Eddy Moratin, Lift Orlando, elevate neighbors through ‘redemptive work'

Since 1982, the Orlando Sentinel has asked the community to help us recognize people who make a big difference in local lives with our Central Floridian of the Year award. For the next few weeks, we will publish features on this year's finalists. Our winner will be announced on April 11.

Eddy Moratin jogged down the stairs from his second-floor office at Lift Orlando's headquarters to the lobby below, welcoming visitors with a first-name greeting and a hug. The building, with a community center and a cafe, is an extension of Moratin’s work in a neighborhood he now calls home. Everyone Moratin greeted seemed happy to see the man with a contagious smile.

“How’s your day?” ” they asked.

“How are the kids?” But a warm welcome wasn't always the case. Moratin, 52, and Lift Orlando were once an unfamiliar and unwelcome presence in the 32805 zip code of Orlando, which includes a collection of neighborhoods around Camping World Stadium, among them Holden Heights, Parramore and Washington Shores.

The residents are predominately low-income, Black and Hispanic. He recalled community meetings over a decade ago where locals accused him of trying to gentrify the neighborhood or build more parking lots for the stadium.

“I left some nights feeling like I had been sucker punched for two hours straight, and I had a hard time even making it home before falling apart, and it felt unfair," he said. But 13 years later, his job as president of Lift Orlando, and its work to revitalize those neighborhoods, has made him a finalist for the Orlando Sentinel's Central Floridian of the Year award. Under Moratin's leadership, Lift Orlando has developed a mixed-income housing complex, a Boys and Girls Club facility and an early learning center.

It has also sponsored college scholarships and joined with Orange County Public Schools to turn a local elementary school into a K-8 charter school with more offerings for local children. The projects, Moratin said, represent the organization’s mission: “Strengthening neighborhoods so people can thrive." Moratin said Lift Orlando started when Steve Hogan, the CEO of Florida Citrus Sports, posed a question: “How could Orlando’s football stadium be the first that was actually good for the neighborhood it sat in?”

Executives from several prominent Orlando businesses, including Florida Citrus Sports, AdventHealth and CNL Financial, then came together to launch the nonprofit Lift Orlando in 2013, placing Moratin at the helm.

“We needed somebody crazy enough to show up every day and give it a try,” he said. Today, Lift Orlando has more than 20 employees. Moratin previously worked at Lifework Leadership, an Orlando-based Christian leadership development organization, and The Jobs Partnership of Florida, a Winter-Park based group of “churches, businesses and community organizations that uses biblical principles to help people maximize their calling at work.”

Moratin moved with his family to Orlando from Washington, D.C. when he was 16. Now, he and his wife and their two children live in the 32805 zip code. He never went to college, instead diving into Christian ministry after graduating from Colonial High School.

Moratin worked with young men escaping gangs and difficult living conditions, he said, and saw first-hand the effects of poverty on the Orlando community. Today, Moratin said his approach stems from the wisdom of Desmond Tutu, the South African bishop who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his activism against apartheid. "

There comes a time when you have to stop pulling people out of the river and go upstream and find out why are they falling in," Moratin said, quoting Tutu. ”

And for us, neighborhood work is that." Early in his tenure as Lift Orlando’s president, however, Moratin tried to pull his neighbors out of the proverbial river. But then he realized the limitations.

He identified a high crime rate at the nearby apartment complex off Orange Center Boulevard, but then learned more from his conversations with community leaders, who were sure crime was a symptom of a lack of education. Moratin then met with Orange Center Elementary School’s principal and learned student turnover was high because housing was unstable for many of their families, who often moved in and out of the school’s attendance zone as they searched for a place they could afford. He needed to look upstream.

“The realization became: There is no silver bullet. There is no one program that if we funded it really well and ran it really we’d solve all these problems, because they undermine each other,” Moratin said.

“You have to kind of do it all.” So Moratin has tried to do it all - something he said only works when philanthropy happens at such a local level.

In his tenure at Lift, Moratin has partnered with outside groups in different industries to bring new resources to the neighborhood. The Heart of West Lakes Wellness Center, where Lift Orlando is headquartered, has healthcare facilities provided by Florida Blue and Community Health Centers. The local Boys and Girls Club opened in 2021 by way of a $4 million dollar donation from the Jacqueline Bradley and Clarence Otis family and other donations coordinated by Lift Orlando.

It sits just across the street from the wellness center. Jamie Merrill, the president and CEO of Boys and Girls Clubs of Central Florida, called Moratin a “wonderful human and a wonderful leader” with a “God-given heart” to make the world a better place. He is a “slam dunk” as a finalist for Central Floridian of the Year, she said.

“Eddy is a person that makes you feel better about the world just by being around him,” she added. Maria Vazquez, the superintendent of OCPS, worked closely with Moratin as the district negotiated with Lift on an unusual plan: Turn Orange Center Elementary into a charter school, a public school run by a private group, with the district remaining a partner. Plans call for the new school to focus on science, engineering, math and technology and to expand to include middle school grades.

The goal is for Lift Orlando to provide the school with more resources than it would get as a traditional public school. Moratin was “tenacious” in pushing the plans through, Vazquez said.

“One of his greatest attributes is his ability to bring people together in order to achieve a common goal. And when you look at what he has been able to accomplish alongside his board in that community, it is amazing,” she said. Lift Orlando also helped organize scholarships, paid for by real estate developers Scott and Jennifer Boyd, to send all Jones High School graduates to Valencia College tuition-free for the next four years.

The high schools sits in one of the neighborhoods the agency serves. Moratin sees Lift's mission as "redemptive work," a concept coined by a Christian venture capital group. The idea is that those with the financial means to make an impact should move beyond the exploitative "I win, you lose" model of capitalism and instead embrace an "I sacrifice, we win" philosophy, he said.

We live in “crazy times” today, he said, and things are likely to get worse before they get better.