Longboat Key Chamber Awards 2026: Full Winners List

I was so honored to be nominated for Leadership Through Engagement at the Longboat Key Chamber of Commerce awards gala on Thursday night. Truly humbling. I run Danielle Gladding & Co. Realty here on the key with my daughter Alison Kanter, and I have been a licensed Florida Realtor since 1981 and a broker since 1987.

The category is about relationship building and creating the kind of connections and opportunities that help a business community thrive, and the nomination came out of the work I do off the clock — LBK100 (Longboat Key 100), which a group of seven of us founded together; the Kiwanis Club of Longboat Key, where I have served as president this year; the State College of Florida Foundation, where I am vice president and where I also studied; and the board of Save Our Seabirds. To be named in that category by this chamber meant a great deal to me.

Congratulations to Bringman Roofing, who took it — Brandy and Dwayne Britton and Brian Timson. A roofing company winning an award for engagement and relationship building on a barrier island two years after two hurricanes is not an accident. That is a business that spent a very hard stretch showing up at people's houses.

Mostly I am just glad to be part of this chamber. It does an enormous amount for this island, and Thursday night was a good reminder of how much.

I have watched this chamber hand out awards through a lot of different years. This one was different, and the difference was not the venue.

From resilience to brilliance

Last October the chamber met at the Lido Beach Resort under a theme built for the moment: recovery. Hurricanes Helene and Milton had come through in 2024, and the marquee category was Business Resilience. It went to Longboat Island Chapel, essentially for getting its doors open again. The President's Award went to Sandra Smith of Secur-All Insurance. Fire Chief Paul Dezzi took Excellence in Municipal Leadership for keeping the town's emergency response running through the worst of it.

This year the chamber moved to The St. Regis Longboat Key Resort and picked a different word. The 2026 theme was "Honoring the Brilliance of Our Community." Ten categories, thirty nominees.

The clearest evidence of what that shift meant is not the ballroom. It is a category that did not exist twelve months ago.

The new category, and who filled it

Small Business of the Year was new to the ballot this year, and its nominees shared something the Business Resilience nominees did not. None of them existed before the storms.

Herb Methodology — Tryla Brown Larson and her sister Crystal Brown's line of plant-based treatments, built on techniques Larson learned from her grandmother, Thelma Brown.
ClearView Windows and Doors — a Longboat showroom on Gulf of Mexico Drive, opened in January, modeled on the company's original Bradenton store.
The Sarasota Style — on St. Armands Circle, one of the newer additions to a strip that also holds institutions like the Columbia Restaurant.

All three launched in January 2026, months after Helene and Milton. Not reopenings. First-time ventures.

That is a different sentence than "we survived." It is "someone decided this was the moment to start something." And the detail I keep coming back to is that ClearView built its inventory specifically around storm resiliency — hurricane-grade windows and doors, stocked on the island, so an owner here does not have to drive off the key to find them. The business did not just open after the storms. It opened because of what the storms taught everybody.

Chamber president and CEO Kim Verreault told the Observer she could not find a better word than "brilliance" for how the island's business owners spent the year. A year ago the chamber was honoring people for enduring. This year it built a category for people who used the aftermath as a starting line.

The 2026 winners

The full slate, across ten categories:

Business Leader of the Year — Michael Saunders, Michael Saunders & Company
Leadership Through Engagement — Brandy and Dwayne Britton, and Brian Timson, Bringman Roofing
Community Impact Award — Humane Society of Sarasota County
Small Business of the Year — Herb Methodology
Entrepreneurial Excellence Award — Dog Perfect
Legacy Family Business Award — Abbott's Family Charters
Professional Services Distinction Award — Sarasota Memorial Hospital Urgent Care at St. Armands
Municipal Leadership Award — Erin Duggan, President and CEO, Visit Sarasota County
Tourism Excellence Award — Columbia Restaurant St. Armands
Cultural Enrichment Award — Save Our Seabirds

And the special recognitions:

Volunteer of the Year — Cameron Debruin
Lifetime Achievement Award — Susan Goldfarb
Excellence in Public Service Award — Town of Longboat Key Public Works Department
Distinguished Leadership Award — Howard Tipton

Congratulations to every one of them. Two land close to home for us. Save Our Seabirds took Cultural Enrichment — the same board I mentioned at the top, and a small organization doing genuinely unglamorous work with injured birds. Watching a room that size stand up for it was the best moment of my night, and I say that as somebody who was sitting there hoping to hear a different name called in a different category. The Humane Society of Sarasota County took Community Impact, and Alison is a former member of that board.

And Herb Methodology winning Small Business of the Year is the whole point of the evening in one result. A business that did not exist eighteen months ago, started by two sisters after the worst year this island has had, walked out with the category the chamber invented this year.

A farewell for Howard Tipton

The Distinguished Leadership Award went to Howard Tipton, who stepped down as Longboat Key's town manager this month after three and a half years. George Landry has taken the role. The Town of Longboat Key Public Works Department took Excellence in Public Service the same night, which felt of a piece with it.

Tipton's tenure covered the 2024 hurricanes, and the people who worked alongside him consistently point to the same thing: the town's response held. Infrastructure projects that had been sitting for years moved. For a job where the public mostly notices you when something has gone wrong, that is a good record to leave on.

I was glad the chamber marked it. Town managers do not usually get a room on their way out.

The room itself

The St. Regis seats up to 400, and the chamber used the space. General manager Winfred van Workum and his team hosted it, and executive chef Alberto Taboada treated the gala as a culinary event rather than a banquet-hall formality — his team told ABC7 they were aiming for a high-end restaurant experience inside a banquet setting, which is a higher bar than most awards dinners set.

Pianist Timmy Phelan performed. The Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe took the stage before dinner. The silent auction included a piano, which fit the evening.

What the ballot was actually measuring

Thirty nominees across ten categories, and the spread is the point. A hospital urgent care center on St. Armands. An insurance restoration specialist. A Spanish restaurant that has been on the Circle for decades. A roofing company. A commissioner. A real estate broker.

That is not a ballot measuring one kind of business. It is measuring who showed up for this island this year, in whatever form showing up took.

It would be easy to read this year's gala as a bigger room and a sunnier slogan. The nominee list says otherwise. Last year's top honors went to people who kept doors from closing. This year introduced a whole award for people who opened doors that had not existed before — and the businesses that filled it built their inventory around the same storms that could have talked them out of starting at all.

That is not recovery language anymore. That is an island deciding that resilience is simply how business gets done here now, whichever word the chamber puts on the invitation.

Around the island

Living on Longboat Key — the island this chamber serves, end to end
St. Armands and Lido Key — where the Columbia Restaurant and Sarasota Memorial's urgent care both took awards this year
Buying in Bay Isles, Longboat Key — the gated community where I live
Every Sarasota and Longboat Key neighborhood we cover
Walking Lower Main Street and Palm Avenue in downtown Sarasota — the other side of the city, and the other kind of downtown
Search every Longboat Key and Sarasota home, live from our local MLS

Disclosure: Nick Gladding, Danielle Gladding's husband, was sworn in as District 3 Town Commissioner for the Town of Longboat Key in March 2026. This post describes awards presented to the Town of Longboat Key's outgoing town manager and to the Town's Public Works Department.

Disclosure: Danielle Gladding serves on the board of Save Our Seabirds, which received the Cultural Enrichment Award at this event. Alison Kanter is a former board member of the Humane Society of Sarasota County, which received the Community Impact Award.

Danielle Gladding was one of three nominees for Leadership Through Engagement at the 2026 Longboat Key Chamber of Commerce awards gala. She has been a licensed Florida Realtor since 1981 and a broker since 1987, and lives in Queens Harbour inside Bay Isles on Longboat Key. She runs Danielle Gladding & Co. Realty with her daughter Alison Kanter, who was born and raised in Sarasota. Both are at DanielleGladdingCo.com, reachable through the firm's contact page, and on (941) 539-8535.