Touching Miami with Love is grateful for the long-lived partnership with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of Florida (CBF FL). Throughout the years, their support has been a strong foundation that has helped TML grow and impact the communities of West Homestead and Overtown through Inspiration, education, and empowerment.

As an organization now over twenty-five years old, one of our greatest joys is to watch our children mature through adolescence and transition successfully into adulthood. We walk alongside our children by educating, inspiring, and empowering them to reach their potential.

We do this by providing extensive education services to help children strengthen their cognitive abilities and succeed in school. We aid in children’s development of confidence as they successfully navigate social relationships and giving them the social skills to succeed. Their character grows as we Inspire them to make a difference in their community and cultivate their spiritual development. As they enter adolescence, staff aid in selecting youths to serve as junior interns in our children’s program, which allows them to gain needed on-the-job skills and learn to care for others.

Throughout their high school years, we Empower youth to begin to live into their God-given gifts, and we get a chance to inspire them to be all that God has created them to be. Then, as seen in the stories later in this newsletter, we experience the joy of seeing these same young people thrive as adults.

Similarly, Touching Miami with Love has matured and grown over the years, and CBF FL has been with us along the journey since the beginning. As one of the founding partners of TML, it was CBF FL who spearheaded a fundraising campaign and purchased a building for our use in programming. When the first building did not suit our growing work, CBF FL sold it to buy a different building for TML for our community-based work as our Overtown Site.

During the same period and in response to the needs of the under-resourced in southern Miami-Dade County after Hurricane Andrew, CBF FL helped secure land and built a building for Open House Ministries, which later became our TML West Homestead site.

CBF FL support did not stop at just providing the two buildings. They also provided the funds for utilities, building renovations, and maintenance on the two properties. Just like the children and youth we serve, as TML has grown, we have been able to slowly take on more of the responsibility of the operating costs of the two buildings.

Now, as a mature twenty-five-year-old nonprofit, CBF FL is supporting our organization by donating the two properties to us, the Overtown and West Homestead Site. This incredibly generous gift will allow us to continue to impact our communities for years to come. CBF FL continues its commitment to the critical work of TML. The countless children who have grown up in our programs and are now thriving as adults testify to the power of partnership.

Thank you, CBF FL, for the years of support and your generosity in supporting future generations of TML children. – Jason Pittman, Touching Miami with Love CEO