Crushing our Gala Fundraising Goals and Increasing Acceptance!

Crushing our Gala fundraising goals and increasing acceptance did not happen by accident!

Our 2024 Generation G- Disco Ball Dream Gala truly was a dream. Thanks to our gala committee, sponsors, and attendees we had our highest fundraising event to date, raising over $145,000!

Of course, the primary reason we even raise money, is to keep our promise to our families of always providing 100% free programming! This is the driving force behind everything we do and why the hundreds of hours preparation and planning is all worth while.

We wanted to share the highlights of the event with you so you can share in all the excitement:

Our powerhouse Gala Committee!

• This team began work back in April, for our October Gala
• They made all the asks for in-kind donations
• They brainstormed decor, food and entertainment options
• They but in so much time working with contacts to secure in-kind donations of things like flowers and bundt cakes to transform the room into a truly special place.
• They showed up early and stayed late to make sure the room and all the evening’s activities were ready to go for 200 gala attendees.

THANK YOU to the committee for their incredible dedication and love of the Down syndrome community.

Special thanks to Trenna Boyd and team from Intentional Purpose Consulting, for their leadership and
passion in helping our vision come to life!

Our Incredible Volunteers!

We have amazing people who give their time to us each year to ensure the event runs smoothly! We are grateful for the group of people that helped set-up and clean up, sell wine and game necklaces, welcomed guests at registration, ran our presentation slides, brought the fun with the DJ music, performed emcee duties, assisted with check out and grabbing winning silent auction items.

Our Advocates and Supporters are Helping Us Change the World!

What truly makes our Gala so special, are the people that attend and celebrate with us!
This year, we used our Achievers adult program to allow our adult participants to practice the soft skills needed to interact with our Gala attendees. This group worked on using phrases to greet and thank people and practiced hand shakes or waves to show their appreciation.

Our friends from Arts for All brought their adaptive dance group, ConfiDancers, to put on a pre-dinner performance that put everyone in a celebratory mood!

Annie Mulligan, a Special Olympian in snowshoeing, shared an inspiring message with everyone about how working hard pays off!

We had about 200 people in attendance and they helped us raise a record amount of funds that will go directly towards running our free programming.

There were 5 different awards given to truly deserving people- you can read all about them HERE.

For the first time ever, we had an anonymous donor commit $20,000 to our Fund a Need portion of the evening so we could use it as a matching gift. We ended up also receiving two separate $10,000 paddle raises! This type of generosity is not common and we could not be more grateful.

As always, our evening ended with an epic dance party. You can see all the memories HERE.

SAVE THE DATE FOR THE 9th annual gala on October 10th, 2025 at the Madison Concourse Hotel!