The Moose Jaw & District Senior Citizens’ Association is holding a roast beef dinner followed by a live auction on Saturday, March 25 to help raise critical funds for the organization.
The Moose Jaw & District Senior Citizens’ Association (SCA) needs some extra help from the community this year as a result of financial adjustments following city hall’s divestment of its stake in the Timothy Eaton Gardens building in January 2022.
The building is now owned by the Moose Jaw Non-Profit Housing Corporation (MJNPHC). It houses several businesses in addition to the seniors’ association, and the relative responsibilities of ownership, maintenance, and necessary future renovations for the building have taken some time to settle out.
The SCA is an important part of enriching the lives of people over 50 in Moose Jaw, and its board hopes supporters will get their tickets and ‘make a bid to help the Centre.’
MooseJawToday.com spoke with SCA board member Candace Thorne to learn more about the dinner and auction.
“We’re having an auction/banquet on March 25,” Thorne said. “We’ve been soliciting donations for the past month and a half … . These are new items or handmade crafts. Ticket sales are ongoing now, but they will cut off by March 20 to give our cook Tina an idea of the numbers.”
Tickets are being sold at the front desk of Timothy Eaton’s for $25 each, which includes dinner and automatic entry into the door prize contest.
On the menu is roast beef, mashed potatoes, mixed veggies, coleslaw, Black Forest cake, and Tina’s famous Yorkshire Pudding.
Entertainment will be provided by the Timothy Eaton Band. There will be a live auction, a silent auction, and a penny parade.
“The whole evening begins at 5 p.m., which is for viewing of auction items, and that’s till 6 p.m.,” Thorne said. “Dinner is a table service starting at 6 and running until 7:30. And from 7:30 on the live auction items will be auctioned off.”
The SCA is still receiving auction donations, but Thorne said she’s very excited so far.
“It’s the sociability of it, and the spirit of competition,” she laughed. “Honestly, you end up bidding for things that you never actually thought you wanted until the competition started up.
“We’re going to break it down into larger and smaller items, and the reason for that is that we want the auction to be accessible to everyone, so people who don’t necessarily want to spend $100 can still spend $5 and have some fun.”
The big-ticket item on the auction list is an entire brand-new storage shed, but there are also spa baskets, small kitchen appliances, gift certificates, art, jewellery, quilts, and plenty more.
Thorne wanted to emphasize — especially as a newer board member — that the fundraiser wouldn’t be possible without what she described as an army of Timothy Eaton’s Centre volunteers.
“These people dedicate hours and hours of their time to everything we do, all the activities, the events, the banquets,” she said. “They’re just remarkable and we wouldn’t succeed at all without them.”
