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My name is Angel Pittman. I'm assistant director at Touching My With Love. We
are an urban nonprofit in Overtown. We serve at-risk children and youth in
kindergarten through 12th grade. We offer after-school programming for children
K through 8th. We do serve Overtown exclusively and so we pick up from seven
area schools and bring them here to our center. We have a driver and two buses.
Walking around Overtown is not always the safest choice for our students so we
do provide transportation from the school to our center and then again home
at night and that's an essential part of making sure that we remain a safe haven
for the kids in Overtown. We are a community-based organization that is
tasked to really to see change in our community to see positive things happen
here through working with children and youth really giving them the
opportunities to become all that God's created them to be and to reach their
potential. My wife and I have been working in nonprofit urban work for
nearly 20 years. I love working with my wife. It is one of the funnest parts of
my job to be able to work together every day. We love it. It's great. When my
husband and I met at Baylor University we sort of centered around this idea of
serving together and being a part of that crazy beautiful life of living in
the inner city is what we've done now for almost 20 years. We think it's
important to to live in the place that we work and so there's both practical
reasons and some some spiritual reasons but some of the practical reasons are
really to experience what the folks that we work with experience. Growing up in
Overtown was definitely an interesting experience for me. I've witnessed a lot
of things that a child shouldn't have been exposed to. I mean in this community
TML is a cornerstone. I mean we are the safe haven in the area. It's a place of
learning. It's a place of caring and they feel that love once they enter the
doors here. Living in Overtown is bad because of the shooting, the killing and
the drugs that they do. The things I like about coming to TML is like the
activities we do. The dances are cooking and most of all helping me with my
homework. I like the fact that they let us just be ourselves. I mean without TML I
wouldn't be able to do as much homework as I'm able to do because to be honest I
have a really sucky computer at home so to come to TML I get to do my
work and I'm able to make the grade and I really appreciate TML for that. Kids
come to us from referrals. Their parents refer them. They maybe got a job and they
need some care for them. We have other kids, middle school and high school who
are referred maybe by a teacher for behavior in the classroom or failing
grades. By school counselors we do a lot of educational enrichment. We have a
certified teacher on staff trying to get our kids up to grade level for reading
and so we have a really long waiting list as we try to reach out to those kids.
TML has been like a safe haven you can say for students to come do their
homework, be able to share what they're going through. Here you can be yourself
and no one will judge you. I moved here to Miami when I was about six years old.
My first house here in Miami was about two blocks away from TML. Since working at
TML it kind of made me want to go to school to work with kids maybe like a
social worker or something like that. Working with kids that are already like
on that path of going the wrong path and I wanted to like just be able to
counsel them and see where they're going and try to talk to them and tell them my
life stories and try to just persuade them to make the right the right choice
and stuff like that. This is a long journey. We own a home in
Overtown for a reason. We don't expect this work is going to be overnight and
we know that we're all on a journey and we hope that we push our kids on their
journey to excellence and we're here to walk with them as long as that journey
takes them.
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