“It is never a one-person story,” said Caylee Dodson, executive director of RestoreOKC. Since 2020, the organization has served as a place-based community development ministry in Northeast Oklahoma City—providing housing, jobs, education and a web of community support to its neighborhood. At every point in the story, Dodson anchors the problem-solving mentality and incredible results in the dedicated members of RestoreOKC.
In 2016, Dodson moved from Oklahoma, where she had lived all her life, to St. Louis for graduate school. She participated in a community-based program called Restore St. Louis, and lived alongside the people Restore served. Some warned her it was a dangerous neighborhood, but Dodson discovered that her neighbors had the same goals and hopes for the future that she did. “We all want safe, affordable housing, good schools for our children. We want communities where we feel safe and we can give back to. As we got to know one another, I realized that we had everything in common.”
She came back to Oklahoma in 2020 to create a place-based community called RestoreOKC, but Dodson knew it had to be co-founded and co-directed. She credits Ernest Odunze for being another co-founder, among the first to have conversations with her about the project. “He grew up in Northeast Oklahoma City,” she said, “and acknowledged that this city was structured in such a way that you could grow up here and not have any lived experience of a person who lived in the same city but a different ZIP Code just a few miles away.”
Everything that RestoreOKC does is based around community health, employment, residence and education. When the pandemic shut down jobs and food resources in 2020, RestoreOKC mobilized resources and within six months, created a grocery store, The Market at East Point. The store employs neighborhood people, gives employees paid training in culinary skills at Eastside Eatery and sells produce from the neighborhood farm.
The grocery store isn’t the only way it quickly mobilized resources to help meet needs of the neighborhood: After the news last fall that SNAP benefits would be suspended, RestoreOKC began rolling out plans to help feed and support the people in its neighborhood.
“We are living here every day with our neighbors who work so hard to break out of generational cycles of poverty,” Dodson said. “If you are not in proximity watching how complex and difficult this is to do, you have no idea what a complex issue this is; 65% of youth in our area live under the poverty line and face food insecurity, and that was with SNAP benefits in place. When a deeply imperfect lifeline like SNAP goes away with no warning, it is an emergency.
“We gave gift cards away for short-term crisis relief, but we are also making plans for long-range relief. We are looking at ways to rebuild a circular economy so that our people have more resilience when these things happen. In 2026, we expect to see whether the state will be able to fund SNAP benefits on its own or not. We are preparing to act again to help this neighborhood if needed. We want to make sure we are ready.”
Dodson said that RestoreOKC is able to mobilize and support the neighborhood as quickly as it does because the community support is so rich. “When we show up and choose love over fear, and decide that we belong to one another, we can change the world. It is beautiful to realize how much we have in common with one another. Chase that knowledge. Sit long enough to listen. Proximity will always foster a love that is stronger than fear.”
Individuals, businesses and churches can make tax-deductible donations or pledge matching funds at restoreokc.org. RestoreOKC stresses that this effort aligns with its mission to restore health, stability and opportunity in neighborhoods disproportionately affected by poverty.
