Simone Lutgert Gomez: A Life Rooted in Giving

Quick Bio

Detail	Information
Full Name	Simone Chassin Lutgert (born Simone Chassin; also known as Simone Lutgert Gomez)
Nationality	American
Primary Occupation	Philanthropist, community leader, former healthcare professional and sales executive
Based In	Naples, Florida
Known For	Charitable work in Southwest Florida; co-founding Women of Means program; leadership at Golisano Children’s Museum of Naples (C’MON); Naples Winter Wine Festival involvement
First Husband	Barry Gomez (deceased 2001)
Second Husband	Scott Lutgert (married November 1, 2003)
Children	Lana Gomez (artist; married to comedian Sebastian Maniscalco), and two other children — Heather Dockweiler and Rodney Weiss
Grandchildren	Serafina Simone Maniscalco and Caruso Jack Maniscalco
Notable Awards	2008 Outstanding Philanthropist Award; 2013 Ken Venturi Award
Fundraising Impact	Raised over $30 million for the Golisano Children’s Museum of Naples

Who She Is — And Why Her Story Matters

There’s a particular kind of influential person you never really hear about until you start paying close attention. They’re not on the cover of celebrity magazines. They don’t have a verified social media presence with millions of followers. But zoom into the social and civic fabric of a wealthy, aspirational community like Naples, Florida — and suddenly, their fingerprints are everywhere.

Simone Lutgert Gomez is exactly that kind of person.

She’s a philanthropist, a former nurse and sales executive, a mother, a grandmother, and a woman who rebuilt her life more than once after serious personal loss. She moved to Naples and quietly became one of the city’s most consequential fundraisers and nonprofit advocates. She didn’t inherit a famous last name — she earned her place in a community that rewards not just wealth but genuine, sustained commitment to making things better for other people’s children.

Most of the people who search for her name today are actually looking for information about her famous son-in-law, comedian Sebastian Maniscalco, or her daughter, celebrated visual artist Lana Gomez. But once you dig into who Simone actually is, you realize the story runs much deeper than family connections to fame.

See also “Miguel Félix Murillo: A Life Lived in the Shadows“

Early Life and the Making of Simone Chassin

Simone was born Simone Chassin — a name that would eventually evolve through marriage, geography, and reinvention into the compound identity of Simone Lutgert Gomez. Details about her precise birthdate and early childhood are not publicly documented in depth, which is not unusual for someone who has spent most of her adult life giving rather than self-promoting.

What the available record suggests is that she grew up in the United States with a fairly conventional upbringing, the kind that gave her strong values around family and community without necessarily pointing her toward any particular path. She pursued higher education — sources point to the University of Tennessee as the institution she attended after high school — where she began developing the intellectual foundation that would carry her through several different professional phases.

She wasn’t handed a blueprint for life as a philanthropist. That came later, shaped by experience, loss, and the environment she found herself drawn toward over decades. The Simone of her twenties was a working woman building a career and a family, not a figure on the gala circuit of one of Florida’s wealthiest cities.

A Career Built on Care and Commerce

Before Simone became recognizable in the charitable community of Southwest Florida, she worked — seriously, professionally, and across two quite different fields.

Her first career was in healthcare, where she worked as a nurse. Nursing is not a casual choice. It requires both technical skill and an emotional disposition oriented toward other people’s suffering. That experience — the long hours, the up-close encounters with human vulnerability, the constant need to stay calm and focused in difficult moments — clearly left its mark on how she would later approach charitable work. When you’ve worked as a nurse, the abstract concept of “helping people” takes on a very concrete form.

She then transitioned into a different kind of work entirely: sales and marketing. For roughly 27 years — a span that ran from her professional prime through to her retirement in 1996 — she built a career in that field, most of it based in Memphis, Tennessee, where she raised her family. It was a long stint in a city that gave her community roots and, likely, the organizational and communication skills that would later prove invaluable when she was trying to persuade wealthy Florida donors to open their checkbooks for children’s causes.

The combination of those two careers — one rooted in compassion, one in persuasion — turns out to be the perfect training ground for high-level philanthropy. You must have a sincere concern for individuals. And you need to be able to sell a vision.

Marriage, Family, and the Weight of Loss

Her first marriage was to Barry Gomez, and together they built a family in Memphis. They had three children: Lana, who would go on to become a nationally recognized painter; Heather, now Heather Dockweiler; and Rodney Weiss. By all accounts, the household was warm and encouraging — the kind of environment where children were pushed to explore their interests and find their own sense of self.

Simone and Barry eventually divorced. Lana was around nine years old at the time, still growing up in that close family environment, though it was restructured. Barry Gomez remained part of the picture until his death in 2001 — a loss that clearly marked an inflection point in Simone’s life.

Widowhood and the aftermath of divorce, arriving in close succession, would test anyone. But Simone had already made the transition from Memphis to Naples, Florida, and was building a new chapter. On November 1, 2003, she married Scott Lutgert — and that single event sent her life in an entirely new direction.

Entering the Lutgert World

The Lutgert family name means something very specific in Southwest Florida. Raymond L. Lutgert was the patriarch who, back in the 1960s, began transforming Naples from a pleasant Gulf Coast backwater into a destination for affluent Americans. His development of Park Shore — now one of the most desirable waterfront neighborhoods in all of Florida — established a family legacy tied permanently to the growth and identity of the region.

Scott Lutgert, Raymond’s son, stepped into the role of chairman of The Lutgert Companies and continued that tradition. When Simone married Scott, she didn’t just gain a husband. She was woven into one of Southwest Florida’s most visible business families — a family whose name appears on college buildings, luxury developments, charitable foundations, and decades of social history.

The Lutgert name at that point was on the Lutgert College of Business at Florida Gulf Coast University. Their developments had helped define the look and feel of Naples as a luxury destination. People in the region recognized that name the way people in other cities might recognize a founding industrial family.

For someone who had spent most of her life outside the spotlight — a working nurse, a sales executive, a Memphis mother — this was a significant shift in social environment. But Simone didn’t simply absorb the Lutgert identity. She brought her own agenda, her own energy, and her own networks to it. She didn’t become known in Naples as merely Scott’s wife. She became known as Simone Lutgert — a figure in her own right.

The Philanthropic Life: Building Naples from the Inside Out

Once she settled in Naples, Simone poured herself into the city’s charitable infrastructure with a focus that would define the next two decades of her life.

Her longest and most celebrated commitment was to the Golisano Children’s Museum of Naples, known locally as C’MON. This is Southwest Florida’s first and only children’s museum dedicated entirely to experiential, play-based learning — a place where kids can explore a recreation of the Everglades, climb a two-story banyan tree, splash around in water installations, and step into imaginary roles as chefs, veterinarians, and artists. It is, by any measure, a beloved institution.

Simone didn’t just attend the C’MON galas and sign the occasional check. She served seven years as a board member and, more significantly, served as the Capital Campaign Chairman — the person responsible for raising the tens of millions of dollars needed to actually build and sustain the museum. Under her leadership, that campaign raised more than $30 million. That’s an extraordinary number for any local nonprofit, and it speaks to both her tenacity and her network. After completing that service, she was named an Emeritus Board Member — a title awarded not as a formality but as recognition of genuinely transformational contribution.

She has also been a consistent presence at the Naples Winter Wine Festival, one of the most celebrated charitable events in the country’s luxury circuit. The festival raises money for the Naples Children & Education Foundation (NCEF), which channels funding toward programs supporting children in Collier County, particularly those from low-income families. The event regularly generates tens of millions of dollars — in 2017 alone, the year Simone and Scott co-chaired, the auction raised over $15 million. Simone has shown up for this event year after year, serving in leadership roles and, as recently as 2025, sitting on the auction lot committee for the festival’s 25th anniversary.

Her connection to NCEF goes beyond the annual festival. She has served as a trustee of the organization and as its Immediate Past Chair — making her one of the people most responsible for the day-to-day direction of an institution whose entire purpose is educational equity for children who might otherwise fall through the cracks of a wealthy county that doesn’t always remember its most vulnerable residents.

Then there’s the work that doesn’t get as much attention but matters just as much. Simone co-founded the Women of Means outreach program at the Shelter for Abused Women and Children in Naples — an initiative built around the recognition that domestic violence affects women across every income level, not just those without resources. Creating a program specifically designed to reach women who might otherwise feel that the shelter system isn’t for people like them was a genuinely thoughtful and necessary piece of community design.

That work, combined with board service at institutions including the Philharmonic Center for the Arts in Naples, adds up to a philanthropic career that spans decades and genuinely touches the lives of children, abuse survivors, arts audiences, and families across the region.

Awards and Recognition

The community eventually found formal ways to say thank you.

In 2008, Simone received the Outstanding Philanthropist award — a recognition given to individuals who have demonstrated sustained, meaningful, high-impact charitable work rather than simply making large donations. The distinction matters: being named an outstanding philanthropist suggests engagement, leadership, and long-term commitment, not just generosity.

Five years later, in 2013, she received the Ken Venturi Award. Venturi was a beloved professional golfer and broadcaster who had deep ties to the Naples area, and the award named in his honor recognizes individuals whose service to the community reflects his spirit of generosity and civic commitment.

These are not minor local accolades. They reflect a genuine consensus, built over years of observation, that Simone Lutgert had become one of the most consistently impactful contributors to the Naples community’s civic and charitable life.

Her stepdaughter, Kristin Lutgert Cartwright, has spoken publicly about being inspired by Simone’s example in her own community work — a meaningful kind of legacy, the kind that multiplies itself through the people who observe it up close.

The Hardships Behind the Public Face

Every life of genuine achievement contains chapters that never make it into the awards speeches. For Simone, there are at least two obvious ones.

The first is the end of her first marriage and, not long after, the death of her first husband Barry Gomez in 2001. Whatever the dynamics of their relationship and its dissolution, the loss of a co-parent and former partner is never simple. She was a mother of three, navigating both grief and the practical realities of raising a family without a partner, in a period before she had fully settled into the new life she was building in Naples.

The second is the nature of invisibility. For a woman who has contributed so much to a community, Simone Lutgert Gomez remains largely unknown outside of Southwest Florida. Her story is searched online mostly by people who discover her name while researching her daughter or son-in-law. That’s a particular kind of quiet — not a hardship exactly, but a reminder that the most meaningful community work rarely generates the kind of fame that sustains public narratives. For someone who clearly prefers to be measured by what she builds rather than how famous she becomes, that may be entirely acceptable. But it does mean that her contributions have been chronically underreported in the broader cultural conversation.

Family Connections and the Maniscalco Chapter

If there’s one thing that has brought Simone’s name to wider attention in recent years, it’s the fame of her son-in-law, Sebastian Maniscalco. The Italian-American comedian from Chicago — known for his high-energy, family-centric standup style and his role as host on Celebrity Family Feud — married Lana Gomez in August 2013.

Simone and Lana appear to have a close, genuinely warm relationship. The two have been spotted together at art events — including a high-profile 2023 collectors’ weekend at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Simone and Scott also attended the 2023 Chicago premiere of Sebastian’s semi-autobiographical film “About My Father,” standing alongside Lana for a family moment that bridged the worlds of Naples real estate philanthropy and Hollywood comedy.

Lana and Sebastian have two children: a daughter named Serafina Simone Maniscalco — notably, the first name honors Sebastian’s late mother, and the middle name honors Simone herself — and a son named Caruso Jack Maniscalco. The naming of Serafina Simone is a quiet but unmistakable acknowledgment of how much Lana’s mother has meant to her life.

As a grandmother, Simone is reported to be actively present and deeply involved in the lives of her grandchildren. That, combined with the fact that her other daughter Heather Dockweiler also appears in the social world of Naples (she and husband Jamie have appeared at C’MON fundraising events alongside Simone and Scott), suggests a tightly knit family that has weathered its losses and chosen closeness over distance.

Money and Net Worth: The Honest Picture

Simone Lutgert Gomez is not a figure whose personal finances are publicly documented, and that’s worth being straightforward about.

Her husband Scott Lutgert is the chairman of The Lutgert Companies, a private, multi-division real estate development firm with a multi-decade history of premium projects across Southwest Florida and beyond. The company is private, which means financial details are not publicly disclosed. What is clear is that the family operates at the level of Naples philanthropy where raising $15 million at a single charity auction is part of the annual calendar — that context says a great deal about the financial environment without requiring anyone to publish a balance sheet.

Simone herself has no documented personal business empire. Her work has been in service roles — nursing, sales, nonprofit leadership, community organizing. Various online sources have estimated her personal net worth at around $1 million, but these are loose approximations with no verified sourcing. What can be said with confidence is that she lives comfortably in Naples, moves in circles that involve significant wealth, and has channeled substantial financial energy toward causes she believes in — whether that’s her own resources, the resources of people she’s persuaded to give, or the combined generosity she’s mobilized across multiple organizations.

The number that actually reflects her financial impact is the $30 million she raised for C’MON’s capital campaign. Whatever her personal net worth, that figure represents a meaningful contribution to a community institution that will serve children for generations.

What She’s Doing Now

As of 2025 and into 2026, Simone Lutgert Gomez remains active in Naples civic life. She was listed as a member of the auction lot committee for the Naples Winter Wine Festival’s 25th anniversary in January 2025 — quoted in local media about the excitement of that milestone year. She and Scott continue to appear at C’MON events and other charitable gatherings around Naples.

The Gulfshore Life profile of Kristin Lutgert Cartwright, published in June 2026, describes Simone as a “driving force” behind both the Golisano Children’s Museum and the Naples Winter Wine Festival — the kind of present-tense language that suggests she’s still showing up, still engaged, still the person other people in her orbit look to when they want to understand what genuine community commitment looks like.

Her lifestyle is anchored in Naples, surrounded by her husband, her extended family, her charity work, and a social world built over more than two decades of consistent presence. She travels to see her grandchildren. She attends family milestones. She continues to serve on boards and committees. By most measures, she’s doing exactly what she’s done for years — just perhaps a little more quietly as the next generation starts to step forward.

Final Words

There’s a version of Simone Lutgert Gomez’s life that sounds straightforward on paper: woman marries into influential family, does charity work, wins awards. But that framing misses what’s actually interesting about her.

She came to her philanthropic identity through genuine professional experience — as a nurse, as a businesswoman, as a mother who raised three children largely on her own after loss. She arrived in Naples not as a lifelong fixture of the wealthy elite but as someone who built her place there over time through sustained, serious work. And the particular things she chose to champion — children’s education, a play-based museum that serves kids of all backgrounds, a domestic violence outreach program designed for women who wouldn’t normally seek that kind of help — suggest a consistent moral compass rather than simply strategic giving.

What makes her distinctive is the combination of things that rarely appear in the same person: healthcare training that grounds her in human need, business acumen that lets her move money and mobilize people, family warmth that has clearly shaped a daughter who named her granddaughter after her, and a preference for results over recognition.

The $30 million capital campaign is real. The museum stands. The children visit it. The 2008 philanthropist award and the 2013 Ken Venturi Award weren’t given out of sentiment. They were earned.

Simone Lutgert Gomez’s life is a study in what sustained, unglamorous, serious charitable commitment actually looks like over time. Not a single headline-grabbing gift, but decade after decade of showing up, doing the work, and letting the institutions built on that effort speak for themselves.

See also “Miguel Félix Murillo: A Life Lived in the Shadows“

FAQs

1. Who is Simone Lutgert Gomez?

She is a community activist and philanthropist from the United States who lives in Naples, Florida. Through her work with the Naples Children & Education Foundation, she—a former nurse and lifelong sales executive—became one of Southwest Florida’s most well-known philanthropists. the Golisano Children’s Museum of Naples, and the Naples Winter Wine Festival, among other organizations.

2. What was her name before she married?

She was born Simone Chassin. She became Simone Gomez through her first marriage to Barry Gomez, and later took the name Simone Chassin Lutgert (also commonly written Simone Lutgert Gomez) after marrying Scott Lutgert in 2003.

3. Who is Simone Lutgert Gomez’s daughter?

Her daughter is Lana Gomez, a nationally recognized contemporary visual artist known for her bold, colorful paintings and mixed-media work. Lana has worked with prominent interior designers, exhibited widely, and is married to comedian Sebastian Maniscalco.

4. Is she related to Sebastian Maniscalco?

Yes — she is his mother-in-law. Sebastian Maniscalco married Lana Gomez in August 2013, making Simone his wife’s mother.

5. How did she raise $30 million for a children’s museum?

Simone served as Capital Campaign Chairman for the Golisano Children’s Museum of Naples (C’MON) over a seven-year period on the board. In that role, she led the major fundraising effort that financed the museum’s establishment and ongoing operations, working with donors across Naples’s philanthropic community.

6. What is the Naples Winter Wine Festival, and what was her role there?

The Naples Winter Wine Festival is one of the country’s top charitable auction events, benefiting the Naples Children & Education Foundation (NCEF), which supports education and development programs for children in Collier County. Simone has been a long-standing participant and leader, co-chairing the 2017 festival with Scott alongside other couples. As recently as 2025, she served on the auction lot committee for the 25th anniversary event.

7. What was her career before becoming a philanthropist?

She worked as a nurse early in her professional life, and then spent approximately 27 years in sales and marketing before retiring in 1996. Much of that career was based in Memphis, Tennessee, where she raised her family.

8. Did Simone Lutgert Gomez win any awards for her charity work?

Yes. She received the Outstanding Philanthropist Award in 2008 and the Ken Venturi Award in 2013, both for her sustained and impactful contributions to the Naples community.

9. Who is Scott Lutgert, and what is his family’s significance in Naples?

Scott Lutgert is the chairman of The Lutgert Companies, a multi-division private real estate development firm founded by his father, Raymond L. Lutgert. The Lutgert family played a major role in transforming Naples into a premium luxury destination through large-scale residential and mixed-use development beginning in the 1960s. Buildings bearing the family name include Florida Gulf Coast University’s Lutgert College of Business.

10. What is the Women of Means program that Simone co-founded?

She co-founded the outreach program Women of Means at the Naples Shelter for Abused Women & Children. It was designed to reach women from higher-income backgrounds who are survivors of domestic violence — a group that sometimes goes underserved because mainstream assumptions about who seeks shelter don’t always include affluent women.

11. Does Simone Lutgert Gomez have grandchildren?

Yes. Through her daughter Lana and son-in-law Sebastian Maniscalco, she has two grandchildren: a daughter named Serafina Simone Maniscalco (born May 12, 2017) — whose middle name honors Simone herself — and a son named Caruso Jack Maniscalco.

12. What is Simone Lutgert Gomez’s estimated net worth?

No publicly confirmed figure exists. Various online sources loosely estimate her personal net worth at around $1 million, but these are unverified. Her husband’s company, The Lutgert Companies, is private, so no financial disclosures are publicly available. What is documented is her role in raising more than $30 million for charitable causes in Southwest Florida over her philanthropic career.

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