You’d be forgiven if you thought that after almost nine years on the job, Erin Oldfield, VP of Community Engagement for the Oklahoma City Thunder, might be acclimatized to the effect her team’s work has on people and communities across the state. After all, they produce about 100 events a season. Happily, she isn’t; in fact the opposite is true. Oldfield, elevated to her current position in 2024, feels a continued sense of awe and knows she’s fortunate to follow in the footsteps of Christine Berney, the mentor and friend who created the Thunder’s philanthropic programs when the team first rolled into town. 

“I feel fortunate to be able to come into this role and further refine the work that we’re doing by being very intentional and authentic and building deep, meaningful relationships with our community partners, schools and fans. We really operate at the intersection of a nonprofit mindset and business discipline,” Oldfield says.

Oldfield’s path to the Thunder, and professional sports was, she acknowledges, “very unusual.” Her career has mostly been in the arts. “I was the director of education and public programming at Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center … And before that, I was at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, and before that, I was a stay-at-home mom. So I do have a very unusual pathway to sports, but it has all been rooted in community,” she says.

“It’s funny: When I made this decision to go in a new direction with my career, we were just getting ready to open the new [Oklahoma Contemporary] Arts Center. I was part of a team that was very, very heavily involved in the new building there at 10th and Broadway,” she says. One day, she was looking at the Oklahoma Center for Nonprofits website. “Lo and behold, Christine had posted this job position there. I wouldn’t have seen it otherwise. I was not looking for a role to come into the Thunder; I was looking at a way to make a bigger impact in my community. I didn’t know what that might look like. And there it was.”  

As a little girl, Oldfield’s career aspirations were quite different. “I wanted to be a pop star,” she says, laughing, but she concedes that she’s “always been a caretaker … since I was 12 years old for my first babysitting gig, through deciding to be a stay-at-home mom until my kids were in school full time and serving my community around me as a community volunteer.”

Though you’ll often see Oldfield on television, grinning and handing off an oversized check or showcasing a nonprofit in front of a sold-out home game, those high-visibility moments are not what matter to her. “What I really love the most about the job are the moments behind the scenes that people really don’t get to see. We’re really good storytellers, and we have amazing videos and photos, but it’s really the conversations, the emails and the letters in the mail I get, telling the personal stories afterward, telling me how much the things that we do mean to them. It’s when the cameras are off, getting to see a player who’s interacting with a kid, and they’re having a special moment in conversation. That’s so energizing. We can talk about numbers all day, but it’s really, it’s those life-changing moments that we get to create that are sometimes the most meaningful.”

Oldfield’s voice is full of gratitude and emotion as she tells story after story of the good stuff her small but mighty team of eight in the community engagement department makes happen. Here’s one: In 2019, the Thunder Cares staff, along with Rumble, a clutch of Thunder Girls and plenty of support staff, rolled into Boise City to cut the ribbon on the new Thunder Cares community basketball court. It was a project that had taken a couple of years to finalize.

Alisha Griffith, president of the town’s recreation foundation, had applied for grant after grant, only to be told that Boise City, he westernmost city in Oklahoma with a population that would fill up only four lower-level sections at Paycom Center, was outside most areas of service.      

“We knew immediately, when we when we got at that site visit, that we were going to refurbish that court,” Oldfield says. “And during that dedication … the town shut down! We had a police escort upon our arrival.” It was a giant party, and Griffith said what so many across the state feel: “We don’t think of them as the Oklahoma City Thunder. We think of them as the ‘Oklahoma’ Thunder. And they proved that to us by driving all the way out here to the last county in the Panhandle to make this investment in our community.”    

For the Thunder, community engagement falls into four key focus areas: education; healthy and vibrant communities; workforce development; and basic needs. “I think we’re most known for building basketball courts. And we’ve built 31 basketball courts in 17 different counties across the state,” Oldfield says. But there’s so much more. “We have a number of education programs that serve statewide.”

The day before Oldfield spoke to Luxiere, the Rolling Thunder book bus, a Thunder program since day one, had just given away its 250,000th book. “To kind of put that in perspective, the Thunder as a team has played about 75,000 minutes of basketball, and so that means we’ve given away three books for every minute of basketball,” she says. 

Then there’s the NBA Math Hoops program, a fun board game and mobile app that teaches students fundamental math skills through the basketball statistics of their favorite NBA and WNBA players. “I cannot believe how wild these kids go over statistics, and it’s kind of like sneaky learning. They don’t even know that they're doing that,” Oldfield says. “The kids are drafting players. They’re solving math problems.” Kids in that program solve over three million math problems a year.

Oldfield also manages the Thunder’s partnerships and collabs with hundreds of nonprofits statewide. “We want to be a megaphone for those organizations. You know, what we hear a lot is, for any nonprofit, visibility can be difficult, and when we’re able to come alongside our nonprofit partners and tell those stories, that’s what we do really well,” she says. “I just feel so incredibly lucky that I get to do this every single day.”

The Luxiere List: Thunder Cares and the Thunder Community Foundation Programs

Grants. The Thunder introduced its inaugural grant cycle on Giving Tuesday 2025, distributing 100K in grants to four organizations: Pivot, Cleats for Kids, The Urban Bridge Impact Center and Junior Achievement of Oklahoma. 

Youth Innovation Pathways. Thanks to a $1M partnership with Google, the Thunder Community Foundation is excited to leverage cutting-edge technology, hands-on learning and real-world problem-solving, creating pathways to empower students to develop creativity, critical thinking and technical skills. Youth Innovation Pathways include: Thunder AI Sports Scholars, a program that blends sports data analytics, coding and technology; Wonder Rooms, spaces where students use interactive, AI-powered toys and apps to encourage motor skills, cognitive abilities and exploration of concepts like cause and effect, sequences and patterns; and AI Educator Workshops, designed to empower teachers with cutting-edge tools to transform their classrooms.

Holiday Assist. The Thunder held 44 events serving 50+ unique agencies in 2025, helping to meet needs in the community. 

Cultural Celebrations. The Thunder participates in parades and special projects to amplify the rich cultural heritage and contribution of our communities. 

Thunder Cares Service Project. An all-team staff project is held at various locations; in 2025, the entire business front office, and Thunder and Blue teams, assisted The Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma in food packing. 

Rolling Thunder Book Bus. Presented by American Fidelity Assurance Company, the Bus is a statewide outreach program that inspires children, kindergarten to fifth grade, to develop a love for reading. The Book Bus is a truck and custom-built trailer filled with over 2,000 fiction and non-fiction books. 

The Thunder Reading Challenge. This school-based reading challenge runs from October through March. This program is open to students in second grade, and challenges schools across the state to compete against each other for monthly prizes, cash prizes and a special assembly featuring Thunder entertainers.

Thunder Reading Time Out. During the season, Thunder representatives take a “timeout” to read books to students, giving every student a copy of the book.

Devon Thunder Explorers. Teachers engage students (grades 4-6) with activities that challenge them to think outside the box, developing problem solving skills around questions that focus on STEM principles. Last year 608 teachers registered from 354 zip codes across the state, reaching over 30,000 students. 

Thunder Math Hoops, presented by Devon Energy, is a fast-paced board game and mobile app that teaches students fundamental math skills through the basketball statistics of their favorite NBA and WNBA players. The Math Hoops curriculum has been shown to improve students’ grasp of statistics and interpersonal skills. Over 10,000 students participate in the Math Hoops program last year.

Black Heritage Creative Contest. Students in grades 9-12 are invited to submit an original creative piece describing/depicting an inspiring experience, moment or individual in Black history and how they have been personally influenced. 

The Thunder Fellows Program aims to unlock new opportunities in sports, entertainment and technology for high school and college students. There are 59 students in the 2025-26 Thunder Fellows Cohorts: 32 high school juniors and 8 seniors from Tulsa and 19 college undergraduates from Oklahoma-area institutions.

The link has been copied!