A ‘Resilience Incubator’ in Sarasota aims to facilitate coordination between organizations.
By Johannes Wener
Original Air Date: June 28, 2024
Host: Sarasota now has a shared office space for nearly a dozen environmental non-profits. Our news team was at a ribbon-cutting in downtown this morning.
Johannes Werner: The second-floor offices in the blood bank building on Mound Road offer collaborative space for eleven environmental organizations that are now roommates of sorts. Suncoast Blood Centers, which operates a donation center on the ground floor, is the landlord.
Three organizations have come together to pay the rent for what they call a “Resilience Incubator”. Two of them are among the “usual suspects” — the well-endowed Barancik Foundation and the Sarasota Community Foundation. The third one, less so: Its name is 
Rebuilding Together Tampa Bay. This Tampa-based non-profit is just three years old. But, with offices in St. Petersburg, Arcadia, Orlando, and Fort Myers, Rebuilding Together has already helped more than a thousand low-income homeowners rebuild after hurricanes — including close to 100 in Sarasota and Manatee Counties — and now it is opening a series of incubators across Florida. In Sarasota, Rebuilding Together Tampa Bay will be working closely with environmental organizations such as Suncoast Waterkeeper, Minorities in Shark Sciences, Southface, Sunshine Community Compost, the Recycling Partnership, and the Florida Veterans for Common Sense Fund.
José García is the executive director of Rebuilding Together. He says the Resilience Incubator will “address the community’s most urgent needs more effectively.” Addressing the needs of low-income residents and environmental activism actually go hand in hand.
Jose Garcia
José García: We provide this residential reversal rehab services, and when houses are damaged the environment starts to take a toll on the houses: start to build mold; you can not live in a place where you can’t breathe properly; there is too much use of energy, because it’s not efficient; water, because it’s not efficient. And some years ago, especially after COVID, we started to notice the connection between what we do in repairs and how it impacts the health of the families, especially because they were spending more time in the house, so they were getting sicker. So we started to look into that and started to make our repairs and rehabs, making sure that the homes become healthier, which it has to do with the environment.
Eleven organizations participated in the ribbon cutting.
So there are things that we need to make sure that we do right, like planting the right trees around the house; like planting the right plants around the house. So in that situation, the house is environmentally friendly and it’s also energy efficient, it’s also healthier, it’s also safer for the family.
JW: Brandy Canada, senior director of operations with Rebuilding Together, says the expectation is for the tenant organizations to work together more closely and effectively.
Brandy Canada: The outcomes that I see is, it creates more buy-in in the community because we’re all here together. It also creates the opportunity to obviously stretch the dollars because we are all either grant funded or municipality or corporate fundraising. So it helps us stretch the dollars overall, but then also everyone can come together and have ideas. And so we can reach more, we can help more if we’re all working in unison.
JW: Reporting from Sarasota, this has been Johannes Werner for WSLR News.
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