Spring to Light
Fundraising Benefit Gala featuring Rick Mercer
Friday, April 25, 2025
This one-of-a-kind inaugural fundraising event includes a champagne reception, live & silent auctions, gourmet appetizers, elegant dinner & wine, photo booth, and entertainment, including harpists, dancers, speakers, and the main event, Rick Mercer!
It’s sure to be the highlight of 2025, and tickets won’t last long—don’t miss out on the magic!
The Event
We are planning our first-ever signature fundraising event on Friday, April 25, 2025, at the Agri-food Hub & Trade Centre, featuring a very special guest, Rick Mercer!
Lethbridge Family Services is celebrating 115 years of instilling hope by creating a diverse, connected, and welcoming community. We invite you to share with us our Spring to Light Benefit Gala in support of mental health and wellness programming for hundreds of clients in our Immigrant Services and DaCapo Disability Services Departments.
Location: Lethbridge & District Exhibition Agri-food Hub & Trade Centre.
Date: Friday, April 25, 2025. Doors open at 5:30 pm, and reception begins at 6:00 pm.
What to wear: Festive and elegant spring attire.
Ticket pricing: $200 per person, $1,500 per table (8 people)
Our gala will have a little something for everyone.
The reception will be a spectacular event opener as attendees enter the Agri-food Hub’s grand foyer adorned with a sparkly spring forest amid a local group of dancers from Danceworks Dance Academy accompanied by a Lethbridge harpist and cellist.
Champagne and beverages will be served as guests walk by projected visuals on the walls depicting scenes from people’s lives—happy, poignant, and memorable.
Greeters will guide guests inside the festive spring ambience with the HBO3 jazz trio playing in the background, to the salons where we will have:
3 appetizer stations hosted by LA Chefs
wine at every table thanks to Southland Trailers
free photo booths
the very special Tompkins Jewelers Mystery Box Fundraiser
and silent and live auction offerings that will tantalize
Following an elegant dinner we will enjoy the humorous and serious side of Rick Mercer!
Special Guest
Rick Mercer chronicles, satirizes, and ultimately celebrates all that is great and irreverent about this country. A national #1 bestselling author and the Governor General’s Award-winner for Lifetime Artistic Achievement, Mercer is our most popular comic: a political satirist who knows exactly what matters to regular Canadians and what makes them laugh. The beloved comic won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour for his memoir Talking to Canadians, in which he charts his meteoric rise to TV fame in a series of riveting, hilarious, and unforgettable anecdotes and behind-the-scenes revelations from his decades-long career. In his new memoir, The Road Years, he continues the story and reminds us, with trademark humour and charisma, how much there is to love about Canada.
Fundraising
LFS is raising funds to support mental health and wellness programming delivered in two of our departments, Immigrant Services and DaCapo Disability Services.
Immigrant Services
We don’t want anyone to feel alone in their mental health journey. We will guide our newcomer youth and families on how to build a support system to maintain good mental health.
The Spring to Light Gala is not only a celebration with our friends; it will be a lifeline for hundreds of newcomer children, youth, and families we serve who carry the weight of profound trauma. A dedicated mental health professional will help them navigate the complex landscape of mental health challenges associated with relocating to a new country and give support in ways they find accessible, acceptable, and affordable. Our mental health support focus will help foster peoples’ wellness, recognizing the tremendous resilience of the over 1,200 newcomers we serve annually.
DaCapo Disability Services Department
For many people living with disabilities, physical care is often seen as the first priority. But when a disability impacts a person’s quality of life, it can directly affect all other aspects of their well-being and daily experience. Many people with disabilities experience traumatic stress due to the painful treatments received for their physical condition, as well as depression and anxiety from the isolation they experience.
One way in which LFS will provide mental health support for our DaCapo Disability Services clients is by providing musical experiences through local guest musicians.
Music is powerful, and for people with disabilities, it can offer a form of personalized therapy. Music has the potential to improve clients’ communication skills, increase interaction and self-expression, and boost their psychological well-being. It can be an effective medium through which the client’s quality of life is enhanced.
“Music is the great equalizer.”
—Mark Foster
