Tulsa Innovation Labs Looking to Create the Nation’s Most Inclusive Tech Community

Staci Aaenson-Fletcher, a Tulsan previously working as an accountant, recently took a career turn. “I was working in an accounting job with a large corporation — great benefits and culture,” she says, but there was a catch. “With the work experience I had, I was pretty capped in my salary. I was going to have to be a traveling regional manager,” Aaenson-Fletcher says, if she wanted to earn more. “But I want to stay local and be with my family.”

Instead, in January of this year, Aaenson-Fletcher joined the first cohort of students from the newly opened Tulsa campus of the Holberton School, a San Francisco-based software engineering academy. The Tulsa campus is one part of the Tulsa Innovation Labs, an initiative that has set out to make Tulsa not only the nation’s newest tech hub, but its most inclusive as well.‍