Posted by
Paul Kuhne on Tue, Apr 10, 2012 @ 11:07 AM
For the last three springs, we here at The Elizabeth Peabody House have geared up to hold our annual charitable auction and celebration known as “The Giving Tree Gala”. The event’s name was inspired by Shel Silverstein’s famous children’s book The Giving Tree and was a great celebration of our, and other organizations', work in Somerville. Despite the goodwill “The Giving Tree Gala” inspired amongst many of our Somerville supporters, this year we came to realize that it doesn’t paint the full picture of who we are.
Out of that realization the 4-Who-Care Awards was born. Many of you may have heard the buzz in the local media, including the Sharon Patch, the Somerville Journal and the Boston Globe. If you have, then you know this year's event is different in a huge way. On May 3, we r
eturn to our home in the West End of Boston, which is where we started as an immigrant settlement house. We later moved to our current locations in Somerville and Sharon but still do what we've been doing for more than a century. We recognized that this year, we had to honor those who came together in 1896 and chose to honor the life of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, who opened the first English-speaking kindergarten in the United States. We picked the number 4 because the numeral was important to her life, as she lived from 1804 to 1894.
The names of our awards reflect our legacy too, as we honor Winston Churchill, Leonard 
Nimoy, Mary Garland and Jim Campano, who have been an inspiration to many of the children and families that we serve today, who hail from places like Haiti, Brazil and El Salvador. Also, we couldn't be more excited about two of our special guests: news reporter Paul Burton of CBS News, will be joining us for the evening as our Master of Ceremonies, and our keynote speaker, award winning author Louise Knight, will be speaking about the importance of the settlement house movement as she wrote about in The Nation recently.
Over the next few weeks, we'll be posting more interesting details about the history and inspiration behind the 4-Who-Care Awards. Stay tuned and we hope you can attend!
The 4-Who-Care Awards Benefit & Auction will be held at the Holiday Inn @ Beacon Hill on Thursday, May 3rd from 6 p.m.-9 p.m. To buy tickets, please click here and to nominate someone for an award, please click here.