MISSION and VISION
Breakaway Outreach is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization founded in 1995.
Our MISSION: To empower young people with Gospel transformation and make disciples of Jesus Christ through nurturing communities of faith, hope, and love.
With a vision of helping kids “breakaway” from a troubled past, founders Jimmy and Cindy Larche began the organization primarily as an outreach to at-risk teens in South Florida juvenile detention centers. Over the years, and standing on the shoulders of many others (including departed loved ones), this movement has grown into an international missions network serving from the margins of Chattanooga to the ends of the earth. Our staple programs in east Tennessee offer resiliency-building and faith-shaping opportunities for children affected by trauma and hardship. Across the globe, our missions network is serving an array of young people through sports ministries, justice ministries, and youth leadership development.
Our VISION: To see every young person BREAKAWAY from everything and anything that stands in opposition to their God-given purpose, their fullest redemption in Christ, their resilience and dignity as human beings, and their potential to excel in productive livelihoods that offer positive contributions back to society.
Our STORY
In September of 1987, chaplain Alan Woody visited the Marion Regional Juvenile Detention Center in Ocala, Florida, for his regular weekly program with the incarcerated teenagers there. After he showed a Gospel Film about the Prodigal Son taken from one of Jesus’ parables in Luke 15, one of the youth inmates gave his life to Christ. His name was Jimmy Larche.
Jimmy had a troubled past. His trauma-affected childhood included abandonment, fatherlessness, abuse, violence, and family dysfunction/addiction. As a teenager, he twice ran away from home and hitchhiked across the country. He spent time in foster homes, homeless shelters, and had a stint in a psychiatric hospital in Washington D.C. He survived a near fatal suicide attempt when he was 15-years old. But everything changed the day he met Reverend Woody in that juvenile center, who became a life-long mentor and a restored figure of fatherhood for Jimmy.
Jimmy says his life "was given a new and living hope," as all of his despair turned into a story of redemption. That testimony is detailed more vividly in his book 13-Foot Coffins. While in college, Jimmy took up biblical studies and continued to visit juvenile centers and youth offender prisons to share his testimony and to give hope to inmates, pointing them to a “way out” of the cycle of delinquency. He became living proof that you don’t have to end up a statistic in the system. He started to mentor others and to disciple them in the way he had been mentored. "Just having one person in your corner can make all the difference in the world," Jimmy often tells young people today.
In 1995, Jimmy met his future wife, Cindy, and together they began facilitating weekly chaplaincy services at the Jonathan Dickinson S.T.O.P. Camp in Hobe Sound, Florida—a juvenile justice aftercare program for youth offenders. Cindy baked cookies for the youths while Jimmy led Bible studies. They brought in teams to offer sports ministries and special events that included music artists and life skills training workshops. The programs were eventually expanded to other regional juvenile facilities weekly. Jimmy became an ordained minister, and Breakaway Outreach was born with the vision of “helping kids breakaway from a troubled past.”
By 1999, Breakaway Outreach had expanded juvenile justice ministries to dozens of facilities all across the state of Florida and began offering mentoring initiatives for youths on probation and re-entry solutions for juvenile inmates being released back into their communities. A scholarship fund was started to send children affected by familial incarceration and other at-risk kids to summer camps. The success of the organization was being recognized by the Department of Juvenile Justice, which led to an invitation to start facilitating training workshops in other states to replicate these programs elsewhere, thus a national network of like-minded ministries was formed.
Over the years, Breakaway has continued to serve youth involved with the juvenile justice system nationally and internationally through chaplaincy services, training workshops, resource development, and various sports ministries.
In 2007, the first Breakaway summer camp was launched to serve the special needs of at-risk and underserved children. It provides creative, fun, and resilience-shaping adventures for kids affected by familial incarceration, poverty, parental substance addiction, abuse, domestic violence, divorce, trauma, and other adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). The camp ministry works closely with the child welfare and juvenile justice system, prison agencies, foster care, school districts, and families to provide solutions that help young people overcome negative stigmas and build foundations to achieve a better future. Campers are afforded scholarships to attend camp made possible by community partners. Camp also serves as a bridge to year-round mentoring relationships and KidVenturez programs for Breakaway kids.
In 2010, international partnerships began to develop for what is now the Breakaway Global Missions Network. Having served in 13+ countries and four continents over the years, this growing network of cross-cultural partnerships is engaging youth/children through sports ministries and adventure camps, developing next generation youth workers, and cultivating outreach to the special needs of vulnerable young people (orphans, migrants, refugees, and street kids).
One of the greatest joys is when we get to see young people who have been impacted by Breakaway, grasp their God-given potential and grow up and mature into servant-leaders. We've seen former juvenile inmates grow up and lead Bible studies in juvenile centers. We've seen children in our programs who were impacted by parental incarceration grow up and become the most amazing camp staff members who serve Breakaway efforts in reaching the next generation. We've had disadvantaged kids mentored through our local ministry end up getting afforded the scholarship opportunity to go and serve overseas on cross-cultural mission trips. All of these are glorious pictures of Jesus breaking cycles of despondency, and creating new cycles of restoring hope in others.
We are intentional about developing next generation youth workers and multiplying disciple-making movements across the street, across the states, and across the seas.
What do Breakaway ministries look like today? That’s like asking what the weather or landscape is like in South Florida, East Tennessee, the Caribbean, Europe, Africa, or East Asia. It all depends on where you look across the topography of our ever-expanding missions network. Breakaway Outreach employs a wide range of ministries in diverse mission fields, yet most areas of ministry will fall into one of three operational categories: youth development, sports ministries, and justice/compassion outreach.