Theme: Community

Community is the intersection of people & ideas. The sharing of common goals among neighbors creates an interconnectedness where community informs identity.

Key Biscayne Presbyterian School
160 Harbor Dr
Key Biscayne, Florida, 33149
United States

Ana Gloria Rivas-Vázquez

Philanthropy

An attorney and former journalist, Ana Gloria has been working in philanthropy for more than 25 years. She currently serves as the Director of Hispanic Development at Catholic Relief Services. Born in Miami of Cuban-Venezuelan parents, Ana Gloria is a frequent speaker on Hispanic philanthropy. She has served as VP and Chief Philanthropy Officer of Hispanics in Philanthropy and VP of Development and External Relations at St. Thomas University. She also held positions as Associate for Advancement at Carrollton School of the Sacred Heart, and Director of Development at the Dade Community Foundation. Ana Gloria has worked in partnership with foundations and nonprofits across the world. Prior to beginning her career in philanthropy, she practiced labor and employment law and worked as a reporter for The Daily Journal and The Miami Herald. Ana Gloria earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Georgetown University and a law degree with honors from the University of Miami School of Law.

Beatriz Ayala-Muñiz

Beatriz Ayala-Muñiz is a spark plug; her love for life permeates everything she creates. She is the ultimate connector of people, experiences, and ideas. A community enabler, Bea is the Founder and CEO of Musicasa, a Techstars Music company, creating a community-powered marketplace connecting music lovers through highly personal home concerts. She’s also a music curator, world traveler, lover of all things adventure & the outdoors, and a former award-winning advertising executive from Puerto Rico. She spent 10+ years leading communication and branding strategies for world-class brands like Snickers, M&M’s, Bacardi, Pepsi, P&G, and Medalla Light across the US Hispanic market, Central America, and the Caribbean. A former D1 NCAA student-athlete, Bea is a proud graduate of Villanova University. She currently resides in Miami, Florida, and is a member of Miami Tech Life and Dreamers and Doers communities.

Billy Kimball

Billy Kimball is a writer and producer, primarily for television. His credits include “The Simpsons,” “Saturday Night Live,” and the Academy Awards telecast. He was a writer and co-executive producer for the HBO series “Veep” for which he received two Primetime Emmy awards. He has also won a Writers’ Guild Award three times, an AFI Award, an “Annie” Award for his work on “The Simpsons,” and a Peabody Award. In addition to his work in television comedy, he also co-wrote the education documentary “Waiting for Superman.” His short humorous fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and McSweeney’s. A former resident of Key Biscayne, he currently lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Alexandra, and two children, Fernanda and Austin.

Eugene Stearns

As a young man, Gene Stearns enjoyed a unique experience in Florida government, serving as Chief Assistant to Florida’s Speaker of the House Dick Pettigrew, running the successful gubernatorial campaign for Reubin Askew, and serving Governor Askew for the first two years of his administration. The years Gene was involved in Florida government – 1967 to 1972 – have been widely recognized as the golden era of Florida politics. Returning to Miami in 1972 to begin the practice of law, Gene has been actively involved in a host of public policy issues on both the state and federal level. On a pro bono basis, he successfully represented communities throughout South Florida who aspired to create new local governments including the Village of Key Biscayne, the City of Aventura, the Village of Pinecrest, Doral, Miami Lakes, Miami Gardens, the City of Sunny Isles, and the Village of Islamorada. Representing African American community leaders in a Voting Rights Act case, Gene is responsible for creation of Miami Dade County’s thirteen member Board of County Commissioners, elected in single member districts. He was principally involved in the Fair Districts campaign and in the effort to amend Florida’s constitution to eliminate party primaries in state elections — which fell just short of the necessary 60% vote. Gene is identified by Chambers USA as the single most respected civil litigator in the State of Florida, a recognition he has enjoyed for many years. He serves as Chairman of his statewide law firm, Stearns Weaver Miller, and heads its Litigation Department. His trial experience over five decades has been in jury and non jury trials in federal and state courts in Florida and other jurisdictions, and arbitration and administrative law proceedings. He has briefed and argued appeals to Florida’s appellate courts including the District Courts of Appeal, the Florida Supreme Court, and in the federal system to the United States Courts of Appeals for the Fifth, Eleventh, Ninth and Third Circuits; and he has successfully argued before the United States Supreme Court in a matter that, when decided, ended almost a decade of disagreement among the federal circuits involving federal diversity jurisdiction.

Manny Rionda

After graduating from Boston College with a marketing degree, Manny accepted a one-year appointment as a case worker serving at-risk youth in the Boston area. Following that he recognized his calling as an educator. Moving west, he enjoyed 9 wonderful years as a classroom teacher at Buena Vista Elementary School in San Francisco’s Mission District. Drawn back to his childhood home in Key Biscayne in 1998, he shifted into sales and business development roles with publishers in the educational technology field. Over the past 20+ years, Manny has continued working with school districts, representing several leading organizations such as Rosetta Stone, Turnitin, and Learning.com. Manny is a volunteer and activist in his community, a former PTA board member, baseball coach, paddle board club founder, Friends of Cape Florida board member, and more. In 2018, Manny co-founded FillABag; a non-profit beach-cleaning initiative which works with coastal area communities to bring awareness to the impact of marine debris and plastic pollution on the environment.

Ramiro Almeida

Ramiro is a co-founder and CEO of Tram, a distributed marketplace for carbon offsets and carbon credits. Tram is on a mission to reduce carbon emissions by incentivizing people around the world to change their mobility behaviors through digital tokens. He spent the last decade working at the intersection of technology, mobility and social innovation. He is an instructor and scholar at the MIT Media Lab and co-founder of Optimus Ride, an MIT spinoff company that built a world-class engineering team of Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Robotics, and Mechatronics experts to deploy safe, sustainable, and equitable autonomous mobility solutions with electric vehicles. Previously he was a resident at Harvard University, where he was appointed with the prestigious Loeb Fellowship at the Graduate School of Design. He published the Spanish version of Wired magazine, Conectados, back in 1999. His digital publishing platform introduced him to disruptive technology and digital transformation. He published books on anthropology, culture, photography, art, design, gastronomy and urbanism. He was President of Libri Mundi, a prestigious Latin American bookstore chain and publishing group. He was appointed Visiting Professor and Director of The Innovation Lab at Miami Dade College. Since 2019, he is a devoted supporter and volunteer for the Key Biscayne Children’s Business Fair, co-founded by his wife Cristina. Ramiro is the creator and Director of the original documentary series Miami Now, to be released in the Summer.

Rosa de la Cruz

Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz’s collection has been listed by ArtNews in the top 200 collections in the world, the 30,000-square-foot museum in the Design District impresses as a vast repository of challenging art, with galleries teeming with paintings, sculptures, and installations of well known contemporary artists. But in addition to being a showcase of biennale-ready work, the collection is also a testament to a powerful civic vision. They incorporate art to facilitate education and cultural exposure. Rosa and Carlos started scholarship programs in partnership with the Knight Foundation for art education to benefit students from New World School of the Arts to travel abroad to Europe and China, and Design and Architecture Senior High to attend pre-college programs at SVA and Parsons in New York. Thus, they have helped over a thousand students pursue art education, exposing many students who have never been outside of Miami to other cultures. Their museum is open 5 days a week, year round free of charge. And after Covid, they hope to resume their lecture series and summer workshops for grade school students, which are also free.