Monty Trainer
At the 2014 Coconut Grove Arts Festival. Monty with Joe Pineda, Assistant Dean of External Affairs at Nova University.
Aerial view of the 2014 Coconut Grove Arts Festival.
if you walked outside that door, there was big trouble coming down.” After his arrival at Saufley, in September 1989 Trainer soon realized he already knew some of the inmates there, including one who had worked as a chef at Monty’s and another who had been a BellSouth employee and had installed the phone system at Monty’s. “Of course, there were some people from Miami who knew me but I didn’t know them,” he said. Many inmates at Saufley had office jobs, but Trainer worked in the prison’s kitchen. “A lot of guys worked in the Navy office. And because of my restaurant background, they put me in charge of salads, he said. “So I was up every morning at 3 o’clock to get the salads going.” Imprisonment “was a big learning experience for me,” he said. “It certainly set me on a different path, more of a community-involved path.” Indeed, Trainer began performing public service after exiting prison in February 1990, and never really stopped. “I had a lot of organizations that wanted me to do my community service working for them,” he said. With 2,500 hours of community service to perform, Trainer started by donating time and equipment to the Miami-Dade Juvenile Detention Center at 3300 NW 27th Avenue. “I had a trailer that was a full-blown kitchen with everything—stoves, grills, exhausts,” he said. “So I donated that to the juvenile detention center. ... We built a restaurant around it in the courtyard. It’s still there.” 76
EXECUTIVE SOUTH FLORIDA
In 1991 Trainer joined the board of directors of the Florida arm of a national organization called Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic, which produced audio recordings of books and other written material for the visually impaired. “After six or seven years I became chairman,” said Trainer. He led a statewide initiative with schools to put audio recordings of teachers’ lectures and homework assignments on portable audio players for blind and dyslexic students. “When I first got there, we didn’t have an outreach program,” he said. Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic got a $25,000 donation from former Miami-Dade School Board member G. Holmes Braddock, Trainer said, “and I matched
it to fund an outreach program. We wound up getting into 305 schools.” He said he performed 10,000 hours of community service—four times more than his 2,500-hour requirement—at Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic, based on work records compiled by the organization, and along the way, “I took it from a local organization to a local statewide organization with 11 outreach centers.” Trainer fondly recalled going to classrooms and watching students with visual handicaps as they played recordings of their teachers’ lessons. “That is probably the most rewarding thing I’ve done, philanthropically speaking,”