Community Foundation of Sarasota County Welcomes New Board Members, Appoints Officers for 2020-2021

Pictured Above (from left to right): John Humphrey, Mercedes Soler, Carla Plush Smith, Dr. Janet Taylor, and Judge Charles E. Williams.

SARASOTA, FL – The Community Foundation of Sarasota County has appointed new members and elected officers to its 2020-2021 Board of Directors, which governs the organization.

Nelle S. Miller, co-founder of BizTank, will continue serving as Chair, with Daniel DeLeo, a partner with Shumaker, Loop & Kendrick, as Vice Chair. Andrew Stultz, president and owner of Atlas Building Company of Florida, was appointed Treasurer, and William M. Seider, partner with Williams Parker Harrison Dietz & Getzen, will continue serving as Secretary.

Joining the Board for three-year terms are John Humphrey, Mercedes Soler, Carla Plush Smith, Dr. Janet Taylor, and Judge Charles E. Williams.

"The Board of Trustees and I are honored to welcome our five new members,” says Nelle S. Miller, Board Chair of the Community Foundation. “Each one brings a depth of experience, accomplishment, and connection that will help us and our community move forward in our work to make this a place of opportunity, equity, hope, and justice for all people."

Humphrey retired from Roper Technologies, a company that designs and develops software and engineered products and solutions, after serving as Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer (2011-2017) and as Vice President and Chief Financial Officer (2006-2011). Prior to joining Roper, he spent 12 years in a variety of financial leadership positions with Honeywell International. Humphrey is also a member of the board of directors of several public companies and he holds a B.S. in Industrial Engineering from Purdue University and an M.B.A. from the University of Michigan.

Soler currently leads Solmart Media, the radio and digital media company that reaches over 300,000 Latinx community members across southwest Florida, with her husband, Tomás Martínez. Prior to founding Solmart Media in 2014, Soler was a strategic media coach for leaders, executives, and diplomats as a subcontractor for the US State Department. She worked as a news anchor for CNN Español from 2010-2016 and earlier spent two decades as an international investigative correspondent with Univision. A renowned bilingual keynote speaker and five-time Emmy, Peabody, and GLAAD Media award-winning media personality and broadcast journalist, Soler has served as a columnist for El Nuevo Herald and taught journalism in Spanish through an affiliation with the University of Miami.

Plush Smith is a Sarasota native with more than 25 years of experience as a Certified Public Accountant. She holds a Bachelor's in Accounting from the University of Florida and a Master’s in Counseling from the University of South Florida. While she primarily focuses on providing tax services to individuals, fiduciaries, and business owners, Plush Smith also holds designations as a financial planner (both as a Certified Financial Planner and Personal Financial Specialist). She is an active member of the Sarasota community, having served many local nonprofit organizations as an officer and director. Recently, she served as Commodore of the Field Club and Chairman of the Plymouth Harbor.

Dr. Taylor is a Sarasota-based community psychiatrist working with individuals who are involved in criminal justice and are afflicted by mental illness. After attending the University of Louisville for undergraduate and medical school, Dr. Taylor completed her psychiatric residency at New York Medical College-Westchester Medical Center and also received a Master’s of Public Health in Health Promotion/Disease Prevention from Columbia University. Dr. Taylor is a frequently invited speaker on subjects of minority health, self-care, stress management, parenting and work-life balance, and is a contributor to CBS’s “This Morning,” NBC’s “The Today Show,” and ABC’s “Good Morning America” on issues of motherhood, parenting, and mental health. Dr. Taylor is also regularly featured on CNN and MSNBC.

Judge Williams is an alumni of Howard University in Washington D.C and earned his law degree from the University of Florida. Upon graduation from law school, he worked as both a prosecutor and a defense attorney in the Sarasota-Manatee area and is a Circuit Court Judge in the 12th Judicial Circuit, which includes Sarasota, Manatee, and DeSoto counties. Committed to diversity and inclusion, he was a founding member of the Sarasota County Bar Association’s Diversity and Inclusion Committee and works closely with the Booker High School Law Academy in hopes of inspiring future generations of lawyers and leaders who understand and respect the role the law has played in shaping our society.

Continuing their duties as board members are C.J. Fishman, Paul Hudson, Donna Koffman, Rodney Linford, Kelvin Lumpkin, Jeffrey McCurdy, Matthew Sauer, Drayton Saunders, Felice Schulaner, Marilyn Thompson, Lynn Wentworth, and Mary Lou Winnick.

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About the Community Foundation of Sarasota County: The Community Foundation of Sarasota County is a public charity founded in 1979 by the Southwest Florida Estate Planning Council as a resource for caring individuals and the causes they support, enabling them to make a charitable impact on the community. With assets of $418 million in more than 1,500 charitable funds, the Community Foundation awarded grants and scholarships totaling $21.5 million dollars last year in the areas of education, the arts, health and human services, civic engagement, animal welfare and the environment. Since its founding, the Community Foundation has been able to grant more than $274 million to area nonprofit organizations to our community thanks to the generosity of charitable individuals, families, and businesses. For more information, visit www.CFSarasota.org or call (941) 955-3000.