Because saving the world isn’t cheap, a small but savvy group of Central Floridians is training visionaries and humanitarians on a subject that’s sometimes foreign to them.
Making money.
“Until now, this has all been a labor of love,” says David Thomas Moran, 34, co-founder of a transportation data start-up called Omnimodal. “They’re talking to us about, ‘What does our sales model look like? What is our three-year development plan?'”
Moran, a would-be filmmaker with a master’s degree in fine arts, is part of the first graduating class of “Rally,” a Central Florida initiative to help the region become a hub for social entrepreneurs — laborers at the intersection of charity and business.
Those chosen for the twice-yearly program receive up to six months of a customized curriculum free of charge; access to business mentors and legal, accounting and marketing experts; and the opportunity to pitch their idea to a panel of experts — “Shark Tank”-style — for a single $25,000 prize.
With its first graduates, the program has already supported efforts to fight human trafficking, power Puerto Rico with high-capacity solar batteries, recycle old mattresses, clean up toxic chemicals and — Moran’s venture — provide real-time public-transportation information so commuters with a smartphone can figure out the quickest, cheapest way to get from Point A to Point B.
Moran and his business partner, Nathan Selikoff, 37, a freelance programmer, took the $25,000 check with their suite of GPS trackers and software that uploads information to such popular apps as Google Maps and Transit.
“We have people riding the bus 30 million times a year in Central Florida, and it can be a very frustrating experience,” Selikoff says. “One of my friends, when she was relying on riding the bus, would have to wake up at 5 a.m. and ride the bus for two hours to go 10 miles to get to work. And then at the end of the day, without real-time information, she would just have to wait, not knowing if it had come already or if it was just running late. It was a lot of wasted time.”
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Their start-up now has its first clients — the I-RIDE Trolley along International Drive and the Sanford trolley that runs between the city’s downtown and SunRail. And the men see a potential for national growth, especially with the ongoing guidance of Rally’s leaders, who continue to mentor them.
Rally launched in 2017 as a collaboration among Rollins College, the Central Florida Foundation, the soap-recycling enterprise Clean the World, Downtown Credo, the city of Orlando and Entrepreneurs in Action, a group of investors led by Orange County mayoral candidate Rob Panepinto. The program trains both for-profit and nonprofit leaders.
“Part of the broader mission of Rally is to get some of these organizations to the stage where they can attract traditional venture capital,” says Panepinto, one of six people who put up at least $25,000 each for a fund dedicated to investing in social enterprises. “Early-stage investing, whether it’s for social enterprise or not, is risky. The odds are against any one individual company, which is why having it structured as a fund with multiple investments, knowing that some of these individual companies may fail, you hope that over time you will get a return.”
Shawn Seipler, founder and CEO of Orlando-based Clean the World, sees social enterprise as the best path forward for societal change. He started his own such company in his garage nine years ago. Today it is a $15 million global enterprise with 13 companies, more than 5,000 hotel and resort partners, and 41 million bars of soap distributed in 118 countries to stop kids from dying of pneumonia and cholera.
“This is growing for a lot of reasons,” Seipler says, “partly because corporations have social responsibility programs but also because of the engagement of the millennial workforce, which is huge.”
Carol Wick, another new graduate of the program, hopes to take what she has learned to help a solar battery manufacturer deliver power to Puerto Rico, where Hurricane Maria left many communities disconnected from the grid.
“The company has already donated a half-million dollars worth of these batteries, which are about 5 feet tall each, so I’m helping them raise to money to put in 500 more,” says Wick, a consultant who previously ran the Orange County domestic-violence shelter Harbor House. “We set them up in churches and community centers where everybody can come in and cook and do laundry.”
Though the battery company is for-profit, Wick is researching whether it should form a hybrid subsidiary for the Puerto Rican effort, which would not generate any income in the beginning but could down the road, when it sells excess power back to the grid.
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“For me, in the nonprofit world, I think this is the future,” says fellow graduate Tomas Lares, founder and executive director of Florida Abolitionist, Central Florida’s anti-human trafficking organization. “I’m all about heart and ‘We are the world,’ but this experience started us looking at how we can monetize a product or service in order to feed and fund our mission. It was amazing.”
By the end of summer, Lares expects to launch his first benefit corporation — often dubbed a “B corp” — a for-profit entity with a social impact on society, workers, a community or the environment.
And Kathy Baldwin, executive director of the Mustard Seed of Central Florida, a longtime clothing- and furniture-bank charity, is hoping the connections she made at Rally will eventually help her expand her agency’s already successful mattress-recycling effort.
Started in 2011, the operation now deconstructs and recycles about 3,000 mattresses each month, creating jobs, sparing millions of cubic feet of material from going into the landfill and generating 20 percent of her charity’s annual budget.
“We’ve actually had to turn away mattresses,” she says. “But I’m still hoping that one of the 100 investors in the room when we did the pitch will come forward so we can expand. We feel like it’s a huge opportunity.”
ksantich@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5503. Follow @katesantich on Twitter.