Amber’s Awesome Angels

The Greater Iowa JDRF hosted it’s 8th annual Hope Gala on Saturday, 21 October.  It’s our black tie event where we have auction items available for bidding.  The theme was Wish Upon a Star, and the intent was to raise money for juvenile diabetes research.  There are many regular auction items, “super silent” items, which are items that are a little more pricey than the regular, but not enough to classify as a “live” item.  For the live items, there is an auctioneer who does a live auction for the patrons on the main items.  Tickets are $150 a seat, you can buy a table for $1500 or more, and the more you pay the closer to the stage you sit, and for the $10,000 or more seats, you get personal concierge service from the JDRF staff. 

We spent most of the two days prior getting ready.  We joked that the event should be called the Spandex Gala, as everything was covered in spandex.  Chairs, tables, artwork.  All spandex.  Granted, it looked pretty cool when it was done, but it was a lot of work.   We had 400+ patrons attending, lots of business leaders in the metro.  The honorees of the evening were Jeff and Mary Stier.  Mary is the senior editor of the Des Moines Register.  I’m not sure what Jeff does, or what their tie to diabetes was except that they were friends with someone who was head of the JDRF International Board of Directors. 

Last year I was a volunteer, and worked the whole night in the bank.  This year, Pioneer paid for tickets for Kim, Amber, and myself, so we were part of those 400+ patrons.  Amber got tasked with a few things to do.  She got to sell P. Buckley Moss prints during the silent auction period.  She got to hand roses and thank all the live auction winners, and she got to carry a puppy around during the live auction.  It was one of the auction items.  Let me tell you, that wasn’t the greatest idea (it was the staff’s idea, not mine).  Amber got very attached to the puppy.  As in cried when she had to give it up to the lady that won the bid.  We blame Mom, she won’t let us have a dog.  This puppy was a 10 week old “teddy bear” puppy, which is a cross between a couple other small dogs.  To say it was cute was an understatement.  It was a cuddler, always wanting to snuggle, and it loved to play tug o’ war with it’s blanket.  The staffer who was watching her for the past few days said she would trip over grass in the yard when she was running around.  

She got to sit on stage with Karli, who is a friend of hers who is also type 1, during the Fund a Cure presentation.  Fund a Cure is the part of the program where we just flat out ask for donations.  We start at $10,000 and go down from there to $100.  There is a speech or a video prior to that in order to get people to be motivated to open their wallets. 

 

The evening went pretty well.  There were a few mess-ups, a few things that just didn’t go as planned, and not everyone was bidding like we’d hoped, but we still raised over $354,000 and still counting.  With matching fund donations, we should still be able to beat last year’s total of $384,000. 

All told in the year and a half that we’ve been volunteering for JDRF, we’ve helped raise over $3 million to find a cure.  That’s what’s most important to me with all this effort.  That, and the two ladies in this picture (as well as the little boy at home who wouldn’t have done very well at this event!  Now off to the next event.  Stay tuned for more information!!