At Saturday night's Crystal Heart Ball, a fund-raiser for Catholic hospital Little Company of Mary, approximately 700 guests bowed their heads in prayer before digging into a Blue Plate-catered Mexican dinner.
Held at the Field Musuem, the event allowed guests to tour current exhibitions—including the temporary "Aztec World," which inspired the evening's meal—and also featured an awards presentation. This year's honorees were journalist Lisa Ling, who took home an award for her humanitarian work, and the hospital's mobile medical care team, which accepted the Sister Nancy Boyle Award for Excellence.
Anne Cullen and Bridget Tucker, event coordinators at Little Company of Mary, oversaw the yearlong planning process. Although the awards presentation was the centerpiece of the ball—the bulk of the evening's program came from speeches and videos about both honorees—the planners also focused on fund-raising.
In the past, a silent auction was the ball's main fund-raising tool. But given the current state of the economy, Cullen and Tucker felt that cash prizes might hold a timely allure, so they took out ads in local papers to alert community members to the evening's $15,000 grand prize. Cullen and Tucker also opened the raffle to anyone—not just guests of the ball—and sold tickets before and during the event.
The planners didn't chart out a specific financial goal for the evening, and won't know how much it pulled in for another few days, but they pointed to the raffle as a successful fund-raising tool: at $100 a pop, some 600 tickets were sold.
