"The Fundraiser Was Awesome"
A post in which 5HE violist Clark Carruth reflects on Fifth House Uncorked, the fundraising event we held on Friday, March 21, 2014.
“The fundraiser was awesome.”
As a quick and easy joke that sentence was all I originally sent in for this blog post, and suffice to say the joke worked. But there is actually a large amount of hugely understated truth in that statement as well!
Two weeks ago on Friday, March 21, Fifth House Ensemble’s Board of Directors threw our first big fundraiser event, and not to toot our own horns, but it was a smashing success! Calling the event “Fifth House Uncorked”, we took over the very cool Mars Gallery in Chicago’s West Loop, wherein we had a great time - marveling at fantastic new paintings, sampling delicious treats from Publican Quality Meats and Mariano’s Fresh Market, grabbing drinks from the bar that resides for some fun quirky reason in the freight elevator, and playing some of our favorite tunes. You know, all the elements of a fun evening. Oh, and making new friends!
Fifth House is lucky to already have many fans and friends in the Chicago area, so it was incredible to realize 30 minutes or so into Uncorked that probably 80% of the people there were meeting us and seeing us perform for the very first time. And this was great because it meant we could find out which of our core missions - collaborative concerts, education, and entrepreneurship - excited each of these new individuals and then converse with them about how their support would directly impact our endeavors. Further driving these conversations were video stations we set up to provide visual examples of our education work and to describe our amazing summer festival, fresh inc.
Upon reflection though, the most amazing aspect to the whole evening is considering why all those new people were at Uncorked in the first place. Our Board members went out of their way to make sure that we filled Mars Gallery with their friends, neighbors, co-workers, and even vendors, and in this regard they achieved 100% success. We could not have sold one more ticket even if we wanted to (and of course we wanted to!), so here is a huge “Thank You!!!” to our Board! Also the night could not have gone so splendidly without Wendy Betts, our Board member in charge of making Uncorked happen - thank you a thousand times over, Wendy! And lest this turn into an Oscars acceptance speech, please just know many other incredible people helped make it very easy for me to say our inaugural fundraiser “was awesome”!
