Sunny Charleston: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

This spring season marked quite a big feather in my event planning cap.

I had the pleasure of interviewing and working for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on their annual pledge program.

Each year, the Gates Foundation invites 100 of the worlds most wealthiest people to an undisclosed location to network and discuss global issues.

What baffeled me was that these people have the means to react to the issues being discussed and make a huge impact with their financial contributions

It was an unbelievable experience to be a part of.

As you can imagine security was uber tight which means no photos. BUT I did sneak a few :)

Note above....Warren Buffet (oldest man alive?) and Bill Gates along with Melinda Gates started the Foundation 4 years ago. They now have 122 "pledgers". In order to become a pledger you must be willing to give a percentage of your net wealth and be a billionaire.

This was the private airport on Johns Island. We had a total of 80 pledgers attend the two day meeting, each in their own plane. This was the photo that the media posted throughout those two days.

The Development Stage

As we started to design the concept of the Plenary Session many many many talks happened about the chair that will be used. I had to have all of these brought in during the site inspection to see what they looked like against the carpeting.

Please note this is the chair I had to ship to them in Seattle

to actually sit in to make sure it was comfortable enough.

The design of the business session came from this photo. The goal of the design was to create a platform for Bill Gates, Melinda Gates and Warren Buffet to address their peers from. The design was to be simple, clean, and bright without going over the top.

To create the panels we went with a more neutral tone.....challenge....how do you keep them from falling on a billionaire?

Please note my client and ALL the chair choices.

The 2 parties we created were some of the prettiest I have ever been a part of.

I won't bore you with the details of how we came up with the concepts, but here are some of the final product photos (that I was able to snap without security confiscating my camera)

This one is the final product on 2nd night. I loved how the bar grounded the huge lawn.

Here is what the lights looked like during the test run on Tuesday night.

When we "mocked up" this concept during the clients site visit here is what the design came out like....note the chair options :) Do you see a pattern happening?

I thought the above was the coolest idea to hang over the farm tables.....

BUT...AFTER ALL THAT PLANNING

and because of the wind we had to move the party indoors to the Jasmine Porch. Plan B put into place....The Sanctuary doesn't typically allow this to happen so we had to protect their floors. Poor Caroline had the tedious job of applying chair pads to each leg.