If you came to this page expecting to see Pensacola Today or the old Studer Community Institute websites, you’re probably wondering what’s going on.

The quick answer: We’ve consolidated PensacolaToday.com into Studeri.org, our renamed and revamped website.

A key reason behind this change is the recent announcement that Quint and Rishy Studer have given the University of West Florida a $1 million gift to help seed a Center for Entrepreneurship. The Institute along with the Florida Small Business Development Center, the Greater Pensacola Entrepreneur Fund, the university’s Center for Research and Economic Opportunity and the Haas Center will be part of the UWF’s new Center for Entrepreneurship, which will be located in downtown Pensacola.

To pave the way for the transition, the Institute is filing paperwork with the state to become an official not-for-profit. We’re also merging Pensacola Today, which was the communication arm of the Institute, into the revamped Studeri.org website. Rather than having two websites, the Institute will now have one.

When we launched the Institute a little more than a year ago, we listed several goals:

• Create a dashboard that shows how the community stacks up to other similar-sized communities.
• Produce research and analysis that will help people become more engaged in the issues that need to be addressed to move our community forward.
• Provide information, workshops, TV programming and community forums that will make it easier for people to form intelligent decisions about local issues.
• Offer workforce, leadership and organizational training designed to strengthen small businesses and not-for-profits in the area.
• Consolidating the Institute and Pensacola Today websites will allow us to do a better job of focusing on these goals. It will free us to do more in-depth research and content.

The centerpiece of the Institute’s new website is the dashboard, which is designed to help people better understand the Pensacola Metropolitan Area. The dashboard highlights economic and social metrics that will allow people to compare our community’s performance to similarly sized communities.

Why is this important?

We believe the more people understand the challenges we face as a community, and the more people become engaged in addressing those challenges, the more progress we are likely to see in Pensacola’s quality of life.

The research and reports the Institute plans to produce will be tied to issues that emerge from this dashboard, which the Institute created in partnership with UWF vice president Rick Harper and his staff at the Center for Research and Economic Opportunity.

“Our whole goal is to improve the community’s quality of life,” said Quint Studer in announcing the changes. “That’s the reason Rishy and I created the Institute in the first place. Merging our resources with the university and the new Center for Entrepreneurship will allow of us to do a better job of working toward that goal.”

The Center for Entrepreneurship will be housed in a proposed $10 million, 55,000-square-foot campus complex the Studers will build on the northwest corner of Community Maritime Park. An adjacent 14,000-foot, $6 million conference center overlooking Pensacola Bay and Blue Wahoo Stadium will allow the Center, the university and the Institute as well as businesses throughout the area to host conventions, workshops and training seminars.

“I am more excited about this project than I was about bringing minor-league baseball to Pensacola,” said Quint Studer. “The Center has the potential to make a significant difference in our community’s quality of life.”