What We Do

City of Welcome is an initiative of Flourish OKC to celebrate the ways, reasons, and opportunities of welcome that can become the Oklahoma City standard.

Our Hope

Our hope is for this to become a movement that invites OKC to become a city where all Flourish by learning from some of the most gracious welcomers we know: resettled refugee, asylum seeking and immigrant communities. We believe that, often, those in our community who have experienced the most barriers to being welcomed are those who most graciously, openly, and bravely extending welcome to others, and we invite you to celebrate Welcome with us today.


“When I welcome someone into my culture it means I am ready to accept them as a part of my family, my friends, and most importantly as a part of me.”

— Member of resettled refugee community in OKC

  • A City of Welcome

    breathes in the hopes of all who call it home. It expands its lungs to take in the reasons and realities of journeys that made this place theirs…journeys that carry a deeply forged hope that offer life to a city who takes it in.

  • A City of Welcome

    A City of Welcome bends down on its knee, listening to the stories of children who share memories of their first home…of grandfather’s wisdom and of playing hide and seek under the moonlight. A City of Welcome knows we all need grandfathers’ wisdom, too.

  • A City of Welcome

    guides a new neighbor by the hand to show them this space…the library…the bank…the school…the supermarket. But it’s our neighbors’ hands who transform a trip to that supermarket into the kind of meal that transforms a city. In the morning hours before the city is awake, hands who traveled the world chop and mix and season and savor. The kinds of dinners that last through the night….the kind where we somehow leave with a more settled soul than before we were welcomed into being our whole selves.

  • A City of Welcome

    pauses to listen carefully to everyone’s name. What does a name carry? Your great-grandma’s strength? Your father’s sacrifice? Your uncle’s dreams for your future? A City of Welcome declares we are a place of belonging for you, for your name, and for all the names that formed yours.

  • A City of Welcome

    A City of Welcome has eyes to see the visions of a future. Not for small visions of individual gain. But visions held by a whole community, for the whole community, requiring the whole community to carry the vision out. A city’s eyes may have to hold steady to see these visions come to pass. But a city of welcome won’t look away if its eyes get tired…or distracted…or startled. A city of welcome holds the gaze of the generations to come.

  • A City of Welcome

    A City of Welcome is always expanding, always a new iteration. Because a City of Welcome remakes itself every time another neighbor calls it home. A City of Welcome learns from each other every moment…we learn how to celebrate more deeply, how to mourn more honestly, and how to mark milestones with the honor they deserve.

  • A City of Welcome

    A city of welcome breathes in the hopes of all who call it home.