provides workforce development and training for youth aged 18–24 experiencing homelessness. As a social enterprise, T-Town Tacos is a revenue-generating business, selling tacos for breakfast and lunch directly to people in downtown Tulsa. It also has delivery and catering offerings. The mission of T-Town Tacos is to provide a safe space for youth to learn soft skills such as responsibility, initiative, and positive communication in order to be job or school ready.
Caption: The team outside of the Youth Services of Tulsa building. Beaux (far left) and Wes (second from the right) run T-Town Tacos.
We became true “Okies” within our first few hours in Tulsa, as we were greeted with tornado warnings on Monday. We went into the office to meet with Wes and Beaux, the entrepreneurs running T-TT, but by mid-morning everyone in the office had been instructed to go home due to the weather. Luckily, there was no major damage near where we were staying but we were acutely aware of the impact variable weather has on the lives of people in Oklahoma.
On Tuesday our plan was to get up early to watch the breakfast shift at T-TT, but again, the weather made that difficult. Tornado warnings went off from about 6:00–8:00 am. Eventually, it cleared up and we made our way to the office to meet with some of the staff at Youth Services of Tulsa. This included several case managers and social workers who have worked for many years with youth experiencing homeless in the region. We learned a lot about the challenges of working with this population and how T-Town Tacos offers much needed support for people with some of the greatest barriers to employment. The ultimate goal of T-Town Tacos is for youth going through the program to be employed with an outside provider for at least 180 days with no more than a 30 day break. Once we had a better grasp of the challenges facing T-TT, we decided to divide our work into three projects.
- Create an inventory tracker that organizes information for inventory and ordering in a simple manner. Right now, Wes and Beaux do most of this work from memory. This tracker allows them to be more systematic and enables them to pass this responsibility onto the youth team members.
- Build a financial model that calculates revenues, costs, and profitability for T-Town Tacos as a whole and by different products. One of the goals for T-Town Tacos is for it to be a zero-cost program for the Youth Services of Tulsa. This financial model gives them a high-level overview of their financial health and will help them make more informed decisions about pricing and how much to scale their catering and delivery offerings.
- Develop a map that organizes the skills taught in the T-Town Tacos curriculum and shows how each skill relates to different activities. The main goal of the program is for youth to be either job or school ready after several months at T-Town Tacos. This map gives Wes and Beaux more insight into what skills are already taught and where there are gaps. Down the road, they will be able to use this spreadsheet to create customized “career tracks” e.g. with computing, customer service, etc
Finally, on Wednesday morning we got to see T-Town Tacos in action! We arrived at the kitchen around 7:00am as the youth were finishing up making breakfast tacos and loading them onto tricycles to ride into downtown. Each day, T-Town Tacos sets up their trikes at a different intersection in downtown Tulsa to attract the foot traffic of people going to work. On this day, T-TT was set up across from City Hall and there seemed to be regulars who were anxiously waiting their Wednesday breakfast taco. The youth did a great job interacting with customers and handling the cash box.
Top: Youth team members riding the T-Town Tacos trikes from the kitchen where the tacos are prepared to downtown Tulsa. Each tricycle has a hot box in the back where the tacos are stored.
Middle: T-Town Tacos set up across from City Hall.
Below: Us with the T-Town Tacos team during the breakfast shift.
The tagline for T-Town Tacos is “more than a taco,” and throughout the week it became clear that this program does a whole lot for its program participants. By working in teams the youth learn collaboration, accountability, and responsibility. There are work expectations such as being on-time and working efficiently, but there is also some leniency and guidance given the difficult situation these youth are in. Wes and Beaux have done an incredible job building trust with the program participants and are thoroughly invested in creating opportunities for them to find meaningful work or schooling. As a team, we discussed the tension between running a profitable business and creating a safe and productive environment for the youth in the program. The phrase “social enterprise” gets thrown around a lot, but this week in Tulsa, we really got to see one in action. We deeply respect the work that T-Town Tacos is doing and we felt so grateful to have spent the week with them.
