Harris Rosen was fired from his job at Disney World in the early 1970s because despite playing a role in the development of resorts including the Contemporary and Polynesian, they didn’t feel he was a “company man”. Upon his firing, he used his life savings to put a deposit down on a Quality Inn, where his office remains to this day. He has now spent decades in the hospitality industry, designing buildings and building one of the largest hotel groups in Florida from the ground up. Rosen Hotels & Resorts now has seven properties in the Orlando area—but Rosen didn’t let that go to his head.
In 1993, Rosen went into a high-poverty, drug-ridden area of Orlando called Tangelo Park and created the Tangelo Park Program. It provided every two to four-year-old child in the neighborhood with free preschool and a free college education for every student who graduated from high school. The graduation rate amongst Tangelo Park increased to 100%, and students who went to schools in the state of Florida had all of their tuition and living expenses covered. But Rosen’s good deeds didn’t stop there. He pledged 20 acres of property from one of his resorts and $10 million to build a new school as part of UCF. The Rosen College of Hospitality Management opened in 2004, and, if it had been up to Rosen, it would have been built on the helms of an anonymous donor without his name attached to the building. Millions of dollars later, and Rosen is still working out of the small office the first hotel he ever purchased.