People Archive

All Together Now

9/19/2023
You may know a community manager, a head of community or even a chief community officer. The job titles are popping up with more frequency at organizations of all sizes, from big brands like Peloton, Lululemon and Tesla to local small businesses and non-profits. They engage with customers, solve problems and learn from their feedback. They may recruit brand ambassadors, host events and share on social media, among other duties.
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Icon: Rita Lowman

9/11/2023
When I was 2, my parents divorced, and, (when I was) 5, they both remarried. So, for the first years of their marriages to my stepparents, I was living six months with one parent and six months with the other. When I was 9, I had the opportunity to go before a judge and he asked me what I wanted to happen. Since my parents only lived about five blocks apart, I said I wanted to live with my mom during the week and my dad on the weekends. The judge thought that was a great idea. For a judge to listen to me, a 9-year-old, that made a big impression on me. After that, I knew I would have the opportunity to have my voice heard.
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Strategic Economic Development is Florida's Future

9/1/2023
Florida's growth is impressive — from the Panhandle to South Florida and all areas in between. The population expansion our state has been experiencing is quite extraordinary, with nearly 1,000 new residents moving here each day. Along with the population boom, business sector growth has followed. When looking at recent U.S. Census data, of the nearly 6 million business applications filed nationally, almost 700,000 of them (nearly 12%) were in Florida.
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Sole Mates

9/1/2023
Trailblazing entrepreneur Rita Case is recognized for many things: As a teenager working at her parents' auto dealership, the first in the nation to carry Hondas, she sold the first of the now ubiquitous cars. Along with husband, Rick, the couple built one of the nation's largest and most successful automotive dealership empires. She's won many awards and national and international honors; and of course, there are her trademark hats — she's never seen without one.
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Icon: Phillip Frost

8/21/2023
Why did I major in French literature? I had never left the country, and the idea of learning a foreign language was appealing to me. And so, it was an opportunity to major in a subject that would at the same time permit me to take enough science courses so that if I had decided to go to medical school, I had that option.
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Ready for Takeoff

8/8/2023
Air travel and cargo transport are major contributors to carbon emissions. To address the challenge, innovators are starting small. Advanced electric-powered aviation technologies, such as drones, combined with geospatial mapping and artificial intelligence, can be used to modernize the industry. The technologies also can predict and track wildfires, monitor water quality and deliver supplies to remote areas, says Tampa entrepreneur and aerospace engineer Rocio Frej Vitalle.
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A Tradition of Excellence

8/1/2023

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AI for All

8/1/2023

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Upping the Ante

7/11/2023
Joey Levy, a South Florida native, dropped out of Columbia University at age 19 to pursue his first startup, Draftpot, a fantasy sports app. While Draftpot ultimately wasn't successful, he became obsessed with innovating the sports-betting experience for the casual fan. That sent him down a rabbit hole that led him to found two more startups.
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Icon: Jeff Johnson

7/11/2023
From a pretty early age, knowing I was adopted, I always felt like I needed to do something really big with my life. And so, when I went off to college, I really wanted to focus on studying the really big topics, so I studied religion and politics.
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65 Years and Counting

7/1/2023
It is an honor and privilege to lead an organization with roots going back 65 years, and one that is an indispensable authority on the issues, people and ideas defining Florida and its business community.
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Past is Prologue

7/1/2023
I never had the privilege of meeting FLORIDA TREND'S founder, Harris Mullen. He'd sold the magazine nine years before my first job at the Tampa Tribune brought me to Florida, but he was well known as an entrepreneurial legend. It also turns out he was man well ahead of his time.
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Betting on Bugs

6/14/2023
Trina Chiasson was born and raised in Wellington, Maine, a little town in the woods with a one-room schoolhouse. Always interested in nature, she studied environmental economics at the University of Southern Maine. Her first career stop was at an environmental non-profit in Washington, D.C., where she learned how politics could impede environmental progress.
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Icon: Mike Boylan

6/13/2023
Hurricane Charley in 2004, that storm was heading right toward us in Tampa Bay, and that's when I got addicted to forecast cones and tracks.
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Innovation's Force Multiplier

6/1/2023

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Success Breeds Success

6/1/2023

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Code Red

5/9/2023

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Florida Icon: Vickie Smith

5/8/2023

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Lessons from Judy

5/1/2023
This month, the University of South Florida is scheduled to open the new Judy Genshaft Honors College on its Tampa campus. It's an exquisite, modern building geared for collaboration and interaction. In many ways, its quite like the president emerita herself.
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The Key to Florida's Success

5/1/2023
The growth of Florida's economy over the past few years has been impressive. Yes, we have great weather and beaches, but we also have a terrific post-secondary education system, a strong talent pool and workforce readiness programs that are second to none — not to mention no state income tax and a business-friendly environment.
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Rising up

4/11/2023
After graduating from Bentley University in Massachusetts in 2011 with a business degree, Tom D'Eri joined his father, John, in starting a business designed to employ people on the autism spectrum. Tom's brother, Andrew, who has autism, was aging out of the school system, and Tom knew Andrew's chances of having a career were slim.
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Florida Icon: Peter Golenbock

4/10/2023
Sports, in a way, is like joining a cult. It becomes very, very important in a wonderful way. I mean, where else can you sit in a stadium and scream your lungs out and not feel like a moron?
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Florida Delivers

4/1/2023
Education is the differentiator. It helps define who we are and what is important to us, while providing an opportunity to grow personally and professionally while uncovering new career paths and opportunities. Whether it is in the form of a technical degree, certificate program, micro-credentials, a traditional two- or four-year degree, a graduate degree or post-graduate studies, higher education provides the ladder to help individuals climb higher.
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Job One

4/1/2023
The state constitution requires only one thing of the Florida Legislature, that it pass a balanced budget each year. If they wanted to, lawmakers could come to Tallahassee, pass a budget and go home, satisfied they'd done their duty.
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Wasting No Time

3/7/2023
About 30% of a typical city's food waste comes from restaurants. Aneshai Smith wants to do something about that while helping restaurants thrive. Her Orlando-based startup, Go See The City, offers digital coupons for deep discounts on unsold food before restaurants close for the day.
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Florida Icon: Jenson Van Emburgh

3/7/2023
My injury happened during birth. I came out the wrong way. The doctor put too much pressure on my spinal cord and it severed. My parents were told that I had no sensation or motor function from my armpits down and that I would be in a wheelchair for life.
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A Really Big Deal

3/1/2023
Jorge and Julio Brea were just little boys when their family immigrated from the Dominican Republic to Tampa in the early 1990s. As teenagers growing up at the dawn of digital age, they loved both music and technology, and they figured out a way to bring the two together.
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Beacons of Hope

3/1/2023
Access to trusted, quality health care is important to all of us — regardless of background or economic standing — especially when it comes to our children.
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A Life Raft for Women

2/12/2023
Sipra Laddha and Shama Rathi are psychiatrists, but when each of them struggled with mental health issues during or after their pregnancies, even they had trouble finding the professional help they needed.
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Florida Icon: Jawole Willa Jo Zollar

2/8/2023
Dancing was definitely a hallmark of my childhood. My sister and I danced at our local dance studio, and we started performing fairly young as part of a revue. These revues in the Black community usually had a comic MC, a flash act like the Nicholas Brothers, a tap dancer, an exotic dancer or a stripper, which was kind of like post-vaudeville burlesque. My sister and I, we were part of the kiddie act. I did that probably from age 7 or 8 until about 16 or 17.
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Lessons Shared

2/1/2023
This past December, I had the distinct honor of delivering the commencement address at Florida Southern College in Lakeland.
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A Side of Success

2/1/2023
Sixty years ago, a 15-year-old boy named George Guito was headed down the path to trouble when he asked for a job at the Columbia Restaurant in Ybor City. César Gonzmart, then the third generation of his family to lead the iconic restaurant, hired George as a busboy and later sent him to school to become a butcher — along the way making him part of the family and a de facto brother to sons Richard and Casey.
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People & Profiles: Archive