Mobile Area Special Olympics will share in the proceeds from a full day of car washes next week, as Tidal Wave Auto Spa stages the 18th annual edition of its company-wide Charity Day on Friday, Sept. 18.
According to a news release from event organizers, the company will donate 100% of car wash proceeds from participating locations that day to local charities and organizations. In Mobile, the beneficiary arrangement is split: Tidal Wave Auto Spa’s location at 949 Schillinger Road will direct 50% of its Sept. 18 proceeds and cash donations to Mobile Area Special Olympics, with the remaining 50% going to the company’s corporate nonprofit partners.
The fundraiser runs from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Sept. 18 — a full 12-hour window. “Every wash purchased at the Schillinger Road location that day will help support local Special Olympic athletes,” the release said.
How the Split Works
The structure of Charity Day pairs a national corporate giving program with a locally chosen beneficiary, and the Mobile arrangement shows both halves at once.
Half of what the Schillinger Road location takes in on Sept. 18, plus cash donations collected there, goes to Mobile Area Special Olympics. The other half is directed to two organizations the release identifies as Tidal Wave Auto Spa’s corporate nonprofit partners: Annandale Village, which gives “progressive life assistance to adults with developmental disabilities”, and The Joseph Sams School, which offers “educational and therapeutic support for children and young adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities.”
Those three beneficiaries share an obvious thread. All of them work with people who have intellectual or developmental disabilities, across different stages of life — school-age children and young adults in one case, adults in another, and athletes of all ages in the third. A customer buying a wash on Schillinger Road is contributing to the same broad cause regardless of which side of the 50-50 split their dollars land on.
The release does not name the other participating Tidal Wave locations or their local beneficiaries, and it does not state a fundraising goal, a prior-year total, or the price of a wash. Customers should not assume figures that have not been published.
What Mobile Area Special Olympics Does
The release describes the local program in its own words.
“Mobile Area Special Olympics provides year-round sports training and athletic competition for children and adults with intellectual disabilities throughout the Mobile area,” the release said. “The program creates opportunities for athletes to build physical fitness, confidence, friendships and inclusion through sport.”
Two phrases in that description carry most of the weight. The first is “year-round.” Special Olympics programming is not organized around a single annual event; local and area programs run training seasons across multiple sports through the calendar, which means recurring costs for facilities, equipment, transportation and competition entry rather than one concentrated expense.
The second is “children and adults.” Unlike school athletics, which release participants at graduation, Special Olympics programs serve athletes across the lifespan. For an adult with an intellectual disability, an area program may be the only organized, ongoing athletic option available, and in many cases the only regular structured social activity outside of work or a day program.
Special Olympics as a Movement
Special Olympics grew out of a backyard day camp organized by Eunice Kennedy Shriver in the early 1960s and became a formal international movement with the first International Special Olympics Games, held in Chicago in 1968. It has since expanded into a global organization operating in more than 170 countries, with programs structured from the local and area level up through state, national and world games.
The athlete oath — “Let me win. But if I cannot win, let me be brave in the attempt.” — has been part of the movement since those early games, and it captures the design philosophy fairly precisely. Competition is real and results are recorded, but the organizing principle is participation rather than elimination. Divisioning, the practice of grouping athletes by ability level so that competitors face others of similar skill, exists specifically so that every division produces a meaningful contest.
Beyond competition, the international organization has developed programming that local affiliates draw on in varying degrees. Unified Sports places athletes with and without intellectual disabilities on the same teams rather than in separate leagues, which changes the social dynamic from service to teammate. Health screening initiatives have used competition days as an opportunity to provide vision, hearing, dental and other screenings to a population that faces well-documented barriers to routine health care. Youth and school-based leadership programs work on the attitudes that shape whether inclusion holds up outside of a gymnasium.
Which of those specific programs operate in the Mobile area was not addressed in the release, and readers should treat the above as background on the movement rather than a description of local offerings.
Why Local Programs Depend on Days Like This
The economics of a year-round local sports program for athletes with intellectual disabilities are unforgiving in a particular way: participation is generally free or nearly free to athletes and their families, which is central to the model, but the costs do not disappear because nobody is charged.
Uniforms and sport-specific equipment have to be bought. Practice and competition venues have to be rented or secured. Athletes have to be transported to area and state-level competitions, often over significant distances, sometimes with overnight lodging attached. Coaches and officials need training and certification. Insurance and administrative overhead sit underneath all of it.
Programs of this kind typically cover those costs through a combination of grants, individual donations, service club support and precisely this sort of business-hosted fundraiser. What makes a day like Sept. 18 useful is not only the money but the exposure: a customer who came in for a car wash and leaves knowing there is a Special Olympics program operating in Mobile is a potential volunteer, coach or donor later.
The Corporate Nonprofit Partners
The two organizations receiving the other half of the Schillinger Road proceeds are described in the release as Tidal Wave Auto Spa’s corporate nonprofit partners.
Annandale Village is characterized in the release as providing “progressive life assistance to adults with developmental disabilities” — language pointing toward long-term residential and support services for adults rather than time-limited intervention.
The Joseph Sams School is described as offering “educational and therapeutic support for children and young adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities,” a combined education-and-therapy model of the kind used by specialized schools serving students whose needs extend past what a conventional classroom is set up to handle.
The release does not provide further detail on either organization, including where they are located or how the corporate partnership is structured, and South Alabama News is not adding specifics the announcement did not supply.
Business-Hosted Fundraisers and the 12-Hour Window
The donate-the-day model that Charity Day uses is common in retail and service businesses, but the version described here is a stronger commitment than most. Many promotions of this type pledge a percentage of profit, or a fixed dollar amount per transaction, or a share of sales during a limited window. This one is framed around 100% of car wash proceeds from participating locations for the entire day.
An automated car wash is a reasonable fit for the format. Throughput is high, the transaction is quick, the decision to buy is low-stakes, and a customer who would have washed the car sometime that week can simply move the errand to Friday at no additional cost to themselves. That last point is what makes the 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. window matter: a 12-hour day covers the commute on both ends, the lunch hour and the evening, so there is no realistic schedule that the event excludes.
There is a second, quieter benefit to the format. Because the participating business handles the transaction, the beneficiary organization is spared the administrative work that usually accompanies a fundraiser. No tickets are sold, no venue is rented, no volunteers are needed to staff a table for 12 hours. For a small local program whose volunteer capacity is already committed to coaching and running competitions, a fundraiser that requires almost nothing from the organization itself is worth more than its dollar total suggests.
The 18th annual designation also tells you this is an established program rather than a one-time gesture. Repeat fundraisers tend to outperform new ones because beneficiary organizations can plan around them and because customers who participated in previous years already know what the day is.
How to Participate
The details are simple. The event is Friday, Sept. 18, from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. The location supporting Mobile Area Special Olympics is Tidal Wave Auto Spa at 949 Schillinger Road in Mobile. Buying a wash there that day sends half the proceeds to the local Special Olympics program and half to Annandale Village and The Joseph Sams School. Cash donations collected at the location are included in the split described by organizers.
No advance registration, ticket or minimum purchase was described in the release. Customers who want to give more than the price of a wash have the cash donation option available on site.
For a program that, in the release’s words, “creates opportunities for athletes to build physical fitness, confidence, friendships and inclusion through sport,” the ask on Sept. 18 is unusually low: an errand most drivers run anyway, done on a particular Friday, at a particular address on Schillinger Road.