Pulse donations likely to be spent this year

Report details how the nearly $1M fund was spent

Nearly $1 million in donations to help heal the community in the aftermath of Orlando’s Pulse nightclub shooting will likely be gone by year’s end, the money spent on immediate living expenses for survivors unable to work, scholarship funds for LGBTQ students, mental health counseling and other needs.

A report made public Wednesday by the philanthropic Central Florida Foundation details the impact of the Better Together Fund — created alongside the betterknown OneOrlando Fund that paid $30.8 million in donations directly to survivors of the 2016 mass shooting and the families of the 49 people killed.

“We set up the Better Together Fund to, first, cover those gaps between what survivors needed and what they had, but also to address ongoing, broader issues within the community,” said Mark Brewer, the Central Florida Foundation’s president and CEO. “I don’t believe the job will ever be done, but it feels as though noteworthy progress has been made.”

Better Together fueled critical support programs — including nearly $200,000 for mental health counseling for survivors and more than $45,000 to train counselors on how to deal with trauma and shooting victims.

“When Pulse happened, nearly all of our mental health folks were generalists,” Brewer said. “We needed them to have the ability to deal with these issues in a sustained way.”

Perhaps the fund’s most lasting impact, though, will be the $100,000 awarded to the fledgling One Orlando Alliance — a coalition formed after the shooting to unite the region’s varied LGBTQ nonprofits so they could work toward common goals.

Brewer said the organization began with 18 small, “fragile” LGBTQ nonprofits each with a specific mission — from HIV testing to sheltering homeless youth — “but the odd thing was that they really didn’t talk much to each other, because they just really didn’t have a place to do that.”

The One Orlando Alliance has given them a united voice and some clout, he said.

The alliance’s executive director, Jennifer Foster, said the organization might not have happened without the grant.

“That really got us off the ground because we weren’t fundraising within the community at all since we didn’t want to compete with our individual nonprofit members,” she said. “I give them credit for seeing the long game.”

Nearly half of the Better Together money went to the Heart of Florida United Way to run the Orlando United Assistance Center, created immediately after the