Laura Bellis is an organizer and community health access strategist who focuses on breaking down social and political resource barriers. Laura is currently serving as Tulsa City Councilor. Laura is the Executive Director of the Take Control Initiative, the longest-running local contraceptive access program in the nation, expanding access to quality care in coalition with over 200 clinic and community partners. Under her leadership she has developed and scaled strategies to ensure reproductive health access in an extremely restrictive environment, including creating a statewide data and policy collaborative, Metriarch. 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, applying and evolving the tactics she utilizes in reproductive health for the Covid-19 crisis.
Laura is deeply involved in the Tulsa community. She has served on the City of Tulsa’s Human Rights Commission since 2017, serving as vice chair in 2018, and a subsequent two years as chair. Since 2015, she has worked on the municipal level of policing policy.
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.
