Town Talk: $3.8 million raised for 'Brain Breakthrough' campaign
Credit to Author: Malcolm Parry| Date: Fri, 01 Nov 2019 14:00:19 +0000
Naz Panahi and Devi Sangara chaired the $3.8-million Night of a Thousand Stars to benefit VGH & UBC Hospitals’ Brain Breakthrough campaign.
ALL BRAINER: Multi-time chair Devi Sangara and second-timer Naz Panahi fronted VGH & UBC Hospital Foundation’s recent Night of a Thousand Stars that reportedly raised $3.8 million in stately style. With the $60-million Future of Surgery campaign wrapping up, this year’s focus was the Brain Breakthrough drive that reportedly has $10 million of its $35-million goal in hand. Good news for the hospitals’ head of neurology, Philip Teal, and the one in three Canadians facing brain disorder or injury. The campaign should keep six-year development director Angela Chapman hopping when she succeeds foundation president-CEO Barbara Grantham in January. The Ismaili Muslim Community of B.C. received the foundation’s Leadership Award for its “significant contribution to our hospitals and health-care system.” Duly honoured, the Ismaili Council for B.C. president, Samir Manji, noted the award’s first-time recognition of a religion-based community.
At the Henriquez Partners’ 50th-annivery event, founding architect Richard Henriquez showed a global-location device he designed and made.
HAPPY 50TH: The Henriquez Partners celebrated a half-centennial recently with guests jam-packing the architectural firm’s Georgia-at-Seymour underground offices. Large posters of 10 major projects covered a wall near founder Richard Henriquez’s office. Ever whimsical, he put the first tree atop a tower (Eugenia Place, 1991), and designed the ship-shaped 46-unit Dockside building beside Coal Harbour. Richard’s self-made gadgets include a compass-linked globe’s articulated hand that points directly to specified world locations. They include one in Poland where pilot-father Alfred crashed a Lancaster bomber in 1944, thus orphaning three-year-old Richard. His own son, Gregory, escaped that trauma and heads the partnership today.
Amelia Tai and Angela Jang joined other Arts Umbrella students creating sketches of guest activities at the million-dollar Splash fundraiser.
HAPPY 40TH: That’s for Arts Umbrella, the children’s arts organization that Richard Henriquez’s wife Carol and friend Gloria Schwartz founded. Launched three years later, the Splash gala and art auction reportedly raised $1.075-million at its recent annual running. Christie Garofalo and Bruce Munro Wright co-chaired again, and — smart idea — Arts Umbrella students reflected donating artists’ works by sketching guests’ activities at a pre-auction reception.
Katerina Tokmak accompanied husband and Turkish consul general Mehmet Taylan Tokmak at his nation’s 96th Republic Day celebrations.
HAPPY 96TH: Recently installed consul general Mehmet Taylan Tokmak, fellow nationals and guests celebrated Turkish Republic Day’s 96th anniversary recently. The event commemorated Mustafa Kemal ending six centuries of the Ottoman caliphate and launching a secular republic named Turkey that still recognized Islam as its state religion. Tokmak previously headed a foreign-affairs department in capital Ankara and was a Turkish embassy counsellor in Prague. His Czech-born wife, Katerina, although not a diplomat, has comparable attributes as a lifeguard and 100- and 400-metre hurdler.
Arts Umbrella’s Splash fundraiser co-chair Christie Garofalo attended with husband and mining executive David fully suited in Prince of Wales check.
BON APPÉTIT: Splash co-chair Christie Garofalo’s mining executive-husband David wore a suit cut from the popular cloth commemorating the Prince of Wales who became King Edward VII. Apparel aside, the trim Garofalo couldn’t consume even a fraction of that mountainous 1901-1910 monarch’s daily diet. It entailed porridge-eggs-bacon-haddock-woodcock breakfasts, kidneys-tongue-macaroni-spuds lunches, multi-confection high teas, 12-course course dinners with steak, crayfish and truffle-stuffed game birds in Madeira sauce, caviar at any time, grilled oysters or a roast chicken at bedtime, and champagne, claret, brandy and cigars along the way.
Restaurant entrepreneur Yuri Fulmer founded Goodly Foods that makes nourishing soups from surplus produce and creates jobs for the hard-to-employ.
SOUP’S ON: The 127-year-old Terminal City Club may have served enough soup to fill Lost Lagoon. But the tomato, beet and squash varieties dished out recently were different. Using surplus produce, they were created by Goodly Foods that restaurant-biz entrepreneur-philanthropist Yuri Fulmer founded in 2017. With the H.A.V.E. Culinary Training Society’s co-operation, the project produces nutritious food while providing paycheques to hitherto-employment-challenged participants.
Danika Sung, Audrey Law, Stella Watson and Chloe Beck enjoyed the puppies-and-kittens Cuddle Lounge when the Offleashed gala raised almost $780,000 for the B.C. SPCA’s cruelty investigation branch.
Darlene Poole hurried from late husband Jack’s Canadian Olympics Hall of Fame induction to join B.C. SPCA head Craig Daniell at the Offleashed gala.
PUPPY LOVE: Tracey Wade recently chaired her fifth Offleashed gala that reportedly raised a record $777,192 for the B.C. SPCA. It will help expand the privately funded cruelty investigation branch that costs $3.5 million annually, said B.C. SPCA CEO Craig Daniell. Featuring puppies and kittens available at the SPCA shelter, a Cuddle Lounge was sponsored by Darlene Poole. She had hurried from Toronto where late husband and 2010 Winter Olympics Bid Corp. head Jack Poole was inaugurated into the Canadian Olympics Hall of Fame exactly 10 years after his death.
Boobyball décor duo Shelby Blair and Gillian Brown flanked organizer and soon-to-be-mother Kelly Townsend at the breast cancer benefit’s third running.
BABY BALL: Swimwear sales representative Kelly Townsend took the charitable plunge again recently by heading a sold-out third running of Boobyball. The event reportedly raised $54,000 for the Rethink Breast Cancer organization that “responds to the unique needs of young women.” Its new-for-B.C. Stretch Heal Grow retreats at Emerald Lake serve those receiving or having completed breast-cancer treatment. Townsend’s own growth includes her first child, a boy, due Jan. 11.
SETTING IT STRAIGHT: The Sleep Out fundraiser for Covenant House Nov. 21 will again entail women sleeping outdoors as well as men.
STILLBIRTH OF A NATION: Seventy-nine years before British Prime Minister Boris Johnson began fighting to leave Europe, predecessor Winston Churchill and France’s Paul Reynaud issued a diametrically opposite but short-lived Declaration of Union. With Nazi invasion imminent, they proclaimed that “France and Britain shall no longer be two nations, but one Franco-British Union.” Citizens of each would have become full citizens of the other.
DOWN PARRYSCOPE: CBC Radio listeners who once waited expectantly for 5:40 p.m. Fridays will lament the death of erudite, entertaining and ever-informative movie reviewer Rick Staehling.
malcolmparry@shaw.ca
604-929-8456