For the thirteenth annual Heritage Centre Gala on November 2, staff once again pulled out all the stops to treat 205 guests to a black-tie fundraising dinner. This event, year after year, provides much of the financial support required to run a variety of seniors programs and to purchase much-needed new equipment.

The financial goal, achieved through donations at the event, was to raise $29,000 after ticket sales to be used toward this year’s projects. To date, $10,000 in donations has come in. This will aid in the purchase of a bathtub for residents with mobility issues as well as equipment and materials needed for a variety of recreational programs run within the Niverville Credit Union Manor.

Additionally, the funds will help subsidize the work of the campus chaplain and provide access to social programs for low-income seniors living in the community.

Special guest Joey Gregorash emceed the full night of dinner and entertainment. Gregorash is a Winnipeg-based Juno-Award-winning recording artist but is most recently remembered as the host of a children’s variety TV show called S’kiddle Bits, which aired in the 1980s.

Gregorash was honored to be invited back to Niverville. His first visit to the area, he told the crowd, was in 1970. His band at the time, Walrus, was the opening act for the Niverville Pop Festival, an open-air rock concert which has since been dubbed Niverville’s Woodstock.

“I’m still doing rock and roll, but my audiences today don’t exactly rush the stage,” 69-year-old Gregorash joked. “If there’s any movement [toward the stage]… security [knows] they still have a chance to go out and have a cigarette and come back.”

Another Juno Award winner, Manitoba native Steve Bell also lit up the stage, entertaining the receptive crowd with his storytelling and music. Bell took his listeners through a musical journey spanning much of his 30-year solo career, including classics like “Why Do We Hunger for Beauty” and “Here by the Water.”

“It’s emotional for me to be here with you because I know the work that you do,” Bell told the crowd between songs. “My father just passed away a couple of months ago and he passed away in a personal care home. My mother is still there and she now lives with advanced dementia. I’m watching the care and the love that they get because people like you do this kind of stuff.”

Bell added that, as a younger man, he never concerned himself with the importance of senior’s care home staff. Now, watching his parents age, he’s become all too aware that loving, compassionate caregivers are a gift to the extended family as well.

Bell learned to play guitar at the age of eight. He tells stories of growing up a prison chaplain’s kid with a musical mother who suffered from anxiety and depression, a disease that was frowned upon within much of the Christian community during those years but was embraced and understood by the inmates that they served.

“That became my church experience,” Bell said of his childhood spent at a variety of prisons. “I had a little different experience of church than most did.”

His desire to play music was encouraged by his parents but it was the inmates of the prison that taught him the craft. For years, the young Bell joined the inmates for their impromptu bluegrass jam sessions which would become the impetus to his own lifelong music career.

“I’ve travelled the world and I’ve done all I’ve done because Canada’s most unwanted men invested in me as a kid,” Bell said. “And the point I’m getting at actually relates to the work that you’re doing here: the dignity of every human being. No matter what stage of life… every single human person that has ever been conceived is first and foremost God’s good idea. That’s your foundational dignity and nobody can take it away from you… When we care for our elderly, when we care for marginalized people, we’re affirming God’s good ideas.”

Wes Hildebrand, CEO for the Heritage Centre, closed the evening with a series of important acknowledgments to the many people who make up the leadership and support team behind the various seniors facilities at the Heritage Centre.

The work of the manor and personal care home staff was recently affirmed, he said, with an accreditation report that gave the facility 158 marks out of 161. As well, the province recently gave the Niverville PCH an almost perfect score based on provincial standards.

“This past year, we added two new programs here at the centre,” Hildebrand says. “[These include] Service to Seniors and the Adult Day Program. We took those programs into our portfolio because we thought that they would fit very well with what we do. We’ve always wanted to reach further into the community and not just keep it within the walls of this campus.”