Bath skatepark to host first Youth Voices Film Festival
Bath’s largest indoor skatepark will use a film festival, raffle and best-trick contest to raise money for youth programs, jobs and the teen center that supports more than 650 young people.
The Midcoast Youth Center and Skatepark in Bath will turn into a fundraiser, screening room and skate session when it hosts the first Youth Voices Film Festival on June 4 at 6 p.m. The event is designed to support the 6,000-square-foot skatepark and the adjoining teen center that help fund programs, meals and local youth jobs.
Organizers said the festival will feature more than 60 minutes of curated films centered on skateboarding culture and adventure sports inside and outside Maine. The lineup includes filmmakers from Dallas, Memphis and Maine, along with a world premiere of Youth Matter!, a short documentary produced by Tailwind Media and made possible by a Community Building Grant from the Maine Community Foundation.
Tickets are priced from $25 to $75. The evening will also include a raffle, a best-trick competition, live music, mocktails, locally crafted bites, a fresh mural art component and a live skateboarding expression session with local skaters and scooter riders. The programming makes the fundraiser less a formal screening than a community event built around the skatepark’s core users and supporters.
The stakes are practical for Midcoast Youth Center, which says it is Maine’s largest indoor skatepark and serves more than 650 youth each year. The organization says the park supports skateboarding, inline skating, scooters and BMX, and that local youth and riders help operate the space. Session fees go back into programs in the teen center and provide employment opportunities for young people.
The skatepark itself has deeper roots in Bath than the nonprofit does. Local teens helped found it in the early 2000s, giving the venue a community history that predates the current youth center. Midcoast Youth Center was later founded in July 2016 by Jamie Dorr through Midcoast Community Alliance after several youth suicide losses in the Bath area.
That origin still shapes the organization’s work. Midcoast Youth Center says it was built in response to unmet needs identified in youth health data, and its programming has focused on support, recreation, meals and youth leadership. The center’s more recent update said teen mental well-being in Sagadahoc County has shown encouraging signs of improvement, placing the festival within a broader effort to keep young people connected to a stable, welcoming space.
The event also follows a recent push to reinvigorate the skatepark, including mural work there last year. For Bath families, skaters and teen participants, the festival is set up to do two jobs at once: raise money and reinforce the role the skatepark plays as one of the city’s most active youth spaces.
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