Leadership Monroe County class raises $25,000 at Marathon festival

A day of music, pony rides and more than 40 nonprofit booths in Marathon ended with a fundraising payoff that reached far beyond the festival grounds. Leadership Monroe County’s Class XXXIII, known as Triple Threat, used its Keys Together Spring Festival at Oceanfront Park to raise $25,000 for Keys AHEC, then finished its project with a total that climbed to $29,280.49.

The Saturday, May 2 event ran from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. and mixed family entertainment with a practical civic purpose. Retail vendors and food trucks lined the park alongside nonprofit booths, while the Key West Police Department brought its horses and partners from the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office and Florida Highway Patrol joined the public-facing display. The result was a free community gathering that doubled as the capstone to a yearlong Leadership Monroe County class that ran from October 2025 through May 2026.

Leadership Monroe County describes itself as an educational, nonpartisan, nonprofit community organization, and Class XXXIII’s curriculum showed how that model is supposed to work in practice. Participants spent the year moving through intensive single- and multi-day sessions across Monroe County, studying tourism, the environment, education, government, healthcare, the military, judiciary, law enforcement, the arts and media. The festival was the class’s public demonstration that those lessons can be turned into something residents can see, use and measure.

The money mattered because Keys AHEC is not a ceremonial beneficiary. It provides no-cost medical care and low-cost dental care for school-age children in the Florida Keys, operating in 10 public schools through a Mobile Dental Unit and a fixed-site clinic. The organization has provided community-based health education and medical services since 1990, and its work is tied to school health efforts that reach families across Monroe County, including Key West and Tavernier.

In a county split by long drives, water and separate municipal lines, a project like this has an unusually local return. The festival gave families a free day in Marathon, but the real payoff was the money headed to children’s clinics and school-based care, the kind of service that can change whether a child gets seen early or waits until a problem becomes an emergency.