A Mobile youth arts program that has outlasted most of the institutions around it is marking 35 years this month — and it is doing it the way it always has, by putting kids on a stage.
Youth on the Winning Side will host its week-long summer intensive for ages 3 to 25, combining fine arts training, mental health education and mentorship.
The Schedule
- Sunday, July 19, 5–9 p.m.: The camp kicks off with an alumni sneaker ball.
- Monday, July 20 – Thursday, July 23: The camp itself, with students exploring their creativity, building confidence and developing their talents.
- Friday, July 24: A showcase performance at the Saenger Theatre in downtown Mobile. Doors open at 5 p.m.
The Age Range Is the Tell
Look closely at that span: 3 to 25. Most youth programs stop at 18, at which point participants age out and the relationship ends.
A program that keeps its people until 25 — and that opens the week with an alumni event — is not really a summer camp. It is a long-term community, and the alumni ball is the evidence. Thirty-five years of participants means the young people in the room this week are being taught by people who sat in their chairs a decade or two ago.
That continuity is the hardest thing for a nonprofit to build and the easiest thing to lose.
Arts Plus Mental Health
The inclusion of mental health education alongside fine arts training is worth noting. It reflects a growing recognition among youth arts organizations that performance training and emotional wellbeing are not separate curricula — that the confidence a child builds on a stage and the tools a child needs to manage anxiety are, in practice, closely related.
For young people in Mobile, where access to adolescent mental health resources remains uneven, a program that builds that education into something they already want to attend is a meaningful delivery mechanism.
Ending at the Saenger
The showcase closes the week at the Saenger Theatre, the 1927 movie palace on Joachim Street that remains Mobile’s most storied performance venue.
Putting a group of students — some of them three years old — on that stage in front of their families is not an incidental choice. For a young performer, the memory of a first appearance on a real stage in a real theatre tends to outlast almost everything else about a summer.
Attending
Doors for the July 24 showcase open at 5 p.m. at the Saenger Theatre in downtown Mobile.
Youth on the Winning Side has spent 35 years giving Mobile’s young people a constructive, creative outlet, and its longevity sets it apart in a city where youth programs come and go with funding cycles and grant years. The inclusion of mental health education alongside the arts reflects a deliberate recognition that the young people it serves face pressures — anxiety, grief, instability — that a dance step or a monologue alone will not address. Building coping tools into a program they already want to attend is a practical way to reach them.
The Saenger Theatre, where the week closes, is one of Mobile’s most beloved landmarks, a 1927 movie palace on Joachim Street that has hosted everyone from vaudeville acts to touring productions. Putting students as young as three on its stage, in front of their families, turns a week of practice into a memory that can shape a child’s sense of what is possible. For many of the participants, it may be the first time they stand in the spotlight — and for some, it will not be the last.
The program’s wide age span, from three to twenty-five, signals something deeper than a summer camp. It is a community that keeps its members through adolescence and into early adulthood, and it opens each session with an alumni event — a living reminder that the people who once stood on that stage now return to mentor the next generation. In a city concerned with opportunity for its youth, a 35-year-old program that still fills a week with art, mentorship, and mental health support is a quiet answer to the question of how to keep young people rooted in something good.
The mental health component of Youth on the Winning Side arrives at a moment when Alabama, like the rest of the country, is grappling with a youth mental health shortage. Access to counselors and psychiatric care for adolescents remains uneven, particularly in under-resourced neighborhoods, and schools and community organizations have increasingly stepped into the gap. A program that weaves emotional wellbeing into arts training meets young people where their interest already is, rather than asking them to walk into a clinic.
The alumni sneaker ball that opens the week is more than a kickoff party. It is the visible proof of the program’s generational reach — former participants, now adults, returning to celebrate and to mentor. For an organization marking 35 years, that continuity is both its proudest achievement and its clearest signal of impact: the children it served decades ago are the volunteers and supporters keeping it alive today. Closing the week on the Saenger’s stage, in front of family and the wider Mobile community, the young performers step into a tradition that has outlasted most of what was built around it.
As Youth on the Winning Side begins its 35th summer, the program stands as a reminder that the most durable investments in a city’s young people are often the quiet ones — not a building or a headline, but a week of attention, mentorship, and belief repeated for three and a half decades. The showcase at the Saenger is the visible payoff, but the real product is the confidence carried home by every camper, from the three-year-old taking a first bow to the twenty-five-year-old who once was that child and came back to lead. That is the kind of return on investment no budget line can capture.
The program’s 35th year is measured not in grants or headlines, but in the thousands of young lives that have passed through its doors and left with something tangible — a skill, a friendship, a memory of being seen and heard.