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Dear Friend,
 Thursday,
hundreds of Central Florida residents, business
owners and community leaders gathered at the
Plaza Cinema Café for the 2009 State of Downtown
Orlando event.
State of Downtown is my annual opportunity to
give our community a progress report on our
collective effort to reshape and revitalize our
Downtown district - Central Florida's urban
core. The event is also a chance for Downtown
stakeholders to celebrate the successes of the
past year and plan for the future.
If you weren't able to make it to the event
in-person, you can watch it on the City's web
site by
clicking here.
Sincerely,
Buddy Dyer
Mayor
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Buy Local Orlando
Merchant Membership Exceeds 200 Businesses
 Yesterday, during
Mayor Dyer’s State of Downtown Address, he
shared some very good news related to Buy
Local Orlando - the number of businesses
participating in the initiative has exceeded
200. Also, more than 50,000 free Buy Local
Orlando cards have been distributed to
consumers since the program launched on May 1.
As part of the
City’s overall strategy for economic growth and
Mayor Dyer’s Strengthen Orlando initiative,
Buy Local Orlando is a proactive and
practical approach for connecting businesses in
Orlando with the buying power of our residents.
Residents carrying the free Buy Local
Orlando consumer card can take advantage
of special offers and discounts at participating
businesses throughout our City.
If you’d like to
become a consumer member of Buy Local
Orlando or for more information about
the initiative, please visit
buylocalorlando.net.
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Keep Orlando Beautiful
Receives $10,000 Grant
Keep Orlando
Beautiful received a $10,000 grant from national
nonprofit Keep America Beautiful, Inc. as part
of a nationwide effort sponsored by Waste
Management that encourages local solutions to
improving community environments. Keep Orlando
Beautiful will use the grant for an event
recycling program called Recycle Orlando.
The Think Green grant will fund the purchase of
a recycling kit including a trailer, recycling
bins, carts and supplies for use at local
events.
In the grant
competition, more than 575 local affiliates of
Keep America Beautiful were challenged to
present proposals for ambitious projects
representing a wide array of stewardship,
community outreach and educational projects.
Keep Orlando Beautiful’s Recycle Orlando
project was one of 15 winners nationwide. |
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Read for the Record
 The City
of Orlando's Director of Families, Parks and
Recreation, Lisa Early, read to children at the
Dr. J.B. Callahan Neighborhood Center on
Thursday as part of Jumpstart's Read for the
Record, a national campaign in partnership with
the Pearson Foundation working to bring
attention to America's early literacy crisis.
This year, the book selection was Eric Carle’s
classic, The Very Hungry Caterpillar. For more
information, visit readfortherecord.org.
Parramore Kidz Zone Profiled as National Example
A new report by the National League of Cities,
The State of City Leadership for Children and
Families in 2009, recognizes Orlando for
its cutting-edge efforts to promote child and
family well-being, including the Parramore Kidz
Zone (PKZ) initiative.
Even
as cities grapple with the worst budget outlook
in decades, mayors and other municipal leaders
have maintained a strong commitment to children,
youth and their families. The State of City
Leadership report highlights Orlando’s Parramore
Kidz Zone as one of the nation’s four most
innovative city models for developing a local
infrastructure for children, youth and families.
Modeled on the Harlem Children’s Zone, PKZ seeks
to connect the Parramore neighborhood’s 2,000
children with a comprehensive network of
services to reduce juvenile crime, teen
pregnancy, poverty, high school dropout rates
and child abuse and neglect. This
neighborhood-based initiative has contributed to
positive trends in many of these areas. Since
2006, juvenile arrests declined by 47 percent,
births to teen mothers fell by 18 percent, the
percentage of low birth weight infants dropped
by 22 percent and state reading and math test
scores improved across the board. In addition,
virtually 100 percent of the children residing
in the neighborhood had enrolled in PKZ’s
programs by the end of the project’s third year.
Downtown South Main Street Holds Family Festival
 Downtown South, one of Orlando’s Main Street
programs, will hold their Family Fall Festival
Saturday, October 17, from 2 - 8 p.m. at the
corner of Michigan Street and Orange Avenue. The
festival will include face painting, pumpkin
carving and a moon jump for children as well as
seven local bands and a beer and wine garden.
See
the Phantom, Save the Fountain
 The Phantom of
the Opera is helping refurbish the Lake Eola
Fountain by donating $5 to the fountain for every ticket
purchased during October to any performance of
The Phantom of the Opera.
The Cameron
Mackintosh/Really Useful Theatre Company, Inc.
production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The
Phantom of the Opera, directed by Harold
Prince, returns to the Bob Carr Performing Arts
Centre in Orlando January 20 through February
14, 2010. The four week run of Phantom could
translate into over $300,000 to help repair the
Lake Eola Fountain if tickets are purchased in
October.
Tickets for
The Phantom of the Opera start at $32.00 and
can be purchased at the Fairwinds
Broadway Across America – Orlando Box Office,
Amway Arena Box Office and all Ticketmaster
locations. Online purchases can be made at
OrlandoBroadway.com. To charge-by-phone call
1.800.982.2787. Group orders for 20 or more may
be placed by calling .407.423.9999 x17 or
1.800.950.4647. |
You
don’t have to drive Downtown to see the progress
of the Amway Center. Watch the progress of the
construction with the Amway Center Webcams.
Showing a bird's eye view of the two blocks
south of Church Street and west of I-4, which
will become the home of the City's new venue for
sports, music and entertainment, the cameras
take a picture every 15 minutes and save the
photos so viewers can watch the progress like a
movie. The webcams can be found 
On Monday, Mayor
Buddy Dyer joined United States Department of
Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun
Donovan to tour areas benefiting from the City’s
Neighborhood Stabilization Program.