Reverse Gala: A Saturnalian Fundraiser!
Most galas invite you to don your finest clothes, sit at a set and candlelit table, and kick back to enjoy the service of delicacies while someone at the front makes an ask. Ours does the opposite or, at least, includes the opposite. On August 23rd, our nonprofit SPIRIT of the Front Range flips the script because we really are in script-flipping times, and too much convenience and ease have eaten more culture and meaning than we could afford to lose. Don’t you agree?
So, we invite you to come wearing beautiful but destructible clothes, like an old frayed dress you can’t bring yourself to part with because of all the memories infused in it, or a favorite shirt whose best days are already years ago. Enjoy delicious herbal iced tea and finger foods while you choose which of the good land-loving labors you’d like to undertake with verve, creativity, and artistry, and an earnest invitation to wreck that fine dress in epic style!
Able-bodied, willing, and inspired participants are invited to take on some of the Sisyphean load of our food-growing, land-regenerating hosts, the Drylands Agroecology Research founders, Nick DiDomenico and Marissa Pulaski on their home farm, Elk Run Farm. You may be moving stones, processing herbs, tending children, sorting compost, or making a dezpacho to offer the land. The purpose is to find tasks suitable for the bodies and spirits of the ones doing them – if you’re an elder, perhaps processing herbs in the shade is your bag, or if you’re strong-backed and full of verve, well, those rocks might just have your illustrious name on them!
When the work is done (as if), we will wash up and set ourselves down to a gorgeous farm-to-table dinner prepared by SPIRIT’s own Sarah D’Antoni and sourced by the very lands you will have just been tending. Then and only then, once you have gotten your hands and clothes dirty, made some surprising art, and nourished well amid good company, we will ask you for money as a celebration of what it feels like to fund the future by actually building it together.
Ticket sales and the garden tool paddle raise form the cornerstone of SPIRIT’s strategy to keep seeding, coordinating, and re-granting to the many regenerative projects growing across the Front Range Commons. Our strategy is to fill the coordination gaps between extant regenerative organizations, to foster solidarity and wisdom with Solidarity Suppers in which we nourish Indigenous and frontlines community leaders, and to build our collective resiliency with the Neighborhood Resiliency Program in which we strengthen our capacities to meet the disturbed times we are facing.
Schedule of Events:
You arrive at 3 for iced herbal teatime and some finger foods in your finery, accompanied by the improvisational stylings of Erica Shapiro.
Gates close at 4.
From 4-4:30, we orient you to the tasks at hand and have you select your task(s), prepared to rate their levels of skillfulness and suckyness upon return.
4:30-6:30 – Work time – destroy your finery as inspired while doing good labor with good people! A photographer and videographer will be on site to capture the magic, and a good rousing musical set will keep your spirits high!
6:30 - Washing up and preparing for dinner
6:45-7:45 Farm-to-Table Family-Style Dinner and Discussion
7:45/8 – Fundraiser begins.
8:45/9 – Dancing in your tattered and filthy finery. Musical act to be announced.
10:30 – Go home, you beautiful benefactor of the revolution of the real!
Preemptive Answers to Likely Questions:
Can I bring a change of clothes for dinner?
Of course.