Experience Matters

Laura Bellis is a community health access strategist and organizer who focuses on breaking down social and political resource barriers. In her first term on the council, Laura has focused on housing & homelessness, childcare access, animal welfare and environmental resilience. And she’s gotten results by working collaboratively with colleagues, neighbors and community leaders. 

As the Executive Director of the Take Control Initiative (TCI), the longest-running local contraceptive access program in the nation, Laura has worked to expand access to quality care in coalition with over 200 clinic and community partners. 

Under her leadership, TCI has developed and scaled strategies to ensure reproductive health access in a restrictive environment, including creating a statewide women's health think tank, Metriarch. Prior to joining TCI, Laura was an English teacher for five years at Nathan Hale Junior High.

She served as a mayor-appointed member on the City of Tulsa’s Human Rights Commission from 2017 forward, and rose to vice chair in 2018. For two years after that, she served as chair. In March of 2020, she co-founded Save Our State: Oklahomans United, a grassroots group of over 50,000 people working on pandemic-era resources and policies.

Laura was recently accepted into a Hunt Institute fellowship focused on early childhood learning outcomes for local elected leaders. In 2021 Laura was awarded a fellowship with the Aspen Institute. As a Healthy Communities Aspen Fellow she collaborated with national public health leaders and innovators focusing on national-level advocacy to drive local-level change.  

Laura has been recognized for her deep commitment to the Tulsa community. In 2019, she received the Rev. Len Busch Social Justice Award from Langston University. The same year she was recognized as an Achiever Under 40 by the Oklahoma Journal of Record. In 2018 she was listed by NextGen Oklahoma as one of the NextGen Achievers Under 30.