AARP celebrated its eighth annual "Best Employer" award dinner in the grand ballroom of the InterContinental Chicago on Tuesday. Along with the announcement of more than 50 winners, the evening included cocktails, speeches from AARP staff, dinner, and a keynote address.
Nancy Shaffer, founder and C.E.O. of Washington, D.C.-based Bravo! Events by Design, produced the event and said that this year's 350 guests outnumbered last year's crowd by nearly 100. Tom Nelson, C.O.O. of AARP, started the evening by thanking everyone for coming out in spite of the concurrent presidential debate. “Tonight is essentially the Emmys, the Grammys, and even the presidential debate, all rolled into one,” he said.
Shaffer said that many of Tuesday's guests had attended past AARP award dinners, which posed the biggest challenge in planning the event. “We have to ask ourselves, 'How can we keep this fresh each year?'” she said.
This year, Shaffer and the Bravo! team opted for a new theme, “Linking the Generations.” The theme served as a nod to keynote speakers Lynne Lancaster and David Stillman of BridgeWorks, a company that offers speeches and workshops focused on bridging the workforce generation gap. The theme tied into everything from the stage set, which displayed three multicolored links, to the the invitations, which revealed three cubed links when pulled open.
The evening's three-course dinner consisted of shitake mushroom consommé with crab corn cakes, braised beef short ribs with mashed Peruvian potatoes, and a lemon sabayon tart with whipped cream, raspberry sauce, and chocolate truffles.