Rally

Civic innovation infrastructure for Central Florida.

Rally is a civic innovation organization operating across 12 counties in Central Florida, wholly owned by the Central Florida Foundation. Our mission is to help the region address its hardest social and environmental challenges, and to become a replicable model for how civic innovation is done.

Most promising solutions to social and environmental problems never reach the communities that need them. They stall between idea and adoption, because they are new, unproven, and untested, and no institution will risk its capital or reputation to be the first to try them. Rally exists to close that gap. We are the infrastructure that carries a frontier solution from idea all the way to regional adoption.

How we work

We move solutions along a five-stage pathway, working alongside municipalities, corporations, universities, nonprofits, community organizations, and residents at every step.

• Understand. We define the region's real social and environmental priorities by working directly with the institutions and communities living them.

• Source. We find high-potential solutions, locally and globally, through our accelerator, our programs, and a national network of impact partners.

• Build. We prepare ventures to be sustainable and to deliver measurable impact, so what we test can survive and scale.

• Test. We serve as external R&D for host institutions, running pilots inside their real operations. This lets a host see whether a solution actually works, without putting its budget, operations, or reputation at risk. The venture earns credibility by proving itself alongside a recognized institution, and the host builds the insight and relationship it needs to make a confident decision.

• Scale. Every pilot produces a fair, decision-ready case study, what was tried, what worked, what did not. We share it with the host and with similar organizations across the region, giving them the evidence to adopt what works. This is how a single proven pilot becomes regional change.

What makes Rally different

We are not an accelerator and not a grant program. We are permanent, testing-and-learning infrastructure, a living lab intermediary that de-risks innovation for the institutions that need it and creates a sustainable, earned-income model in the process. Our role is to make it safe and evidence-based for a region to adopt the solutions that will improve life for its residents, businesses, and visitors.

We are actively seeking partners, host institutions, and peer organizations interested in bringing this model to their own regions.