provides hope
A portion from every Sea Love Swim lesson goes to Swim For Africa. A charity that assists families in Kenya, Africa by providing school fee's in order to try and break the cycle of poverty and provide education to support quality of life.
How Learning to Swim
and changes lives
In 2009, Sea Love Swim's founder read in her local news paper about a woman who swam across her home lake of Lake Tahoe (22 miles) and something began to stir in her heart. Having grown up on the south side of the lake and never having heard of someone swimming across it before she decided that she would attempt the swim too. At the time, she had no idea what God was planning for her life or how He would use her personal swimming fitness goal to deepen her faith and begin her journey into starting Sea Love Swim.
God's faithfulness revealed, the girls made a commitment to continue to support the children of Athi River Kenya and founded Swim For Africa in 2011..
Today Swim For Africa celebrates one University graduate, two trade school graduates, two students currently in University, and 12 students at various levels grades K-12. Beyond sponsorship for school, Mercy Ministry has also been seeded for when excess funds are available. This includes basic food supplies for families in the village experiencing hardship that will last them 8-12 weeks.
For ten years and with the Lord always providing, Swim For Africa usually
held various family and friend fundraisers to raise awareness and support
for the kids but just as a need continues to grow, so do the idea's for fundraising need to grow.
Having moved from California to Tennessee in the fall of 2011 (just after the 22 mile swim in 2010) Sea Love Swim's founder had no intention of beginning a swimming program. She loves to sing and came to Nashville for the Music Industry however she paid bills by teaching swimming and playing music. Looking back, it seems like the Lord was up to something...
After having served as the swim lesson coordinator for Nashville's Jewish Community Center and a Lead Instructor with a local fitness club as well as the Nashville Dolphins, a local non-profit empowering swimmers with special needs; she saw a need for patient and student-paced swim instruction. Though many more parts to the story had to align, Sea Love Swim was born in 2021 desiring to implement a water-safety focused curriculum that would celebrate individual strengths of swimmers by focusing on teaching toward these strengths to accomplish water safety techniques like rolling into a back-float or falling in and turning around to grab onto a wall.
With the support of many Sea Love Swim families, Sea Love Swim celebrates its 3rd season this year with a swim lessons training program for instructors to compliment it's private swim lessons program focused on water safety techniques, stroke introduction, refinement and improvement.
Sea Love Swim's motto is all ages, all abilities because the curriculum equips swim instructors to adapt to the learning style and physical ability of a swimmer. The best part is seeing God's provision for the kids of Athi River as it is Sea Love Swim's business model to tithe into the Swim For Africa charity. It is the founder's hope that as Sea Love Swim grows, so will the work and provision continue in Kenya.
If you are a believer, please pray for the kids and widows of Athi River. If you would like to adopt and sponsor a child's education directly, please contact TJ at sealoveswim@gmail.com
During her swim training and with a community that rallied behind her she began searching for a charity to use the swim to raise awareness for a cause. That Christmas, her sister returned home from the missions field in Kenya, having made a significant relationship with a woman named Gentrix who had a heart for the orphaned and the widowed. Together, Sea Love Swim's founder and her 2 sisters raised funds for this Kenyan community. Upon completing the swim in August of 2010, the girls raised enough funds to provide education scholarships for every preschool age child where they would be guaranteed at least one meal a day.
