Adrienne Arsht, who donated $30 million for the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts in Miami — among other donations, has given a $5 million gift to a think tank in Washington, D.C. to create the Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center at the Atlantic Council.

The new center will officially launch in May.

At a dinner Tuesday night in her honor in Washington D.C., Arsht told guests that she joined the board of the Atlantic Council, in part, to open doors for other women at the male-dominated international think tank, according to a Washington Post blog. The dinner was a thank-you to her from the council (originally focused on North America and Europe) and a way to highlight the new Latin America partners, wrote Roxanne Roberts, in her blog.

Arsht, who now spits her time between homes in Washington, D.C., Miami and New York, said Thursday in a telephone interview that her interest in Latin America began in 1963, when she was 21 and spent a month traveling to Colombia, Peru, Chile, Argentina and Brazil, on a break during her first year of law school.

She said she made the donation to the Atlantic Council to bring greater awareness to Latin America. “It’s time that the rest of the world figured out what people in Miami have kown for a long time: that we must be tied to South America in ever stronger ways,” Arsht said.