2025
Impact Report
In 2025, Pana MIA Club grew in many ways. There is much to learn and celebrate, but first we must measure our commitment to our vision for a better South Florida through our efforts and actions.
We Believe: The future is local
We wouldn't have the momentum that we do without the support of our community, and as we step into the future of Pana MIA, we're excited to co-create with and for the people of South Florida. We do this for our community, and it is that same community that makes this possible.
In hard numbers, 2025 saw Pana MIA all over the map. Pana MIA sponsored 17 events with a total attendance of over 5,000 people spread across the tri-county area, and appeared at dozens more. We collaborated with dozens of local initiatives like the Center for Black Innovation, the Miami DSA, and the Subtropic Film Festival.
Pana Events Attendance
View as table
| Month | Miami | Broward | Palm Beach |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jan | 20 | — | — |
| Feb | — | — | — |
| Mar | 60 | — | — |
| Apr | 2,250 | — | — |
| May | 115 | — | — |
| Jun | 50 | — | — |
| Jul | 145 | 40 | 80 |
| Aug | 750 | — | — |
| Sep | 30 | 40 | — |
| Oct | — | — | 160 |
| Nov | 100 | — | 80 |
| Dec | 400 | 1,000 | — |
| Total | 5,320 | ||
We produced six events, ranging from connection mixers to film challenges and art activations. Our events targeted a wide demographic, and we reached people across South Florida, from artists and working professionals to students.
Events per County
- Miami70%
- Palm Beach17%
- Broward13%
Collaborative Event Spotlight:
Subtropic Film Fest x Pana Mia
In August 2025, we debuted a collaboration with Palm Beach-based film festival Subtropic Film Fest with supporting collaborative partners such as Braveman Studios, Shapeshifting Studios and BREZ.
Our goal? To invite local creatives interested in filmmaking to work together for the chance to produce a film that would be submitted in that year's Subtropic Film Fest in October. We presented a film prompt (Love Letters to Community), and encouraged creatives in the space to collaborate with each other to create film submissions. After hosting a follow up event in Palm Beach's Garden District, we held a screening for over a dozen original films created from this incubator.
It was astounding to see the variety of submissions: from stop motion, to documentaries, dramas, comedies, even a music video. In the end, Planting Bodies, an incredible documentary film, was chosen to be featured at the Film Festival and was awarded accolades for their submission. Not only did this collaboration (as all our event collaborations intend to do) create an opportunity for connection, but it created new opportunities for local creatives to develop and produce art.
To make much of this possible, we grew our volunteer base through the launch of our Community Building Task Force program. With the generous support of grants and sponsorships from local businesses and organizations, we were able to provide so much more to our events, programs and community.
Special thanks to grants and partnerships from Tripping Animals Brewery, BREZ, and the Youth Action Fund (YAF).
Our Culture Work
We focused on art and creation for much of the year:
This year marked the start of our rebrand, with an update on our visuals and the introduction of the Pana MIA symbol, representative of the essence of what Pana MIA is all about. We also published an in-house zine defining our signature use of Pana in the context of the work of Pana MIA.
Collaborative Event Spotlight:
Heatwave Visions Journal
- Our first incubated project, founded by local queer historian James Ávila.
- A mixed media journal featuring local South Florida based arts: poetry, photography, nonfiction, visual art, comic strips.
- 2 volumes published so far: Swamps of time and Subtropic Gothic.
- Through collaborative posts and features in the newsletter both projects have helped each other with exposure. We worked with a local venue Thorn to throw a release party for the first edition.
Event Series Spotlight:
How to Make a Pana Zine! An Activation Series
In April 2025, we launched an event series that asked a very important question to every participant: How Do You Find Connection in South Florida?
We find that this is one of the most pressing questions for many South Floridians that often have trouble finding community. The goal was to create a collective zine by asking participating panas to design half a page with their thoughts, answers, and feelings on the matter using collage materials and their imagination.
The result, eight zine pop-ups later, was over 100 pages from locals and transplants all over South Florida that had something to say on the subject. Now, in 2026, we are releasing a compilation from selected zine contributors in a curated magazine named "How to Find Connection in South Florida" under our new publishing initiative Pana Press Ink.
We believe that art is a transformative tool that has the ability to bring down walls by connecting people through their creativity, this is why it is and will continue to be an integral part of the events we produce.
Our original mission is in place, continuing to add organizations, businesses, and individuals to our local directory, with 727 subscribers to date. Building on the impact that our directory had locally, we saw an opportunity for growth to not just promote but to meaningfully engage the South Florida community as a whole. This led to the first-ever hyper-local social connection platform, Pana Social.
The goal is to take the good that social media can do (bringing people together, platforming communication and conversation), and strip what didn't serve the ultimate goal- getting people off the platform and into actually connecting in real life.
Before a hard launch, we already have 200+ subscribers and boast a litany of features, including conversation boards, video conferencing, a home for articles, and more. It's a new corner of the internet, owned by community and for community.
- Join conversations
- Discover Events
- Build local connections
“Pana MIA is paving the way for the world we want to build-- one liberated from extractive systems and instead towards one where communities pour into themselves-- showing up for each other emotionally, creatively, financially,”
“They [can] build communities that feel like instant family, ones where you can envision lifelong connection to people, organizations, and the work of being a villager.”
Conclusion
Looking back at 2025, we have so much pride in what we were able to accomplish in the face of many internal and external challenges we encountered as organizers, dreamers and human beings living in South Florida in this modern era. Still, with our feet firmly grounded in the soil we've built our communities on, and our eyes fixed on the vision of what we dream South Florida can be, we continue to create the path everyday alongside our growing partners, collaborators and beloved Panas. Here is to an expansive 2026!
