From Homeowners to Homeless — and Back Again
Taushauna and Avery Burrel were homeowners. A starter home in Michigan, then a second home as their family grew. They had built something solid. Then, in 2021, led by faith, they gave it all away — and followed God to Florida.
What they couldn't have anticipated was what waited for them when they arrived. The apartment they planned to rent had already been leased to someone else. For their first thirty days in Florida, a family of six — with a baby on the way — had nowhere to go, driving across Tampa, learning the hard way that a rental market they'd never had to navigate before had no room for them.
When they finally secured housing, they were wrongfully displaced. A property manager raised rent, applied erroneous HOA fees, and forced the family into a negotiated exit. Legal fees drained their savings. The Burrel family — now seven, their baby just a year old — were homeless.
They lived with a neighbor. They leaned on SNAP benefits. And in the middle of all of it, they paid attention to the one thing they could still control: their health. Back in Michigan they had kept a garden. In Florida, homeless and rebuilding, they started again — growing pineapples and avocados from buckets.
Faith brought them stable housing. And once they were housed, Avery planted. They grew. They ate clean. And out of that season — the loss, the rebuilding, the garden, the pineapple that grew from nothing — Lend to Lead Foundation was born.
Because they knew what it felt like to be without. And they knew that nobody had ever sat down with them and said: here is how you go from surviving to owning. Here is how you grow something from the ground up — literally and figuratively. That is the gap Lend to Lead exists to fill.
Deliverance without development is a recipe for disaster. People look to fill the need — but nobody teaches people how to sustain it.
— Taushauna Burrel, Co-Founder