Orange Blossom Award: When Infrastructure Becomes Impact

Joshua Bean and Hillary Van Dyke, founders of Green Book of Tampa Bay, photographed wearing Green Book shirts. The community-built directory highlights Black-owned businesses across the region and focuses on strengthening economic circulation as a form of long-term equity. Photo provided.

by Avery Anderson

Every few years, a city rediscovers a conversation it swore it was already having.

In 2025, Tampa Bay is once again talking—loudly—about equity, access, and who actually benefits when a region “thrives.” What’s different this time is the growing recognition that visibility alone isn’t impact. Statements don’t circulate dollars. Panels don’t keep doors open. And goodwill, without a system behind it, fades fast.

That’s why Green Book of Tampa Bay receives an Orange Blossom Award this year.

Not because the idea is new. But because the work has proven durable.

While many equity-focused initiatives surge during moments of crisis and quietly recede, Green Book has continued to do something far less glamorous and far more powerful: maintain the infrastructure that makes economic intention possible. Year after year. Click after click. Business by business.

In a region where Black-owned businesses are still disproportionately affected by rising rents, shrinking arts funding, uneven recovery from COVID-era losses, and shifting tourism dollars, Green Book has remained a constant. A tool people actually use. A resource that removes the friction between wanting to support Black-owned businesses and knowing how to do it.

That distinction matters right now.

As Tampa Bay markets itself as a destination for culture, creativity, and entrepreneurship, the question underneath the branding has become unavoidable: who is that growth for? Green Book doesn’t answer that question with rhetoric. It answers it with a directory—one that quietly insists that economic participation is part of civic responsibility.

This year, especially, that insistence feels urgent.

As public funding tightens, as arts organizations and small businesses are asked to “do more with less,” and as community trust in institutions continues to erode, tools that empower individual action carry outsized weight. Green Book doesn’t ask people to wait for policy to change. It gives them a way to act now—intentionally, repeatedly, and locally.

The Orange Blossom Awards exist to recognize not just excellence, but impact that often goes unseen. Green Book of Tampa Bay is a reminder that some of the most consequential cultural work doesn’t happen onstage or on a ballot—it happens in the systems that shape everyday choices.

This award honors Green Book not as a moment, but as a commitment.

Because when the spotlight moves on, the map still has to work.

What Are the Orange Blossom Awards?

A month-long series from The Arts Passport celebrating the people and organizations whose quiet, steady work strengthens Tampa Bay’s arts ecosystem. No applications. No campaigning. Just community-driven recognition, released daily in December.