Wearing their brightest rainbow gear, hundreds raced through downtown Orlando Saturday during the CommUNITY Rainbow Run, past the Pulse nightclub where 49 people were murdered in 2016.
For the city, not much has changed at the shuttered club where the makeshift memorial still exists eight years later.
The onePULSE Foundation set to build a $100 million museum and memorial, but with big ambitions and big administrative costs, the foundation spectacularly imploded. The foundation shut down last year amid financial questions and transparency concerns.
None of the foundation's money remains, city officials acknowledged this week. The challenge is for Orlando government to pick off the pieces and fundraise again to build a permanent memorial.
"I don't even know how much money was given to this organization and what they did with it," said Orlando city commissioner Patty Sheehan, who is gay, during a Friday press conference. "I'm heartbroken that we were taken advantage of. I really feel that the LGBTQ community, the victims and survivors, were taken advantage of, and now we have to fix it, and that's really hard."
Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer announced the city has reached out to victims' families, survivors and others and plans to get input this summer on building a memorial, whether it means tearing down the building or not. No cost estimates have been determined. Officials used the word transparent multiple times to describe how they want the process to be this time around. The city's advisory board will also include first responders, healthcare workers, community leaders and design/engineering experts.
"It is my hope that together, we can create a place that is some place that you can go to reflect for those impacted by the tragedy and our entire community," Dyer said. "At the forefront of the city's efforts to ensure that the creation of the memorial is hearing from families of the 49 and survivors."
On Saturday, about 2,000 people signed up for the city-organized Rainbow Run — the first one since the onePULSE Foundation collapsed. Net proceeds from this year's race will go toward the city's efforts to build a permanent memorial.
On the course in a humid morning, participants ran past the Orlando Health campus, hospital therapy dogs and Pulse. The finish line ended at Orlando City Hall with people celebrating with rainbow-colored medals and ice cream.
The race has meant to be a time for healing, for people to come together and run a symbolic 4.9K.
"The run epitomizes how in 2016 our community united to honor the 49 and display our commitment to inclusion," Dyer said. "Certainly today, in a country and a world that seems so divisive, we ensure that in Orlando, love and optimism will always be more powerful than hatred and fear."
Not all embrace the race.
"We remind you that the Annual Community Rainbow Run was a crass fundraiser started by the dissolved and disgraced onePULSE Foundation used to turn the massacre into a tourist attraction and pay six-figure salaries to ineffective and undeserving nonprofit executives," said an open letter written by a group of survivors and victims' family members who want to cancel the annual event. "Lacking any resemblance of empathy and ethics, the Community Rainbow Run promised to take joyous joggers, walkers, and runners on the same route that victims/survivors took down Orange Avenue when they ran for their lives and were evacuated from the Pulse Nightclub to Orlando Health."
The open letter is a reminder of the heartbreak, community anger and political challenges ahead.
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