The Love Mobile® CEO delivered a keynote on managing the tension of the middle, then accepted the chapter’s leadership award on 918 Day.
TULSA, Okla. Koddi Dunn, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Love Mobile® Incorporated, received the 2026 Project Tulsa Award from PMI Tulsa on Friday, Sept. 18, at the chapter’s Ignite 918 event.
The award reads “Where Leadership Meets Legacy.” PMI Tulsa presented it in the chapter’s 35th year, on 918 Day, at American Solera in Tulsa.
Koddi was also the evening’s featured speaker. Her keynote was titled “Managing the Tension of the Middle.”
Most leadership talks are about the idea or the outcome. Koddi’s was about everything in between.
Her argument: nobody is measured by the moment they had the idea, and nobody is measured by the applause at the end. Leaders are measured by how they handle the hundreds of ordinary days in the middle. The disruptions. The missed deadlines. The conversation nobody wanted to have.
She laid out three practices.
Fix it quick. Leaders have to own a misstep fast and out loud. A team only admits mistakes if it has watched the person in charge do it first.
Capacity and kindness. How a leader behaves when tired or under pressure is the culture. Not the values on the wall. The Tuesday afternoon when nothing is going right.
Dance with disappointment. Process the setback, reset, and do not carry it into the next meeting. The cost of a bad hour is rarely the hour. It is the three meetings after it.
Koddi pushed back on work life balance. Absolute balance is not achievable for anyone building something. What is achievable is harmony, meaning small moments of alignment that get protected on purpose.
She described one practice by name. The reset line is a separate, private phone line she shares only with immediate family. It stays off the company grid. It lets her be completely unreachable for work without the low grade anxiety of wondering whether something at home is going wrong.
A small operational fix for a real problem. The room noticed.
The talk was not abstract. Koddi and her husband and co-founder Wade Dunn Jr. started Love Mobile® at their kitchen table with one question: what if cell phones could be used as a force to support the greater good?
Wireless is one of the most consolidated industries in America. Everyone competes on price. Nobody was asking what a phone bill could do besides buy service.
Love Mobile® is carried on three of the major US networks, branded Love Pink, Love Blue and Love Red. Plans start at $15 a month. Every plan funds nonprofit partners across four pillars: education, environment, community services, and pet services and adoption.
The model is local by design. Dollars raised in a community fund nonprofits in that community. From the stage, Koddi named NAMI Tulsa, the 1256 Movement, and Girls Inc. among Love Mobile’s nonprofit partners.
At 1,000 subscribers, the Give Back Model™ can fund up to $120,000 a year for a single nonprofit partner.
Getting there took carrier agreements, regulatory registration state by state, and a technology stack built in house to track which community each dollar came from and where it lands. That last piece did not exist off the shelf.
Giving back at Love Mobile® is not only money moving to nonprofits. Some of it is training.
Love Mobile® partnered with Google to bring Google Career Certificates to its community at no cost, through the Love Mobile x Grow with Google Free Certification Program. In year one, 232 learners enrolled and 566 certifications were completed. For the 119 people who finished at least one, the combined potential comes to up to $13.3 million a year in new earning power, measured against Google’s published entry level salary medians.
Participants paid nothing. No tuition, no fee, no phone purchase required.
The tracks include Google Project Management, which lands differently in a room full of PMI members, along with Cybersecurity, Data Analytics, UX Design, Digital Marketing and E-commerce, IT Support, IT Automation with Python, AI Essentials and Prompting Essentials.
Koddi closed on the part of growth founders resist. Scaling means giving up control.
Her phrase for it: good is good. A founder who demands perfect on every task becomes the constraint. Building past yourself means accepting work that is good, trusting the people doing it, and putting that trust into the structure instead of into individual heroics.
That is the tension. It does not resolve. You manage it.
PMI Tulsa is the Tulsa chapter of the Project Management Institute, serving project management professionals across northeastern Oklahoma. The chapter is marking 35 years of project management excellence. Its Project Tulsa Award recognizes leaders who are projecting Tulsa forward.
On Thursday, Sept. 24, Koddi takes the CHROMA main stage at Gradient for the Startup x Disruption panel, part of Tulsa Tech Week.
Love Mobile® Incorporated is a prepaid wireless company headquartered in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Love Mobile® is The Cellphone Company That Gives Back®. Plans start at $15 a month. Every line funds nonprofits in local communities every month, automatically, for the life of the account.
See if Love Mobile® is live in your state at GetLOVEMobile.com, or apply to become a nonprofit partner at nonprofit.getlovemobile.com.
Love Mobile Inc., The Cell Phone Company That Gives Back
12 N. Cheyenne Ave., Tulsa, Oklahoma 74103 [email protected] | 1-888-271-LOVE (5683)
Copyright © 2026 Love Mobile Incorporated.
All rights reserved.
