MIAMI — At the Key Clubhouse center, adults with mental illness get help finding work from an employment specialist that the nonprofit hires with grant dollars from Miami-Dade County.

But that help may be on the chopping block as Mayor Daniella Levine Cava prepares to cut most of the county’s funding for nonprofits — including the $61,800 Key Clubhouse of South Florida received this year.

“It’s not much,” Amy McClellan, president of Key Clubhouse, which has centers in Kendall and Northside, said at a recent budget town hall with Levine Cava. “But for us, it’s a lot.”

Charities take one of the largest hits in Levine Cava’s spending plan for 2026, which wipes out about $40 million in grant money for nonprofits, including arts groups, social-services organizations and food pantries. That includes about $465,000 that was included this year for Kristi House, a nonprofit that manages child-abuse cases.

“What am I supposed to tell the 354 children Kristi House will have to turn away this year because the county decided they weren’t worth fighting for?” CEO Amanda Altman asked Levine Cava at a town hall Tuesday night at the Arcola Lakes Senior Center in West Little River.

The charity cuts are part of Levine Cava’s plan to close a $402 million deficit between projected revenues and the cost of services that are funded mostly by property taxes in the county’s $3.4 billion budget for general government expenses like police, transit, parks and social services.

While the mayor has proposed charging transit riders an extra 50 cents per trip and having the Parks Department save money by cutting the grass less, the loss of charity grants has brought Levine Cava the most pushback at town halls she’s convened ahead of the County Commission’s final votes on the 2026 budget, scheduled for September.

Advocates for the nonprofits argue that as cuts to federal funding for social services are being made under President Donald Trump, the community needs Miami-Dade’s dollars more than ever.

“Now is the time to strengthen our safety net, not unravel it,” said Marcella Cruz, a manager at Jewish Community Services, which is on track to lose about $430,000 in county funding for its social-services operation, which includes delivering meals to people in need.

Cruz spoke at a July 31 town hall at downtown Miami’s Main Library, which saw Levine Cava praise the work of Jewish Community Services and other charities that sent people to the event to push back against her budget.

“I have spent my life in social services,” said Levine Cava, a former social worker. “I care deeply and recognize the hardship and that this is a very, very difficult time for this.”

Levine Cava’s overall budget proposal for Miami-Dade tops $12.9 billion, which includes spending on Miami International Airport, PortMiami, and the county’s sewage system and garbage-collection operations. The friction comes from services that rely on property taxes and sales taxes — expenses that account for roughly 25 cents of every dollar Miami-Dade spends each year.

Those funds are under strain this year from a combination of new county expenses and reduced revenue growth. That includes Florida ending state and local sales taxes on commercial leases and more than $100 million in property-tax revenue diverted to the newly independent office of the Tax Collector.

County spending decisions are behind the gap, too. Levine Cava and Miami-Dade commissioners lowered the countywide property-tax rate by 1% in both 2022 and 2023, cuts costing Miami-Dade’s budget more than $45 million this year. Pay raises in various union deals added $150 million to the budget. Under Levine Cava, Miami-Dade also agreed to cover $46 million in cash expenses and overtime for police and paramedics that organizers plan to hire for the 2026 World Cup games at Hard Rock Stadium.

Miami-Dade also no longer benefits from hundreds of millions in dollars of federal COVID and stimulus dollars that flowed into county coffers during the pandemic. Miami-Dade used some of that federal money to boost the amounts of charity grants the county issues each year.

While Miami-Dade routinely funds nonprofits, the dollars aren’t competitive. Instead, the same nonprofits mostly get funded each year. Past efforts to bid out the dollars and allow new nonprofits to compete stalled or fizzled out over the last decade as the county’s elected officials balked at the backlash from cutting off public funding to some well-known charities.

Levine Cava’s 2026 budget removes the nonprofit-grant section entirely, leaving nonprofits to push her and commissioners to put the money back into the spending plan before the 2026 budget year begins on Oct. 1.

“I’m very sad tonight that nonprofit organizations, who are the backbone of this community, have to come here and beg to stay in business,” Thema Campbell, who runs a Miami after-school program and other youth activities through the charity she leads, Girl Power Rocks, told the mayor at the Main Library town hall.

Commissioners will make final budget votes in September after public hearings on Sept. 4 and Sept. 18.

The Levine Cava budget proposal not only cuts about $30 million in grant funding for nonprofits providing services, a category known as community-based organizations or CBOs. It also saves another $2 million eliminating about a dozen positions in the grants office that oversees the money.

That would mean cuts in tax dollars that pay to provide food for low-income residents, services for people with disabilities and staff for after-school programs across Miami-Dade.

“People have come to me and told me the reason that they’re still alive — and their kids are still able to go to school without being hungry — is because of Farm Share,” said Fritz Mortimer, a Miami Gardens resident who helps connect low-income residents with the Farm Share food bank, which says it is set to lose more than $750,000 in Levine Cava’s budget.

Along with the CBO cuts, the Levine Cava budget strips about $12 million in grants for the arts, while preserving $11 million in arts grant funding that’s paid out of hotel taxes.

Ending most charity grants is part of a broader rollback of social services by Levine Cava, the first social worker elected as Miami-Dade’s mayor. The private social-services agency that Levine Cava founded in the 1990s and ran before entering politics, Catalyst Miami, loses about $260,000 under the mayor’s budget plan.

After the Kristi House CEO asked Levine Cava how Miami-Dade could cut off funds for child-abuse cases, Levine Cava, who was once a lawyer in Miami-Dade’s child-welfare system, noted that she helped found Kristi House decades ago.

“You can imagine how painful this is to me,” Levine Cava said. “It’s really devastating.”

A Miami-Dade commissioner, Kionne McGhee, has already floated a plan to cancel the World Cup subsidy in an effort to have more money available to restore charity funding in the 2026 budget. Levine Cava said on Local 10’s “This Week in South Florida” on Sunday that she expects commissioners may consider revoking the $10.5 million World Cup installment that the board approved in May.

Other potential charity dollars could be freed up by the Tax Collector’s Office. This week, the Tax Collector’s Office released a 2026 budget that predicts it will rebate the county about $26 million in property taxes that otherwise would have been spent by the newly independent agency. That could give Miami-Dade an additional $26 million to plug into its budget revenues for 2026 — although it only represents about 6% of the $402 million deficit Levine Cava said she had to close with cuts and new fees.

For the Key Clubhouse, the county’s roughly $62,000 grant makes up about 7% of the nonprofit’s $850,000 yearly budget, according to public tax records. McClellan, the volunteer president of the nonprofit’s board, told Levine Cava at the July 31 town hall that loss of the grant endangers a program that steers people struggling with mental illness toward employment and away from trouble.

The program “is extremely effective in helping to keep people out of the hospital, crisis and jail,” she said.

At the town halls, Levine Cava said it’s possible Miami-Dade will find more dollars to reduce the charity cuts but that nonprofits shouldn’t expect to see the level of grant money they received in recent years.

“This has been hard,” she told an audience of more than 300 people at Arcola Lakes. “We’re going to work together as best we can to get through this.”

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