During the summer of 2026, I had the honor of serving as the Personal Development Instructor for AileyCamp Miami at the Adrienne Arsht Center. Over six weeks, I worked alongside an exceptional team of artists and educators dedicated to one purpose: empowering middle school students through dance, mentorship, leadership, and life skills. I want to share what that experience was, where it comes from, and why it matters to the work I do every day. This was not just another gig on a calendar. It was a chance to serve inside one of the most respected youth-development programs in America, to honor a legacy far bigger than me, and to bring everything I have learned in more than two decades of teaching to a room full of young people who were still figuring out who they wanted to become.

Before I say a word about my summer, I have to honor the man who made it possible. Alvin Ailey was one of the most important choreographers this country has produced — the founder of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and a creator whose work, above all his beloved Revelations, carried the depth of the African-American experience to stages all over the world. He believed dance was not a luxury for a few but a birthright for everyone, and he refused to keep it locked inside a theater.

Out of that belief came AileyCamp. In 1989, in partnership with the Kansas City Friends of Alvin Ailey, he opened the first camp in Kansas City — just months before he passed away that December. Think about that. One of the last things this master built was not a ballet but a place for children. That is the lineage I was asked to serve in Miami, and I did not take it lightly. When you teach in an Ailey program, you are not just running a class; you are keeping a promise a dying man made to kids he would never meet.

That promise is personal to me. I started out as an at-risk youth myself, and dance is the thing that turned my life around. So when I look at a room of eleven- to fourteen-year-olds who are still deciding who they are going to be, I am not looking at strangers. I am looking at the kid I used to be. Ailey understood that a young person does not need to be rescued so much as recognized — handed a discipline, a mirror, and a reason to believe in themselves. That recognition saved my life once. Getting to pass it on is the whole reason I keep teaching.

AileyCamp is a nationally recognized, full-scholarship, six-week program for middle school students ages 11 to 14. Its mission reaches far beyond dance. The camp helps young people build confidence, resilience, communication skills, and a positive sense of self through a comprehensive curriculum of artistic and personal growth. No child is turned away for lack of experience or lack of money — the whole point is to open a door for young people who might never otherwise walk through it.

The dance training is real — ballet, Horton-based modern, jazz, and West African dance — and it is demanding. But the personal development curriculum is where the program does some of its deepest work, with an emphasis on leadership, communication, conflict resolution, nutrition, goal setting, and positive self-image. Every morning, campers recite affirmations together, promising to show up fully and to never let the word “can’t” decide their future. That combination — artistic excellence on one hand and character on the other — is exactly the balance I have spent my life trying to strike. Stepping into a program that already lived by it felt like coming home.

AileyCamp Miami makes its home at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts of Miami-Dade County — one of the great performing arts institutions in the country. Since the Miami program began in 2009, it has served more than 1,600 Miami-Dade County public middle school students, most of them from communities that do not get handed opportunities like this. The scholarship covers everything: instruction, supplies, uniforms, and two meals a day. In 2016 the program earned the National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award, the nation’s highest honor for creative youth development. To teach there is a privilege.

Our 2026 season ran six weeks and built, as every AileyCamp does, toward a final performance — ours on the Arsht Center’s Knight Concert Hall stage. There is nothing like watching a child who was terrified in week one step into a professional spotlight in week six and own it. That stage is where the whole summer comes due, and where families see, in a single evening, everything their children became.

In my role, I facilitated engaging, discussion-based classes designed to help students develop the tools they need to succeed both inside and outside the studio. My lessons focused on self-awareness, leadership, conflict resolution, decision-making, goal setting, communication, self-esteem, personal responsibility, and creating healthy relationships. I do not believe you can lecture character into a young person. So we worked through interactive activities, role-playing, journaling, group dialogue, and real-world scenarios — the kinds of exercises that let students discover their own voices and practice leading with confidence, integrity, and empathy.

I drew on more than two decades as an educator, mentor, adaptive dance instructor, and youth-development professional, and I brought movement, storytelling, and mentorship into every lesson. My teaching philosophy is simple to say and hard to live: true success begins with purpose, discipline, respect, and service to others. I reminded my campers — and myself — that personal growth matters just as much as artistic excellence. A beautiful dancer with no character is a missed opportunity. A disciplined, respectful young person who has also learned to move is a leader in the making.

What I love about the discussion-based approach is that it hands the microphone back to the campers. When a young person works through a real conflict out loud, in front of peers, and finds their way to a respectful resolution, they do not just learn a lesson — they prove to themselves that they can handle hard things. When they set a goal on paper and name it in front of the group, it stops being a wish and starts being a commitment. My job was never to have all the answers. It was to build the room where they could find their own, and to make sure that room felt safe enough that they were willing to try.

Throughout the program I collaborated with fellow instructors and staff to create a supportive environment where every camper felt seen, valued, challenged, and inspired. That word — every — matters to me. It is easy to reach the confident kid in the front row. The real job is reaching the one in the back who has learned to disappear, and letting them know they are just as welcome, just as capable, just as needed. Adaptive teaching is my specialty, and I used all of it: meeting each camper where they were and building a path from there.

I also refused to be a nine-to-noon presence who vanished when class ended. Beyond classroom instruction, I participated in daily camp activities, rehearsals, field trips, and the final performance, making sure students experienced consistency, encouragement, and positive role modeling throughout the six-week journey. Young people can tell the difference between an adult who is being paid to be there and one who actually wants to be. I wanted them to have no doubt which kind I was.

Serving as Personal Development Instructor at AileyCamp Miami 2026 was more than a teaching opportunity. It was a chance to invest in the next generation of leaders, artists, and changemakers. I watched students grow in confidence, embrace challenges instead of running from them, strengthen friendships, and discover a potential they did not know they had. I watched campers who could barely make eye contact in June stand tall on a professional stage in July. I watched a room full of individuals become a team that would not let one another fail.

Every one of those moments reaffirmed the commitment that has guided my whole life: that education, mentorship, and the arts are among the most powerful tools we have for personal transformation. I did not leave that camp thinking I had given those young people something. I left knowing they had reminded me why I do this at all.

People sometimes ask how you measure a summer like this. You cannot put it on a test. You measure it in the camper who starts finishing their sentences instead of trailing off. In the one who used to sit alone at lunch and now saves a seat for somebody else. In the group that argued in week one and covered for each other by week six. Those are the wins that last, because a young person who learns they are capable in June does not un-learn it in September. They take it back to their school, their family, their block — and that is how one camp ripples out into a whole community.

I built Solo Expression on one belief: everyone deserves a chance to shine. We serve developmentally disabled and at-risk youth, adults, and senior communities through adaptive dance, movement therapy, and mentorship. Anyone can open a studio, but without a purpose behind it, you are doing the art form a disservice. AileyCamp Miami is that purpose living out loud — on a national stage, in front of the whole country.

Serving inside a nationally recognized Ailey program does something real for Solo Expression as a service provider. It sharpens my tools and validates my method — movement plus mentorship plus honest life skills — against one of the most respected youth-development curricula in the country. It brings everything I learned in Miami back to my students in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. And it tells the schools, care facilities, nonprofits, and community organizations we partner with that when they bring in Solo Expression, they are bringing in someone who has done this work at the highest level and is ready to do it for their young people, too. That is the standard I hold myself to, and AileyCamp raised it.

There is one more reason this fit matters. My specialty is adaptive dance — designing instruction so that every learner, whatever their ability or background, can take part fully and feel successful. A personal development room full of thirty different middle schoolers needs exactly that. Every camper shows up with a different story, a different pace, a different way of hearing encouragement. The same care Solo Expression brings to a student with a developmental disability is the care that lets a big, diverse camp feel, to each young person in it, like it was built for them. What I practice all year in small rooms in Easton, I got to practice at scale in Miami — and it works the same way, because people are people, and everybody wants to be seen.

In 2010, my father and I founded Dance Mogul Magazine to inspire self-empowerment through dance culture. To me, being a “mogul” has never been about money. It is about owning your story, your discipline, and your future — and helping other people own theirs. From day one, DMM has been more than a publication. It is a service to the dance community: a platform that documents leadership, lifts up the builders and mentors nobody else covers, and shows young dancers that this path leads somewhere real.

A season like AileyCamp Miami 2026 is what that mission looks like in the field. When Dance Mogul Magazine tells this story, we are connecting a national institution’s legacy to the everyday work happening in real rooms with real children — and showing our readers around the world what empowerment-based dance media can be. Both of my life’s organizations, Solo Expression and Dance Mogul Magazine, exist to serve. AileyCamp let me put that service to work on one of the biggest stages there is, and everything I learned there comes home with me.

Fifteen-plus years into Dance Mogul Magazine, I have watched us build an archive of exactly these stories — the mentors and community builders whose names rarely make the mainstream press but whose impact you can measure in changed lives. Documenting a season like this one is not about a headline. It is about proof. It ensures that the next educator weighing whether to take on this kind of work, and the next family wondering whether the arts are worth it, has evidence in hand that the answer is yes. That is a service, too — not just doing empowering work, but making a record of it so other people can find their way to it. Solo Expression does the work on the ground; Dance Mogul Magazine makes sure the map keeps growing.

Alvin Ailey gave dance back to the people and built AileyCamp so that gift would keep giving long after he was gone. This summer, in Miami, I got to be one small pair of hands passing it along. Every camper I taught is proof that the vision still works — that with purpose, discipline, respect, and service, a young person can become anything. Read the companion feature on this season at Dance Mogul Magazine, and learn more about our youth, adaptive, and therapy programs at Solo Expression. The work continues — and so do I.