Boys & Girls Clubs of South Alabama Launch ‘Our City, Our Future’ Telethon June 16

The Boys & Girls Clubs of South Alabama is asking the community to pick up the phone — or text — for its youth this month. The nonprofit’s “Our City, Our Future” telethon launches at 6 a.m. Thursday, June 16, with live fundraising continuing through 7 p.m., a full day of on-air appeals aimed at turning community generosity into program funding for the region’s kids.

Donations can also be made online right now through the club’s donation page, for anyone who wants to give before the phones light up. On telethon day, donors have two direct lines: calling 1-833-998-2582 (CLUB) or texting BGCSA to 44-321. Every dollar raised goes toward the organization’s work across South Alabama, where the club serves young people ages 6 to 18 with programming that spans academics, health and nutrition, on-site counseling, college and career guidance, and social skills.

The telethon format is a throwback with a purpose: a concentrated, community-wide push that makes giving an event rather than an errand. For a nonprofit whose services stretch across a region, a single day of visibility — with clubs, kids and staff in front of the cameras — accomplishes what months of quiet appeals cannot.

What the money supports

The Boys & Girls Clubs of South Alabama operates on a mission the organization states plainly: doing “whatever it takes to build great futures” for the young people it serves. That mission breaks into three pillars — academic success, healthy lifestyles and good citizenship — and the telethon’s proceeds fund the daily machinery behind all three.

Academically, the clubs provide homework help, tutoring and structured enrichment during the hours when young people are most at risk of falling behind or drifting into trouble: the after-school window and the long summer stretch. The June timing of the telethon is no accident. Summer is when the clubs’ role expands, filling the gap left by school with programming that keeps kids fed, active and engaged while parents work.

Health and nutrition programming addresses a harder reality — that for many of the children the clubs serve, a meal at the club is a dependable part of the day. On-site counseling extends that care to mental and emotional health, putting trained support inside the club environment where kids already feel safe. College and career guidance reaches the older end of the club’s age range, helping teenagers map paths to graduation, higher education and first jobs. And the social skills strand — the least glamorous and perhaps the most consequential — teaches the everyday competencies of cooperation, communication and responsibility that carry a young person through every other setting in life.

Who the clubs serve

The organization’s reach spans South Alabama, serving youth ages 6 to 18 — an age band that runs from first-graders to high school seniors, and that requires the clubs to operate essentially three different programs at once: childcare-adjacent enrichment for the youngest members, middle-school engagement for the turbulent middle years, and teen programming aimed at graduation and what comes after.

The Boys & Girls Club model is built on accessibility. Clubs are deliberately placed in the neighborhoods where need is greatest, membership costs are kept minimal, and the formula pairs safe physical spaces with trained mentors — youth development professionals who show up consistently, learn members’ names and hold them to expectations. Decades of national research on the model have linked club participation to better school attendance, lower dropout rates and healthier choices, which is precisely the evidence base a telethon audience hears when it asks where its money goes.

Why the telethon matters this year

Nonprofits serving young people have spent recent years absorbing one disruption after another — closed facilities, remote programming, staffing shortages and rising costs. A fundraising day like “Our City, Our Future” is both a budgetary necessity and a statement: the clubs are open, the kids are back, and the community’s support converts directly into reopened doors and expanded services.

The live format also gives the organization a way to show its work. Telethons put club members and alumni in front of the camera, and the stories that carry a fundraising day are rarely the statistics — they are the specific accounts of young people who found a second home at a club, a mentor who refused to give up on them, or a path to college that began with help on a homework table.

How to give

The mechanics of giving are deliberately simple. On June 16, donors can call 1-833-998-2582 (CLUB) — a toll-free line staffed through the broadcast — or text BGCSA to 44-321 from any mobile phone, a method that has become the fastest-growing channel for charitable giving because it takes less than a minute. Anyone who prefers to skip the phones entirely can give now through the club’s donation page online, which remains open before, during and after the telethon itself.

The telethon runs from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m., and donations made throughout the day count toward the total the organization will announce at the close of the broadcast. Corporate donors and individual givers alike typically time their gifts to the broadcast hour, adding to the day’s momentum — a dynamic the telethon format is designed to create, since visible progress encourages the next caller to pick up the phone.

The club’s place in South Alabama

The Boys & Girls Clubs of South Alabama is part of a national movement with more than a century of history, but its work is local through and through. The clubs operate in communities across the region — including Mobile and the surrounding municipalities — serving a population of young people whose needs have only grown as family budgets have tightened. For working parents, the club is often the difference between reliable after-school care and an unsupervised gap in the day; for the kids themselves, it is a place where a meal, a mentor and a plan for the future come in the same building.

Community support has always been the model’s engine. Clubs are funded not by tuition but by donations, grants and partnerships, which is why a day like June 16 carries so much weight in the annual budget. Every pledge made during the broadcast translates into programming hours, staff salaries, meals and supplies for the coming year.

The organization’s ask, in the end, is the one printed in its own mission: whatever it takes to build great futures. On June 16, from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m., South Alabama will have its chance to answer — by phone at 1-833-998-2582, by text with BGCSA to 44-321, or online through the club’s donation page at any time.

The hours that decide a childhood

Child development researchers have long identified the hours between the last school bell and the evening as the most consequential — and the most dangerous — of a young person’s day. It is in that window that unsupervised children and teenagers are most likely to encounter trouble, experiment with risky behavior or simply drift, and it is that window the clubs occupy by design. A child who walks into a club at 3 p.m. and walks out at 6 has spent the riskiest hours of the day in a structured, supervised, relationship-rich environment, and the cumulative effect of that routine over years is the quiet mechanism behind the model’s track record.

The same logic governs the summer. Out-of-school months strip away the school day’s structure entirely, and communities without summer programming watch achievement gaps widen and youth food insecurity rise. The clubs’ summer operations — and the funds the telethon raises to sustain them — exist to hold that line, keeping members fed, active and connected to the adults who know them.

A movement with deep local roots

The Boys & Girls Club movement traces its history to the 1860s, when a group of women in Hartford, Connecticut organized what became the first club for boys who roamed the city’s streets. The idea spread across the country on a simple observation: that young people rise or fall to the expectations of the adults around them, and that a dedicated place with caring staff could change the trajectory of a life. The organization that grew from that idea now serves millions of young people nationwide, and its alumni include leaders in every field.

The South Alabama clubs carry that history into the neighborhoods of the Gulf Coast, adapted to the needs of the communities they serve. What has not changed is the core transaction the telethon asks the public to fund: safe places, caring mentors and programming that works, delivered to the young people who need it most. One hundred fifty years of evidence says the investment pays for itself many times over — in graduations, in careers, in the adults these children become.

On June 16, the phones will be waiting.