Since 1982, the Orlando Sentinel has asked the community to help us recognize people who make a big difference in local lives with our Central Floridian of the Year award. For the next few weeks, we will publish features on this year’s finalists. Our winner will be announced on April 11.
When demonstrators interrupted a service at Joy Metropolitan Ministries last year, standing up and shouting “Synagogue of sin!”, dozens of people decided that the LGBTQ+ congregation would not be harassed again.
The following Sunday about 70 formed a human chain around the building. They were all part of The Central Florida Pledge, a group committed to treating everyone with respect and protecting those being threatened.
“It meant a lot to me, but it meant even more to my congregation when they walked in to see a bunch of people they’ve never seen before standing outside saying, ‘You’re going to have to go through us to get to them’,” said Rev. Terri Steed Pierce, pastor at Joy Metropolitan. “And ninety-nine percent of those people standing outside my gay church were not gay.”
The Central Florida Pledge, whose mission is to build “America’s most welcoming community,” started two years ago, urging residents to “take the pledge.” That means they agree to treat all people with dignity and respect, especially those with whom they disagree, support those being attacked and commit to educating themselves on all forms of discrimination.
Alan Ginsburg, who is Jewish and a prominent Central Florida businessman and philanthropist, founded the movement with Joel Hunter, an evangelical Christian who once led one of the region’s largest churches and served as spiritual advisor to President Barack Obama.
“It was my thought, if we could get enough people in Central Florida to take the pledge and agree that they, in their own life, would be part of the overall community, without the bigotry and biases that most of us possess, then we could do something better for Central Florida,” Ginsburg said.
For their work, the pair are finalists for the Orlando Sentinel’s Central Floridian of the Year Award.
The Pledge formed in the wake of terrorist attacks on Israel in October, 2023 and the subsequent war in Gaza. It’s an effort to combat what its founders saw as a rise in religious and ethnic discrimination.
Since then, more than 5,000 people have signed on and, sometimes, shown up.
Ginsburg and Hunter have known each other for more than a decade, first meeting at an interfaith dinner Ginsburg hosted at his home. They’ve since become close friends, sharing family vacations, their pledge work and laughs. At a recent photo shoot, Hunter tried to strike a traditional pose, and Ginsburg disarmed him with a playful kiss to the cheek.
Orlando businessman and philanthropist Alan Ginsburg jokingly plants a kiss on his friend Joel Hunter, chairman of the Central Florida Pledge, while getting a portrait together at The Alfond Inn in Winter Park on Tuesday, March 31, 2026. Both longtime community leaders are finalists for the Orlando Sentinel Central Floridian of the Year for their creation and stewardship of The Central Florida Pledge campaign. (Rich Pope/Orlando Sentinel)
In early 2024, the pair invited 150 influential Central Floridians to the Alfond Inn in Winter Park and asked them to sign the pledge. The hope was that those leaders would inspire others to do the same and the movement would grow. And that is what happened.
The pair are especially pleased by how many young people have embraced the message. The University of Central Florida’s student government adopted it into its bylaws. More than 1,000 students from all the area’s major colleges and 60 high schools have signed on.
“It’s so much fun to see how many of them are involved,” Hunter said. “We have a lot of hope that they’re going to be able to develop this in ways my generation couldn’t.”
The Pledge hosts workshops for students, with speakers who talk about conflict resolution and peacekeeping. The upcoming one in May at UCF is expected to draw 2,000 students and features Northern Ireland leaders who helped negotiate the peace agreement in their country.[
The Pledge also sponsors inter-faith meetups and has begun partnering with corporations, looking to find ways to incorporate the pledge into employee training. It has set up a hotline for people to report incidents of discrimination.
But its focus is largely on students, as Ginsburg and Hunter feel younger people are not as stuck in their ways and more open to new ideas.
“If you’re going to have a healthy community, you’ve got to have conversations, as well as respectful treatment, with people who are not in your group,” Hunter said. “You’ve got to care as much about them as you care about the people in your own group.”
That message of inclusion is one Hunter thought he’d been preaching for decades. But the Pulse Nightclub Shooting in 2016 sparked a moment of profound reflection.
When the shooting occurred, Hunter was the pastor of Northland Church in Longwood, with a congregation of more than 20,000. He braced himself for what he thought would be an onslaught of calls from people impacted by the tragedy seeking spiritual guidance and support.
He did not get a single call.
“We knew we had gay people in the congregation. But there was no one who felt like they could reach out to us, apparently,” Hunter said. “And so I went to the congregation and said, ‘I’m going to do a self-examination as to whether or not I have been culpable by not speaking to a broad love of all our neighbors, especially the gay community’.”
In an effort to connect with the community he realized he’d left out, he called Rev. Steed Pierce.
“I knew pastor Terri was an outspoken faith leader, and so I went to her and said, ‘I just need you to be my friend. We don’t need to sort out all the gay-straight stuff. I just want to be your friend’,” Hunter said.
At the time, Steed Pierce had mixed feelings.
“I was honestly very angry. Because the religious community has said, ‘God hates us’,” she said.
But she invited Hunter into her office anyway and the two began what she said developed into a beautiful friendship. Steed Pierce was in that first group invited to sign the pledge.
“I’m a conservative evangelical Christian for crying out loud. And I have not had to sacrifice one iota of what I believe,” Hunter said. “But I have been able to figure out how I can best respect other people for what they believe.”
Ginsburg was a concert promoter and talent manager in Detroit, Michigan, in the 1960s, who worked with The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Elvis Presley. He then went into real estate development and became one of the largest developers of affordable housing in the United States. He worked closely with the Reagan Administration to develop the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit.
He later set up a foundation that has donated to numerous local causes, giving $25 million to Nemours Children’s Health, and $10 million towards the construction of a 40,000 square-foot Holocaust museum that will be built in downtown Orlando.
He was involved for many years in Seeds of Peace, an organization that brings young people from the Middle East to a summer camp in Maine to teach them how to bridge divides in their conflict-torn communities.
That is a message he and Hunter feel has gotten lost as the political climate in America has become more polarized. The best way through that polarization, they believe, is to locally build a community that embraces and supports its residents.
“Whatever your background, whatever your belief, whatever your personal thought, as long as you’re here to do no harm, you are immediately welcome, and you’re part of the community,” Ginsburg said. “And we’re happy that you’re here, and you’re going to help us collectively grow into something bigger and bigger and bigger.”
2026 Central Floridian of the Year
Finalist No. 1: Trina Gregory
Finalist No. 2: Deborah Beidel
Finalist No. 3: Justin Muchoney
Finalist No. 4: Eddy Moratin
Finalist No. 5: Alan Ginsburg and Joel Hunter
Sunday, April 12: Winner announced
More about our Central Floridian of the Year program and past winners and nominees at OrlandoSentinel.com/CFOTY