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\u2019s finalists. Our winner will be announced on April 11.<\/p>\n
When demonstrators interrupted a service at Joy Metropolitan Ministries last year, standing up and shouting \u201cSynagogue of sin!\u201d, dozens of people decided that the LGBTQ+ congregation would not be harassed again.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt meant a lot to me, but it meant even more to my congregation when they walked in to see a bunch of people they\u2019ve never seen before standing outside saying, \u2018You\u2019re going to have to go through us to get to them\u2019,\u201d said Rev. Terri Steed Pierce, pastor at Joy Metropolitan. \u201cAnd ninety-nine percent of those people standing outside my gay church were not gay.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Central Florida Pledge, whose mission is to build \u201cAmerica\u2019s most welcoming community,\u201d started two years ago, urging residents to \u201ctake the pledge.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s largest churches and served as spiritual advisor to President Barack Obama.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt 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,\u201d Ginsburg said.<\/p>\n
For their work, the pair are finalists for the Orlando Sentinel\u2019s Central Floridian of the Year Award.<\/p>\n
The Pledge formed in the wake of terrorist attacks on Israel in October, 2023 and the subsequent war in Gaza. It\u2019s an effort to combat what its founders saw as a rise in religious and ethnic discrimination.<\/p>\n
Since then, more than 5,000 people have signed on and, sometimes, shown up.<\/p>\n
Ginsburg and Hunter have known each other for more than a decade, first meeting at an interfaith dinner Ginsburg hosted at his home. They\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n
![\"Orlando](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/TOS-L-CFOTY-sequence.jpg\")
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)<\/p>\n
In early 2024, the pair invited 150 influential Central Floridians to the Alfond Inn in Winter Park and asked them to sign the pledge.\u00a0The hope was that those leaders would inspire others to do the same and the movement would grow. And that is what happened.<\/p>\n
The pair are especially pleased by how many young people have embraced the message. The University of Central Florida\u2019s student government adopted it into its bylaws. More than 1,000 students from all the area\u2019s major colleges and 60 high schools have signed on.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s so much fun to see how many of them are involved,\u201d Hunter said. \u201cWe have a lot of hope that they\u2019re going to be able to develop this in ways my generation couldn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.[<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you\u2019re going to have a healthy community, you\u2019ve got to have conversations, as well as respectful treatment, with people who are not in your group,\u201d Hunter said. \u201cYou\u2019ve got to care as much about them as you care about the people in your own group.\u201d<\/p>\n
That message of inclusion is one Hunter thought he\u2019d been preaching for decades. But the Pulse Nightclub Shooting in 2016 sparked a moment of profound reflection.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
He did not get a single call.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe knew we had gay people in the congregation. But there was no one who felt like they could reach out to us, apparently,\u201d Hunter said. \u201cAnd so I went to the congregation and said, \u2018I\u2019m 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\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n
In an effort to connect with the community he realized he\u2019d left out, he called Rev. Steed Pierce.<\/p>\n
\u201cI knew pastor Terri was an outspoken faith leader, and so I went to her and said, \u2018I just need you to be my friend. We don\u2019t need to sort out all the gay-straight stuff. I just want to be your friend\u2019,\u201d Hunter said.<\/p>\n
At the time, Steed Pierce had mixed feelings.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was honestly very angry. Because the religious community has said, \u2018God hates us\u2019,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m a conservative evangelical Christian for crying out loud. And I have not had to sacrifice one iota of what I believe,\u201d Hunter said. \u201cBut I have been able to figure out how I can best respect other people for what they believe.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
He later set up a foundation that has donated to numerous local causes, giving $25 million to Nemours Children\u2019s Health, and $10 million towards the construction of a 40,000 square-foot Holocaust museum that will be built in downtown Orlando.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhatever your background, whatever your belief, whatever your personal thought, as long as you\u2019re here to do no harm, you are immediately welcome, and you\u2019re part of the community,\u201d Ginsburg said. \u201cAnd we\u2019re happy that you\u2019re here, and you\u2019re going to help us collectively grow into something bigger and bigger and bigger.\u201d<\/p>\n
2026 Central Floridian of the Year \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Since 1982, the Orlando Sentinel has asked the community to help us recognize people who make a big…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":219502,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[45155,28,2174,266,482,1335,139,141,140,1976,1014,109,76410],"class_list":{"0":"post-219501","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-orlando","8":"tag-central-floridian-of-the-year","9":"tag-florida","10":"tag-lake-county","11":"tag-local-news","12":"tag-opinion","13":"tag-orange-county","14":"tag-orlando","15":"tag-orlando-headlines","16":"tag-orlando-news","17":"tag-osceola-county","18":"tag-seminole-county","19":"tag-social","20":"tag-social-opinion"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219501","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=219501"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219501\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/219502"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=219501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=219501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=219501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Finalist No. 1:\u00a0Trina Gregory<\/a>
Finalist No. 2:\u00a0Deborah Beidel<\/a>
Finalist No. 3:\u00a0Justin Muchoney<\/a>
Finalist No. 4: Eddy Moratin<\/a>
Finalist No. 5: Alan Ginsburg and Joel Hunter
Sunday, April 12:\u00a0Winner announced
More about our Central Floridian of the Year program and past winners and nominees at\u00a0OrlandoSentinel.com\/CFOTY<\/a><\/p>\n