CL and CTB launched the contest in January with a simple goal: to solicit ideas for making Tampa Bay a better place to live. Over 100 days (give or take a few weeks), we received over 80 applications, chose 10 as the most promising, and awarded one of them the $1,000 grand prize from Creative Tampa Bay.
You can read about the 10 finalists here: Suffice it to say they were all eminently worthy of support. But one caught the judges' imaginations the most, and that of the audience, too, I think: Swings, a USF student's so-simple-it's-genius idea to install homemade swings in unexpected places.
[image-1]The irrepressible Reuben Pressman and his mysterious one-named roommate Hunter (well, not mysterious to me, but Hunter prefers to go by only one name, like Cher) brought one of their already-trademark red swings to the event. If we'd had a ladder handy I have no doubt they would have tied one up to the rafters and got the whole party swinging. (We may get our own swing yet; stop by our offices someday to see.)
But the vibe in the room really didn't need any assistance. From the Pitch Party on, you had the sense that this was a gathering of people jazzed by the opportunity to share their ideas with other innovators. Carissa Caricato of Hoola for Happiness; Ron Weaver of Real Estate Lives; Alayne Unterberger of FICS and her amazingly poised teenage Advisory Board members; idea machine Neil Cosentino; Rudy Arnauts and the Readers' Choice-winning Roosevelt 2.0 crew; the charming community gardeners of The Giving Patch and the godfather of community gardening, Rick Martinez of Sweetwater Organic Community Farm; intrepid Tampa CHANGING photographer Bryan Weinstein; Daniel James Scott and his USF St. Pete "Pitch Me" posse; Jake Filloramo of UT Entrepreneurs at the University of Tampa — plus the dedicated bunch from the Creative Tampa Bay board, led by Chair Michelle Royal: all in all, this was a remarkably fun, forward-thinking crowd that left me hopeful for the possibility of positive change in these parts.
So thanks, everybody. Keep in touch with us, and with each other.
