‘Anything is possible’: Entering its 13th year, Zo’s Summer Groove changing kids’ lives

Mourning still pressing on in fight to help kids

MIAMI — The gymnasium at the Overtown Youth Center has yellow and burgundy concrete walls, a scoreboard with a few busted panels and four wooden backboards along the sidelines. It’s in one of the most impoverished sections of Miami, a hardscrabble neighborhood where shootings and crime seem all too common.

This is where Alonzo Mourning gives kids hope.

“If you don’t love yourself, then you’re not taking care of yourself,” Mourning is saying, sitting in a circle with 10 girls Wednesday afternoon, each of them nodding silently with their eyes fixed on the 6-foot-10 former NBA star. “Surround yourself with the right people. Make the right decisions. Set your goals.”

This has long been Mourning’s message to kids in Miami. This youth center is where he hammers the point home, and Zo’s Summer Groove — a charity weekend where, on average, more than $600,000 gets raised for youth-related causes — is the vehicle that makes the work possible.

The 13th edition of the Groove, a five-day series of events now co-hosted by Dwyane Wade, started Wednesday.

“Anything is possible,” says Tenisha Lane, 21. “Not only Dwyane and Zo, but a lot of people who are famous came from our type of neighborhood. And now I know that growing up this way doesn’t have to be a negative thing. It makes you do better, want to be better, want to do better things and someday be like Dwyane and Zo, come back and help others.”

It’s people like Lane who are why Mourning started the Groove in the first place.

The sixth of 16 children, Lane became the first in her family to get a college education and credits the Overtown Youth program as the driving force. Charisma Clark, 19, probably wouldn’t have gone to college, and now is studying elementary education at Florida A&M — because she got financial assistance and other support from the center, much of it possible from the money generated by the Groove.

“Everyone at the center looks up to Zo and everyone at the youth center,” Clark said. “They’ve made a second home for us. We definitely appreciate that.”

Had Lane and Clark never walked into the facility that Mourning was instrumental in getting built, they would likely have added to Overtown’s grim statistics. Well over half of the children from that neighborhood leave high school without diplomas. Meanwhile, out of the most recent group of seniors involved with programs at the Overtown facility, 90 percent are going to college.

“It’s not magic,” says Carla Penn, the center’s executive director. “These kids have worked so hard. But you have to feel loved, genuinely, when you walk through that door. There’s no other way.”

Mourning demands it be that way.

He champions a very specific system of learning, scoffing at the notion that poor communities can’t find ways to educate youth. He’s challenged state lawmakers to provide more help, often unsuccessfully. He sat with a former U.S. senator from Illinois last year, telling him the struggles some kids face in Miami, which despite its glitzy beach scene still ranks as one of the nation’s poorest cities.

That former senator was President Barack Obama, whom Clark gave a tour of the Overtown facility to when he was campaigning.

“It was a very big deal,” Clark said, shyly.

Without the Groove, it wouldn’t have been possible.

There’s a $1,000-a-head golf tournament on Thursday, a comedy show on Friday, gala dinner Saturday and free block party Sunday before the annual highlight, the charity game where reigning MVP LeBron James, Mourning, Wade, Carlos Boozer and other NBA greats will serve as headliners to support the cause.

“There’s no downside to doing this,” Wade said. “No one believes you’re going to change everyone. But being in the position I was in before, and knowing that people helped me over my life to get to this point, if I reach one kid, I’ve changed that kids world. And then that kid will reach one kid. And that kid will reach another kid. That’s why we do this.”