About APA Florida

Welcome to APA Florida!

APA Florida welcomes you! Thank you for visiting our website and allowing us the opportunity to provide you information to learn more about us. We hope you find this site easy to navigate, but if you need additional info please don’t hesitate to reach out.

As a professional organization averaging 3,000 members, we believe that planning for our communities is paramount to the health of our places in Florida. Whether that relates to economic opportunities, environmental protections, mobility alternatives, or other practices that support measures to enhance our future, we work to responsibly care for our natural and built environment systems. We are comprised of a mixture of private and public sector dedicated planning professionals, more than half of whom are guided by an ethics code through a professional certification by the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP).

APA Florida provides many services to our members, including two annual professional and career development opportunities. These include our annual conference held each fall, and our Public Policy Workshop (PPW) held in Tallahassee early in the calendar year.

We also annually host Florida’s Great Places competition, a public effort to recognize places within Florida that provide a model for amazing standards of community; those with a sense of place that attract visitors and residents alike. Please check here for past winners, with descriptions of their dynamic stories.

To better serve our membership, and because we are such a large state, we instituted geographical sectionswithin APA Florida. There are twelve (12) sections in total, each of which also hosts events and professional opportunities on a regional level.

We also recently initiated a program to assist disadvantaged communities to better their future. The Community Planning Assistance Team (CPAT) is a collaboration of volunteer planners from Florida that come to a community to partake in work sessions and presentations with local stakeholders. In doing so, the CPAT provides achievable results through an action plan with implementable solutions. The final output is a document of strategies to assist the community in moving toward success by achieving an identified goal.

We also adopt a legislative platform, budget, and strategic plan to guide our mission as an organization.

If you have any questions about APA Florida, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me. I look forward to hearing from you.

Best regards,

Allara Mills-Gutcher, AICP

APA Florida President 2025-26

Our Mission

APA Florida provides statewide leadership in the development of sustainable communities by advocating excellence in planning, providing professional development for its members, and working to protect and enhance the natural and built environments.

About APA Florida

The American Planning Association and its professional institute, the American Institute of Certified Planners, are organized to advance the art and science of planning and to foster the activity of planning — physical, economic, and social — at the local, regional, state, and national levels.

The objective of the Association is to encourage planning that will contribute to public well-being by developing communities and environments that meet the needs of people and of society more effectively.

The Florida Chapter of the American Planning Association serves APA members within the state, and those who are members although they may not live within Florida. APA Florida is the state-level resource for networking and professional development. When you join APA and reside in Florida, you automatically become a member of APA Florida. You are also able to join without APA membership. Please contact our office for more information.

The Florida Chapter provides members the opportunity to share experiences with colleagues and to broaden perspectives. The chapter holds an annual conference, educational workshops, AICP exam preparation courses, and produces a newsletter. APA Florida also conducts an annual legislative workshop, sponsors training opportunities, conducts an awards program, and provides public information to and about the planning profession.