Thomas William Moore (Tom) was born in Claremore, OK at the Indian Hospital on June 8, 1977. He comes from a long line of Lenape Chiefs and carries the blood of his ancestors from the Lenape, Shawnee, German, and British people. Tom is a member of the Delaware Tribe of Indians and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. Tom grew up in Nowata, OK, Tulsa, OK and Cheyenne, WY before earning a BS in Political Science with an Ethics minor and a BA in Journalism from the University of Wyoming in Laramie, WY. Tom returned to Tulsa in 1998 to attend the University of Tulsa College of Law and earned his Juris Doctor degree in 2003.

Tom was raised by his grandfather for many years who taught him to make every day and every dollar count while working hard all day to earn your keep. Tom’s remaining years in childhood were spent living with his mother whose substance abuse defined her life. Tom’s mother was loving and shared her love of music and nature but passed from breast cancer just after her 45th birthday and just 6 months before getting to see her son be the first in the family to graduate college. Tom grew up under the poverty line and learned to cook using commodities and food pantry items because the food stamps were usually traded away for cigarettes and whiskey.

Tom started his career in the lunch room during his 4th grade year as a dishwasher and went on to carry 2 jobs throughout his teenage years and through college to help support his family. In addition to being an entrepreneur at a young age, Tom worked as a desk clerk, hotel manager, bartender, dishwasher, furniture mover, paperboy, video store clerk, fast food employee, contractor, hardware installer, tech support, phone tech and a variety of other odd jobs before beginning his career after law school.

After getting his degree, Tom became an integral part of a 4-person team that owned and operated a hotel, restaurant, a chain of fashion accessory stores, and managed 3 large apartment complexes in North Tulsa (Bradford, Edenwood, and Jordan Plaza). Soon after, the group had a calling to become pioneers in the wind energy sector and quickly leased up over 400k acres of land and continued on to develop and build over 3,000 MW of utility scale wind energy projects in Oklahoma valued at over $4B that provide clean power to over 1M homes. Opting to avoid the constraints of a desk job, Tom has focused his energy on real estate investing and renovation and used the properties as a launching pad to help a series of recovering addicts and formerly incarcerated men find a path back into a world that will let them work and grow into their roles in society. This arrangement also fed Tom’s thirst to work with his hands and learn as many skills and trades as possible and can take apart and repair just about anything. His hobbies include lampwork glass art, mixed media visual art, disc golf, writing and audio/video production.

Tom was married in 2002 to his wife Jamie and has a son who is 19 and a daughter who is 10. His driving force of late has been getting his little farm going in North Tulsa and becoming acquainted with the science of the soil and learning what it will take to live off the land. This dream was met with an immediate barrier 2 years ago when the City decided it wanted to use the condemned building next door that was a 45 minute walk to the nearest bus stop as the new low-barrier homeless shelter. Finding zero help from anyone in the City and a City Councilor who couldn’t even be bothered to speak out against such a flawed concept, Tom fought the City until the plan was eventually scrapped… otherwise we would have over a hundred homeless folks land locked at Mohawk Park supposedly getting put on track to get new jobs and apartments in a part of town where those things exist only after a 2 hour walk/bus ride back to the parts of town that made sense for a shelter. Tom learned much about the operations of the City of Tulsa in that process and quickly figured out why North Tulsa seemed to be lagging behind the rest of the City and vowed to do what he could to get things on track.

Tom has a long track record of serving his community and performing thousands of hours of community service since he was in elementary school and read books to kids at the library but since then has been doing outreach for troubled youth, working with addicts and homeless populations, serving his Tribe, and a variety of other civic causes. Tom has helped kick off several non-profits and served on the Boards or other leadership roles amongst them and has most recently been working in harm reduction and combating addiction. Giving back to the community and leaving everything better than you found it are core concepts for Tom and he stays busy setting that example for his children to follow.