The Shoulder, a Gulf Coast nonprofit that has spent more than four decades helping people recover from substance abuse and addiction, will hold a fundraiser banquet next month in Daphne. The event is set for Thursday, Aug. 13, at the Daphne Civic Center, with doors opening at 5:30 p.m. and dinner served starting at 6 p.m.
Guests will hear from keynote speaker Anna David, a nationally bestselling author, TEDx speaker, podcast host and addiction recovery advocate. The invitation list is expected to draw supporters from across Baldwin County and Mobile, the two communities where The Shoulder’s work has made its deepest mark over the years.
An Evening Built to Raise Support
In addition to David’s remarks, the evening will include a dinner catered by Naman’s Catering, a silent auction and a book signing with David. The format is familiar to Gulf Coast fundraising circles: a seated dinner, a hall full of silent-auction tables, and a keynote that ties the evening’s purpose to a story the audience can carry home.
David’s presence adds a book signing to the night’s agenda, and her background bridges the worlds of entertainment publishing and recovery advocacy. As the author of bestselling books and the host of a podcast centered on addiction and recovery, she has built a public platform around a message that resonates with families affected by substance abuse — a large and often quiet constituency on the Gulf Coast as elsewhere.
Organizers say proceeds from the banquet will support The Shoulder’s recovery programs, which have served men and women along the Gulf Coast for more than 40 years. Individual tickets are $70, and tables and sponsorship packages are also available for those looking to support the organization at a higher level. For businesses and families that have watched the nonprofit’s work up close, the sponsorship tiers offer a way to put a name on the evening while underwriting its cost.
Four Decades of Recovery Work
The Shoulder has operated along the Gulf Coast for more than four decades, a longevity that places it among the region’s most established treatment organizations. Substance abuse treatment in the nonprofit world depends on persistence — recovery is measured in months and years, not days — and an organization that has served men and women for forty-plus years has treated generations of families, sometimes the same families across two generations.
Recovery programs of the kind The Shoulder provides typically combine structured treatment, counseling and peer support, guiding clients from the crisis of addiction toward stable, sober lives. The work is expensive to deliver and, for many clients, difficult to afford — which is why fundraisers like the August banquet matter to the program’s budget. Proceeds from the night go directly into the programs that serve men and women whose insurance, savings or family resources fall short of the cost of care.
Baldwin County’s role as host reflects the organization’s footprint. Daphne, sitting on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay, anchors a corridor of communities — Fairhope, Daphne, Spanish Fort — within easy reach of both sides of the bay. The Daphne Civic Center, the city’s principal event venue, has hosted countless charity galas and community gatherings, and its size accommodates the kind of banquet with silent auction and seated dinner that established nonprofits favor.
The Keynote: Anna David
David’s resume spans publishing, broadcasting and public speaking. She built her career as a journalist and author in the entertainment world before turning her experience with addiction and recovery into the focus of her work, writing bestselling books that draw on her own story and hosting a podcast that has become a fixture of the recovery community. Her TEDx talk extended that message to a broader audience, and her appearances at recovery events across the country have made her a familiar name in advocacy circles.
For an organization like The Shoulder, a keynote speaker with a national profile serves two purposes. She draws ticket buyers who might otherwise skip a benefit dinner, and she frames the evening’s mission in terms the audience can feel: addiction as a disease that touches every community, recovery as a real and reachable outcome. The book signing that follows her remarks gives attendees a personal artifact of the night — and another channel through which her story circulates.
Recovery speakers occupy a distinctive place on the nonprofit circuit. Their credibility comes from lived experience, and audiences at recovery fundraisers typically include people in recovery themselves, along with the parents, spouses, siblings and friends who have watched the disease from the other side. The keynote hour at such an event is part inspiration, part recognition — a public acknowledgment of struggles most families keep private.
The Auction, the Caterer, the Details
The silent auction is the engine room of an evening like this. Donated items — art, gift packages, getaways, services from local businesses — are displayed for bidding through the cocktail and dinner hours, with proceeds flowing straight to the organization. Successful auctions rely on the generosity of Baldwin County and Mobile merchants, whose contributions also serve as a kind of endorsement of the nonprofit’s work.
Naman’s Catering, which will serve the dinner, is a name long associated with Gulf Coast event catering, and a seated dinner at 6 p.m. sets the evening’s rhythm: guests arrive when doors open at 5:30, bid through the silent auction, eat, hear the keynote and finish the night with the book signing. Individual tickets at $70 position the banquet as accessible to the organization’s broad base of supporters, while tables and sponsorship packages give businesses and major donors a larger role.
Why the Money Matters
Nonprofit treatment providers live in a financial gap. The cost of structured recovery programs — staff, facilities, counseling, administration — exceeds what many clients can pay, and public funding covers only part of the difference. Annual fundraisers fill that gap, and the proceeds from the Aug. 13 banquet will go where the organization’s supporters expect them: into the programs that have served men and women along the Gulf Coast for more than 40 years.
The need has not shrunk with time. Communities across Alabama continue to grapple with the toll of substance abuse, and the families that seek help at organizations like The Shoulder represent every income level and background. Longevity in this field is its own credential — four decades of service means alumni of the program now in middle age, staff with decades of experience, and a reputation that draws new clients by word of mouth.
For attendees, the evening offers dinner, an auction, a nationally known speaker and a direct connection to that legacy. For The Shoulder, it offers the resources to keep the doors open for the next generation of Gulf Coast residents seeking recovery — the same mission the organization has carried since its founding more than 40 years ago.
The Setting: Daphne’s Civic Center
The Daphne Civic Center has long been Baldwin County’s go-to venue for events that need room — charity galas, business expos, graduations and community celebrations. Its location along U.S. 98 in Daphne puts it within a short drive of the Eastern Shore’s communities and, across the bay, of Mobile itself, which is why organizations drawing supporters from both counties routinely book it. On a Thursday evening in August, the hall will be dressed with silent-auction tables and set for dinner, the standard configuration for a benefit banquet of this scale.
The August date places the event in the stretch of summer when Baldwin County’s nonprofit calendar accelerates toward the fall season. School-year commitments have not yet resumed, vacation schedules are winding down, and supporters are available for an evening out — practical considerations that fundraising planners weigh when they set a date years of experience have validated.
Substance Abuse and the Gulf Coast
The Shoulder’s mission addresses a problem that has touched every community on the Gulf Coast. Addiction cuts across lines of income, race and neighborhood, and the region’s treatment providers have long emphasized that recovery is possible with structure, support and time. Organizations like The Shoulder occupy a crucial place in that landscape, offering programs for men and women whose recovery journey might otherwise have nowhere to go.
Four decades of operation also mirrors the modern history of addiction treatment itself. The field has evolved enormously since the organization’s founding — in public understanding, in clinical practice, in the way communities talk about the disease — and a nonprofit that has endured through those decades has adapted with them, expanding and refining its programs while keeping its core mission intact.
Events like the Aug. 13 banquet serve a second, less tangible function alongside fundraising: they make the community’s conversation about addiction a little more public. A civic center full of supporters, a speaker telling her story from a podium, a silent auction where local businesses put their names beside a recovery program — each is a small act of normalization for a subject families often keep silent. For the people The Shoulder serves, that visibility matters as much as the money raised.
How Supporters Can Take Part
The pathway into the evening is simple: individual tickets are $70, with tables and sponsorship packages available for supporters who want to do more. Attendees can expect doors to open at 5:30 p.m., dinner from Naman’s Catering at 6, the silent auction running through the evening, David’s keynote remarks and the book signing to follow. Proceeds support the recovery programs that have been the organization’s work for more than 40 years.
For the region’s philanthropic community, the banquet is one of the established markers of the late-summer calendar — a night when Baldwin County and Mobile supporters gather around a cause that has quietly shaped thousands of lives along the Gulf Coast, one recovered man and woman at a time.