OUR STORY

Rally didn't begin with a strategy document. It began with a group of people noticing they were solving the same problem separately.

By 2016, Downtown CREDO had spent years building a grassroots effort to support social entrepreneurs across Central Florida, working alongside Rollins College and the Crummer Graduate School of Business. At the same time, the Central Florida Foundation had launched Entrepreneurs in Action, offering pro-bono consulting to social enterprises and nonprofits pursuing earned income strategies.

The realization was mutual: separately, these were good programs. Combined, they could become something the region didn't have — world-class support for early-stage social entrepreneurs, backed by an Ashoka Changemaker university, the City of Orlando, Orange County, and a group of philanthropic investors willing to fund the experiment.

Rally was born from that convergence in 2017.

OUR EVOLUTION

What started as an accelerator became something larger, because the region kept revealing a different need.

Entrepreneurs weren't only short on coaching. They were short on access — no way to get a solution in front of an institution that might adopt it. And institutions weren't short on ambition. They were short on a safe way to try something unproven.

Rally grew into the layer that connects them: Central Florida's civic innovation infrastructure. Not a program that ends when a grant cycle closes. Permanent regional infrastructure for sourcing, testing, and scaling solutions to the social and environmental challenges that determine whether this region and its people thrive.

Today Rally operates a Living Lab spanning 12 Central Florida counties, working across nine pillars of regional resilience that expand Thrive, the Central Florida Foundation's framework for a thriving region, into the specific domains where solutions get sourced, tested, and scaled. Rally serves entrepreneurs, nonprofits, corporations, municipalities, philanthropic investors, and residents, each with a different entry point into the same shared infrastructure.

WHAT A DECADE PROVED

• 9.6% acceptance rate. Rally reviews far more ventures than it accepts. Selectivity isn't gatekeeping — it's the first stage of validation. Institutions can trust what comes out of Rally because of what doesn't.

• 25% institutional adoption rate. Across completed Innovation District Partnership pilots, one in four moved into real institutional operations. That's the number that matters, because it measures whether the model actually converts evidence into adoption.

• 12 counties. The Living Lab is regional by design. What gets tested in one community can be validated, adapted, and scaled across the footprint.

WHERE WE”RE GOING

Central Florida's institutions are executing ambitious plans — Green Works, Vision Zero, Vision 2050, OUC's Strategy 2035. The plans are strong and the region is delivering on them.

What no one has yet is shared infrastructure for finding and proving the next generation of solutions before capital and reputation are committed. That's the work ahead: deepening the Living Lab, expanding pilot capacity across all nine pillars, and building the evidence base the region needs to keep moving from plan to proof.

We're approaching our tenth year. We intend to be here for the next fifty.