In Key Biscayne, the want to give back often begins at home.
For Malena Legarre, the co-founder of Hermanos de la Calle, public service was always a family affair. As a mother of eight, Legarre and her husband, Narciso Muñoz, started the organization to show their children how they could find opportunities to initiate real change without going too far.
“We wanted to show them that, although there’s real need overseas, it’s possible and important to service your own community,” she said.
The project began with a few local families volunteering together for the sake of helping and eventually grew into a larger network to support unhoused members of the Miami community.
Even as the initiative expanded, however, the couple’s modus operandi has stayed the same.
It was always a family project,” Legarre explains. “The idea was that maybe they were ‘losing’ time with their mom, but for something that was worth it.”
As one can imagine, balancing eight children with a growing nonprofit was not easy.
“It was hard at times,” she said. “The way to not feel guilty is understanding that it’s a project with purpose.”
Having been built for them and by them, the project cannot get more personal for the Muñoz-Legarre family.
When asked how her as a mother extended into her philanthropy, she answered “I ended up with many more children.” And considering the passion and love that Hermanos de la Calle puts into their efforts, this close connection is no surprise.
For Legarre, caring for others, whether that’s at home or in her community, all comes from the same place.
“When you have a big family, your life is for others,” Legarre said.
For Amarylli Fridegotto, founder of the Key Biscayne Piano Festival and Key Biscayne Piano Academy, philanthropy starts with the same instincts as motherhood: to nurture, guide and intentionally shape people.
As a mother of two, Fridegotto has spent decades mentoring not only her own children, but also generations of students who have grown up under her guidance. Many begin at a young age and stay with her through their formative years, developing not only as musicians, but as individuals as well.
This same vision extends beyond the doors of her studio into the broader community. After moving to Key Biscayne, she felt the absence of consistent and widespread access to high-level classical music on the island. This pushed her to create the Key Biscayne Piano Festival in 2016, an initiative built to bring world-class artistry to a local, accessible setting.
“I wanted to contribute something of lasting value,” she said. “Not just a concert, but a cultural presence.”
To balance her academy, the festival, and family life, Fridegotto feels she has needed both discipline and a strong clarity of purpose.
“I’ve found that making art available to people, and building community around it, is one of the most special ways to give back,” Fridegotto said.
Together, both Legarre and Fridegotto balance a great deal at all times, showing the core building blocks of philanthropy: showing up constantly, consistently, and intentionally for a community.
Legarre and Fridegotto are just two of the dozens, maybe even hundreds, of women, and many are moms, involved in the art of giving back, making the Island better.
Melissa White is known for her role on behalf of philanthropists and residents who care on Key Biscayne, but the role she values most is being a mother. As Executive Director of the Key Biscayne Community Foundation, one of only three community foundations in Miami-Dade County, White is faced with balancing the demands of leading a very active nonprofit organization, with raising three children with her husband, Taylor.
A Key Biscayne native, she is now raising her family in the same close-knit community that shaped her, instilling in her children the same values of service and connection that guide her work. Her roots on the island run deep: her grandfather helped to finance the Mackle Company development of the island; the developers behind the iconic Mackle Homes which helped drive Key Biscayne’s early growth.
On the challenges of balancing motherhood with her professional career, White said, “Sometimes, I feel like I don’t balance it at all,” she admitted candidly. Still, she highlights the support system around her–from her husband to her family to Bruna to the community–as what makes it possible for her to do it all. “I just feel grateful,” she said. “I don’t know how mothers without the support I have do it.”
Many other moms are involved in giving back, some still raising families on the island, like Barbara Diaz and Laura Teran Zapata, two of the co-founders, along with Chiara Bergonzi and Milagros Ponce de Leon, of the organization It Takes a Village, which has completely changed Key Biscayne’s disposition toward inclusion in what Diaz calls, An Epidemic of Love. In a recent OpEd piece, Diaz and Teran wrote, “witnessing the transformation of Key Biscayne from what it was about six years ago to what it is today feels like watching night turn into day.
From kitchen tables to concert halls, from grassroots outreach to organized foundations, these women show that philanthropy is not separate from motherhood, it often grows directly from it.
Whether raising eight children, mentoring young musicians or leading community-wide initiatives, their work is rooted in the same instinct: to care, to guide, and to build something better for the next generation. On Key Biscayne, that spirit of giving starts at home, but its impact reaches far beyond it.