First -time candidate Republican Belinda Ford, 44, is challenging Democrat State Rep. LaVon Bracy Davis in the Nov. 5 election to represent District 40. The district spans Ocoee, Pine Hills, College Park, Lockhart, Riverside Acres and part of Fairview Shores. Representatives serve two-year terms and earn $29,697 annually.

Early voting takes place daily Oct. 21-Nov. 3, 8 a.m.- 8 p.m. Check our list for locations. The deadline to request a mail-in ballot is Oct. 24. Mail-in ballots can be returned to any early voting location but must be received by the Supervisor of Elections office by 7 p.m. on Nov. 5.

Ford — BeBe to her friends — is running on a platform to make Pine Hills, a majority Black and Hispanic community, great. So much so that Ford sometimes sounds like she’s running for mayor of Pine Hills rather than representative of a larger district. She moved to the neighborhood from Clermont in July. She has a business in the area. And even though there is an active Pine Hills Community Council, which promotes business development, offers real-world educational opportunities for students and lobbies all levels of government on behalf of the neighborhood, Ford believes more can be done so that Pine Hills can succeed like its neighbors Ocoee and College Park.

“I want to take Pine Hills to Tallahassee. It’s time for the community to be at the table. That’s why I’m running,” Ford said in her one-minute speech at the Pine Hills Greater Orlando Hob Nob in July. 

“Ocoee and College Park are thriving communities,” she said later in an interview at House Blend Cafe. “You can see the families, the wholesome families that come out of there. I believe the same can happen to Pine Hills. It's not hopeless. I know that I focus on Pine Hills, but I think we're only as strong as our youth is.”

A key plank in Ford’s platform is establishing church-based vocational schools in Pine Hills with apprenticeship programs for high school graduates who don’t want to go to college or into the military.

She said grads “should be able to go to some technical school to get some skills in order to provide for [their] family and maybe start a business and provide for [the] community.

“I have a cosmetology license. I can easily start a school. Someone that already has a welding company could go get a license to start a school. There's so many different avenues that can come in and help this to happen.”

But vocational training already exists within the district at Orange Technical College-Westside, which recently opened a brand new campus in Ocoee. The school offers a dozen or so established four-year apprenticeship programs in fields such as cosmetology, carpentry, HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning), electrical work, plumbing, building maintenance and a certificate program in welding.

In addition, Evans High School in Pine Hills encourages students to participate in Dual Enrollment with Orange Technical College at any of its four campuses, including the new Westside campus in Ocoee. Starting at age 16, students can receive double credit for the courses they take through the technical college and “receive industry-level training in work-environment labs, have the opportunity to be placed in high-wage internships and jobs, can earn a certificate of completion while earning community college credit through Tech Prep and are eligible to apply for Tech Prep scholarships for post-secondary training.” Plus, financial aid is available.

Where she comes from

Ford grew up in Washington Shores, an area of Orlando she described as “impoverished,” where “we didn’t have much,” she said.

She said her mom and stepfather both worked hard — her father “wasn’t in the picture” — and that “they tried their best with me, but I did get caught up in the community at hand.”

There was drug addiction. There was an abortion. Her two children were temporarily in the custody of the Department of Children and Families.

But she said her life “changed” when she found Jesus. She attended seminary and was ordained as a minister. “I wanted to tell everybody what happened to me,” she said. “I just felt like I had to have some type of degree or something in order to preach it.”

For five years, she was a pastor for the evangelistic ministry Rock Orlando Center for Transformation. She was also a co- founder of the Back 2 God movement, an “initiative designed by God to empower the redeemed of the Lord to stand up for Godly values in America.”

Advocate against abortion

Taking her daughter to a doctor’s appointment led to a chance meeting with the late John Barros who stood outside the Center of Orlando for Women for two decades, harassing women who arrived for abortion appointments. The meeting put Ford on her current path as an “advocate for the unborn.”

“I didn't think anything was wrong with abortion,” said Ford, who had an abortion herself as had women in her family. “He challenged me to go look up Margaret Sanger. I did that and my life changed. She called Black people weeds and said we had nothing to offer society.”

[Ed. Note: Reproductive health rights advocates are reckoning with the complicated legacy of Planned Parenthood’s founder who opened the country’s first birth control clinic in 1916 and advocated for women’s autonomy through contraception but who also espoused racist views and promoted eugenics. In 2020, Sanger’s name was stripped from Planned Parenthood of Greater New York’s Manhattan location.]

Ford began preaching against abortion in the Black community, which led her to open two crisis pregnancy centers, in Pine Hills and Winter Garden. Such centers push misleading or false information to deter access to contraceptives and abortions. Now, she pushes to abolish abortion.

“I want to make sure I'm clear when I say abolish abortion, I mean get rid of it,” she said.

But even within that absolutist stance, Ford draws key distinctions about intention and necessity. A mother who is told by her physician that there’s a medical emergency and her pregnancy needs to be ended “is not the same as going to a clinic saying, I don’t want to have a baby. I already got 10 kids, and not necessarily have to talk to a physician. I think those are two different … I don't think it's the same.”

The first decision, Ford explained, is “solely with the mother, the family, with the doctors. I think that's their business.” But the second decision, “where a young girl can just get up and go to an abortion clinic without even talking to a medical doctor,” Ford said, “is our business.”

Tackling crime

Ford said she wants to reduce crime in Pine Hills by keeping teens engaged in after school and summer activities at churches, tapping community members for their expertise in leading workshops on cooking or art for a grassroots approach to looking out for the neighborhood’s youth.

But as crime has dropped in the county, it’s dropped in Pine Hills, too, declining 16 percent from 2022 to 2023.

Still, there have been headline-grabbing crimes in Pine Hills, like the deaths last year of a News 13 reporter, 9-year-old girl and her mother by a gunman on a shooting spree. But, when it comes to guns and gun violence, Ford said, “I’m very Republican about this.” She added she does not believe in background checks. “I believe we should have the power to protect ourselves.”

“If a criminal or somebody wants to do something wrong, they're going to get a gun. That cannot be controlled. For me, being a single mom, if my gun is controlled, and there's a criminal coming to my house, how am I supposed to protect myself?”

But one area where she may buck the Republican Party line is school shootings. “If there is this issue with kids going into a school, shooting up everyone because they have access to a gun at home, then the leadership of this state needs to figure out how to protect guns at home because you're being irresponsible. That's our job as legislators. Our job is to keep you safe. As legislators, we have to get out of being party-driven and actually start thinking about the community.”