For the third consecutive year, a day-long telethon will raise money for one of Mobile’s oldest nonprofits and its mission to help the city’s underserved populations.
The Dumas Wesley Community Center will host its third annual telethon on a local television station on Wednesday, Aug. 19, from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. Viewers can expect feature stories on the center’s programs, along with live interviews with volunteers and people whose lives have been changed by them.
Regions Bank is this year’s matching sponsor. The Birmingham-based financial corporation will match every donation dollar for dollar, up to $25,000 — a structure that doubles the impact of every gift made before the match cap is reached.
Bruner Binion, president of Regions’ Mobile market, said in a statement that Regions is proud to support Dumas Wesley and other organizations that change lives for the better every day.
“We believe empowered communities create more opportunities for more people,” Binion stated. “The work being done here is about much more than one event — it’s about coming together and investing in the future of our friends and neighbors.”
More Than a Century of Service
Dumas Wesley’s roots stretch back to 1903, when Methodist women in the Mobile area founded the organization to provide childcare to the disadvantaged families working in the cotton mills of Crichton, a mill village in the city’s northern neighborhoods. What began as a settlement-house-style mission has grown into a comprehensive community center serving Mobile and Baldwin counties with more than a dozen programs for the working poor, seniors, youth and families experiencing homelessness.
Over 123 years, the organization’s model has evolved, but its focus remains the same: educate, empower and enrich vulnerable individuals and families through programs that address immediate needs while fostering long-term self-sufficiency. In 2025 alone, the center deployed more than 77,000 direct services, connecting underserved and under-resourced individuals with food, housing, education and support.
Among its best-known programs is the Sybil Smith Family Village, a transitional housing program founded in 1999 to fill a void in housing services for homeless women and children. The 18-unit facility provides up to 24 months of housing for as many as 150 individuals annually, pairing shelter with intensive case management, life skills classes, counseling and financial literacy training. According to the center, 93 percent of residents who exited the program in 2025 transitioned successfully into permanent housing — a rate the organization says is well above the national average.
Building on that model, Dumas Wesley opened the Baldwin Family Village in May 2023, Baldwin County’s first transitional housing program for homeless women and children. The program provides 12 months of housing stability and wrap-around services for up to 100 women and children annually, and it posted a 94 percent success rate among program graduates in 2025, according to the center.
Programs for Every Generation
The telethon will spotlight the breadth of that work. For young people, Dumas Wesley runs after-school achievement programs, summer enrichment camps and mentoring designed to keep underserved students on track in school and headed toward higher education or employment. For homebound seniors, the center’s Senior Activities for Independent Living program delivers meals and daily wellness activities, along with the regular human contact that isolated seniors often lack.
The center also operates emergency services — food, clothing and transportation assistance — for families in crisis, along with job readiness programming designed to help residents of its housing programs build the skills they need to support themselves once they leave. The approach is deliberately integrated: a mother in transitional housing can access childcare, after-school care for her older children, and job training without leaving the organization that houses her.
That continuity, center leaders have said, is what separates Dumas Wesley from shorter-term interventions. Fewer than 2 percent of graduates of its transitional housing programs have returned to homelessness within two years of completion, according to figures the organization has reported — a retention rate it attributes to the length of the program and the depth of the case management behind it.
How to Give
To support the telethon, viewers can call 251-479-0649 between 6 a.m. and 7 p.m. Wednesday. Because of the Regions Bank match, a $100 donation becomes $200 for the center’s programs, up to the $25,000 match cap.
Organizers say the fundraiser is as much about awareness as it is about dollars. The telethon format gives the center’s staff, volunteers and program participants a full day of airtime to explain what the organization does — from the meals delivered to seniors each week to the apartments that give homeless families a stable place to rebuild.
For a nonprofit that has spent more than twelve decades adapting to the needs of the same neighborhoods, the broadcast is a modern take on an old mission. The cotton mills of Crichton are long gone, but the work of educating, empowering and enriching vulnerable families on Mobile’s doorstep continues — with a camera, a phone bank and a matching check from a Birmingham bank helping to carry it forward.