About: In 2009, the city of Orlando held a community-wide public safety survey that identified youth education and youth related crime as the highest concerns of Orlando residents. City programs such as the Mayor’s Matching Grant Program and the After School All Stars program were developed and realigned to target these community concerns.
With this in mind, the City of Orlando applied for the Cities of Service grant in April of 2010. The city was chosen to receive the grant sponsored by Rockefeller and Bloomberg Foundations in July 2010 and Marcia Hope Goodwin was named Orlando’s first Chief Service Officer.
More than 600 community leaders were invited to participate in a survey sharing ideas and solutions to Orlando’s youth education and youth crime challenges. More than 75 of those community leaders participated in one of four, full-day focus group exercises where they developed specific operational solutions to our community’s challenges. Orlando Cares, Mayor Buddy Dyer’s Cities of Service program, features six initiatives which focus on service as a solution that were developed from community input and from those focus groups.
