Solace Charity Banquet 2018
The inaugural Solace Charity Banquet was held at Orchard City Banquet Hall in Campbell, California on Sunday, the November 18th from 5–9pm. The main objectives of this event were twofold — develop it as an annual fundraiser for Solace Charities and provide a venue for Sheeba Ameer, founder of Solace, this time around, to talk to and meet with the local benefactors and volunteers of Solace Charities in San Francisco Bay Area.
The planning and execution of the event was spearheaded by the Roy Jose, the president of San Francisco Bay Area chapter of Solace Charities. The event rolled out 100% by volunteers and there were lots of them involved.
The organizing team had to deal with 3 main external entities:
- The Campbell City that rented out the Orchard City Banquet Hall.
- Red Chillies, the well known Malayalee restaurant based in Milpitas that was contracted to provide the Kerala cuisine, the cuisine we picked this time for the dinner.
- Music India Foundation that agreed to provide musical entertainment free of charge.
Though it is impossible to name each one of them, I would try to name a few who had been leading the charge in various departments:
- Joji Mekkattuparamban coordinated between the various subcommittees to make sure that tasks are incrementally progressed and there were no blockers. He also developed the event execution script for the days leading up to the event and the D-day.
- Manoj TN coordinated with the Music India Foundation to stage an excellent show at the event. They even brought in Rajesh Cherthala, a visiting renowned flute instrumentalist from India, as a guest artist to the event.
- Sindhu Nair developed the event program by coordinating with the depending teams that shared the hall and the stage for rolling out the event.
- Agnal Kokkat with help from Anish Padiyara and Sasi Puthiyaveedu, a veteran organizer of events like this, worked with Red Chillies to develop a dinner & drinks menu and program from scratch that was innovative and one of the highlights of the event.
- Ambili TP transformed an ordinary banquet hall into a magnificent looking place with her talents in decor and assistance from a lot of her dedicated volunteers. She had written about it here already.
- Managing registration is a thankless job with no visibility but any failure on that front would leave an event looks ametuer. Jayasudha did a marvelous job there by aggregating ticket sales info from various sources for this sold out event with very little maneuvering room. Suresh Kadavath, an experienced hand managing registration of large scale events, extended help as well.
- We requested the local community also for assistance with holding this fundraiser with an additional objective to go mainstream with the mission of Solace. That worked out, more than 30 high school students showed up at the event for helping out and their work was critical in completing the preparations so the event could be started on time. Anju Parayil managed all the volunteers and that was very critical for the success of the event.
- Auction is one of the main revenue streams of a fundraiser like this. Roy Jose took the pains to bring all the attractive items auctioned off at the events from Kerala and designed the auction part of the event and coordinated with the professional auctioneer we hired.
- For the payments and finance related requirements Supriya Viswanathan coordinated with the rest of the team and the city of Campbell for the banquet hall. Also she compiled various donation programs to be promoted as part of the event.
- Bysi Bhasi came up with the creative ideas of focussing on selling tables and not just individual seats and that helped to sell all the 300 tickets without much efforts.
- Remi Deepesh executed the idea of providing onsite babysitting which was a huge success — both parents and kids were happy and organizers didn’t have to stop any kids from running around in hall.
The event was opened to the guests at 5pm sharp. Hand picked drinks, esp. local wines and beers were available. Sindhu Nair and Dr. Anil Neelakantan were the MCs and they kickstarted the event. The highlight of the first session was the performance of Music India Foundation while starter of the dinner, appam (Kerala style crepe) & stew, was served as well.
A short video on the life journey of Sheeba Ameer and her founding of Solace was screened after that. That powerful video was written and directed by Priya Menon. Followed by that Dr. Anil Neelakantan presented Solace and its programs to the guests.
The main item of the event that night, the speech by Sheeba Ameer, followed the Solace presentation. There was a Q&A session after that in which the guests had the opportunity to ask the details on Solace’s operation in Kerala and its presence in the U.S. After that the leaders from various community organizations presented donations and briefly talked and took pictures with Sheeba Ameer on stage. They included Shirley Jacob from Vanitha, Sajan Mooleplackal from MANCA, Raji Menon from Punyam and Susan Varghese from Silicon Valley Indian Lions Club.
The Red Chillies team served the main course of Tellicherry Biriyani and dessert Ada Pradhaman while Music India Foundation performed their second part.
The auction was the last part of the event. Roy Jose, president of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of Solace Charities, did the vote of thanks concluding an entertaining and charitable event of that night in San Francisco South Bay.
