A red carpet at the Castle at Park Plaza led to an all-white setting for the Unicef Children’s Champion award dinner on Thursday. The event, which honored Sting and Unicef U.K. Ambassador Trudie Styler, was the most successful award dinner to date, attracting more than 450 guests and raising upward of $1.2 million, exceeding the organization’s $1 million goal.
Anne Linder, the New York-based special events manager at the U.S. Fund for Unicef, attributed the event’s success in part to its high-profile honorees. “We were so lucky to have had Sting and Trudie Styler join us this year," she said. "This event generated tremendous buzz in Boston ... in fact, it was our largest event to date.” Sting and Styler’s participation also helped boost the success of the evening's live auction: A weeklong stay at the couple's private Tuscan villa brought in $130,000, and the overall auction raised more than $450,000.
Having such well-known honorees did raise the stakes for planners, however. “The most challenging aspect was creating an elegant event that was both worthy of all Sting and Styler have done for Unicef, but that also fit within our modest budget,” Linder said. Though his wife has a more official tie to the organization, Sting has also supported Unicef by, among other things, performing at fund-raisers.
To design such an event, Linder worked with Jen Wheaton of the Design Collaborative. "Simplicity was the elegance of this design," Linder said. The cocktail area was outfitted with glittering wall-to-wall carpet and long white console tables provided by PBD Events. Diaphanous, floor-to-ceiling curtains led to a dining space filled with white suede tables, crystal candelabras, and sprays of Winston Flowers’s calla lilies.
Max Ultimate Food catered the three-course dinner, which ended with Sting and Styler’s acceptance speech and a performance by Grammy-nominated trumpeter Chris Botti.
