Darcy Marie Mayfield helps places that are losing their people become places people choose to move to — and stay. Founder of Shift with Darcy Marie and the strategist behind Experience Tulsa’s Find Your Tulsa, she turns talent attraction into lasting residency, and population decline into economic renewal.
She calls the discipline civic hospitality: arrival, connection, and retention treated not as happy accidents but as infrastructure to be designed. Her Art of Arrival methodology gives cities and regions a repeatable model.
The proof is Tulsa. For three years she has advised on Tulsa Remote — a nationally studied, philanthropy-backed effort to reverse decades of brain drain. Nearly 4,000 have moved there, most have stayed, and an independent study found every dollar invested returns fourfold.
Her perspective is anchored in global hospitality: she helped launch Airbnb Experiences from 7 to 40,000 cities and served as the principal Culture Architect at TaxJar, before its 800M acquisition into Stripe.
Belonging is not a soft feeling but a force for economic transformation — and from the United States to Europe, the places that design for it are the ones people never leave.
