From the outside of The Highsteppers Dance Studio, tucked away in a strip mall in Mount Healthy, you wouldn't know exactly what to expect. Step inside and you are met with smiling faces in photos on the wall and dozens of trophies some three feet tall throughout the room.Kelli Dobson started the Highsteppers 25 years ago and turned it into a nationally recognized dance team."Highsteppers is a ministry for me," said Dobson, who spends her day as a research scientist at Cincinnati Children's Medical Center. "God let me know a long time ago that I needed to do something in my life and that I was actually put here to bless children in the kingdom."Dobson loved to dance, so dancing became the vehicle for her to do more than teach young ladies to keep a beat."I always tell people that come in here and they look at the trophies. I'm like, 'You know my girls really don't remember the trophy experience, but they do remember the experience that's involved in it and they remember the impact that that season had, or the experience had on them because we instill life skills here, so it's way more than just dance,'" Dobson said. "Dance we just use as a shuttle to instill these life skills."Those life skills include accountability, responsibility, academic excellence and respect."Just having dignity, being driven, being a leader," Dobson said. "All of these things that play into being that successful adult that well-rounded adult that's ready for the world."Janyla Godfrey is 15 and has been dancing with Highsteppers for a few years. She said the group gives her mentors who have taught her the importance of sisterhood and so much more."I think when I came to Highsteppers I learned more about myself and how I can embrace more self-love and self-respect than I did when I came in here," she said.It's the same for Daunai White. At 13, she's only been dancing for a couple of years. When she started at Highsteppers, she said she was very unsure of herself."What I learned about myself is don't be afraid to show who you are and what you do," said Godfrey.She's a straight-A student at Winton Woods. Educational excellence is a requirement for the Highsteppers.Dobson said nearly all the girls who graduate from the program go on to live prosperous lives, become professionals in the community and are immediately part of what they call "the sisterhood." That sisterhood comes back to the Highsteppers to teach and mentor the current students. Dobson said it's important for her Highsteppers to see these women who have walked in the same steps that they walk now.Dobson knows that some of the girls coming into the program are in an at-risk category. And, had they never stepped foot into her studio, they may have gone down a much different path."Absolutely," she said. "I've actually seen it. When the girls come into the studio my gift outside of the dance piece is to be able to see in them what they can't see in themselves."The challenges these girls face outside of her studio have changed through the years. In many ways, Dobsons says, they've become much harder. So, she's had to change her approach with them. What hasn't changed is that she may challenge them and she may correct them, but it will come to them, said Dobson, "with love."When asked if she thinks she and the program have saved lives, her answer is, "I think I have."Dobson doesn't do it for the money. There is none. She donates all of her time at Highsteppers. Instead, seeing the impact she has had on young ladies' lives is what she calls "my payment."