About the Proxenia Foundation
A foundation for hospitality innovation.
The Proxenia Foundation is an independent Central Florida nonprofit developing programs that connect hospitality experience with entrepreneurship, education, research, and community participation.
Why Central Florida
Central Florida knows hospitality.
Few regions bring together this much operating experience, visitor-economy expertise, education, entrepreneurship, and technology. Yet those strengths do not automatically become shared knowledge or accessible pathways.
Founders can struggle to reach operators. Students and professionals may not see a route into innovation. Useful relationships often depend on individual introductions and disappear when a program or event ends.
Proxenia exists to help more of the region’s knowledge move, more people gain access to it, and more useful relationships endure.
Why PROXENIA
An institution rooted in stewardship.
In the ancient Greek world, proxenia was a public relationship between a city-state and a citizen of another community who served as its proxenos—a “public friend” who helped people from the two communities interact.
The name “Proxenia” fits the institution we are building: independent structures that help people enter unfamiliar networks, find trusted relationships, and contribute to shared work.
How the work is organized
Understand. Prepare. Connect.
Research, education, and community are three connected parts of the same work: understand what is changing, prepare people to participate, and connect them with one another.
01 · Understand
Research
Turn hospitality experience into knowledge others can use.
Proxenia develops public writing, industry interviews, practical analysis, and research partnerships around hospitality operations, entrepreneurship, technology, work, and the human experience of the industry.
02 · Prepare
Education
Create practical pathways into hospitality entrepreneurship and innovation.
The active Accelerator combines founder development, practitioner-led learning, subject-matter expertise, and direct contact with people who understand hospitality from the inside. Additional educational pathways and partnerships will be identified honestly as they are developed.
03 · Connect
Community
Make useful relationships easier to form—and harder to lose.
Founder Showcases, expert sessions, roundtables, and recurring gatherings give operators, founders, educators, researchers, investors, and community partners credible places to meet, learn, and begin useful work together.
Already underway
The work is already underway.
The Foundation is being established around demonstrated work rather than a hypothetical program model.
Proxenia Accelerator cohorts have brought founders into sustained contact with operators, mentors, subject-matter experts, and investors. Founder Showcases, public writing, and recurring gatherings extend that work beyond any single session.
- Hospitality-technology founder cohorts
- Operator, mentor, and investor participation
- Founder Showcases and community gatherings
- Public writing and practical industry analysis
How the Foundation is being built
Independent by design.
The Proxenia Foundation is being developed as an independent nonprofit capable of supporting research, education, founder pathways, and community work beyond any single cohort, event, or individual relationship.
Its public responsibility includes being clear about which work is active, which work is emerging, and what still requires partners and support.
Florida nonprofit corporation
Established 2026
Federal tax-exempt application
Pending IRS determination
Founding Board
Currently being seated
Florida charitable registration
CH82070
Where you fit
There is more than one way to contribute.
Operators, founders, educators, researchers, investors, mentors, and regional partners bring different kinds of value. Explore the work already underway, or help establish the Foundation that will support it for the long term.