On June 27th this year we hosted our first-ever UpLifting Vision Dinner at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, sharing our vision for the next 3-5 years with over 30 individuals who have been a key part of Fathers’ UpLift’s story to-date and/or who have recently joined our story in a big way.

Thank you to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and their staff who helped to make this event possible. Additionally, we want to publicly thank Toussaint the Liberator Band (@toussaintlib on Instagram) for providing some incredible music throughout the evening.

Additionally, thank you to Ty Scott, who provided all images and video from the event. (You can view more of Ty’s portfolio through his LinkedIn, Instagram,or website.)

Shared Stories

As part of the evening’s festivities, we hosted guided conversations over dinner, with key questions and conversation points provided to each table. We were excited and honored to hear a diverse array of stories shared by our guests of fathers and father-figures in their own lives and how they shaped them.

We weren’t shy with our questions, and our guests weren’t shy about sharing. Two of the question prompts we asked our guests to share were:

“What role did (or does) the most significant male figure in your life play in guiding who you are today?”

“What are some difficulties you would have faced without them? Or if you haven’t had a significant male figure in your life, what difficulties do you think that created for you?”

One common element from everyone’s stories: Every father brings his own unique history, challenges, strengths, and personality to every child’s upbringing, for both better and worse. Our experiences with our fathers (and also father-figures) are critical in shaping who we are. Very few individuals in our lives share the same capacity for impacting our lives in a positive way.

It’s our honor to be able to help fathers to nurture the positive that they can bring into both their own lives, those of their children and families, and those of their communities.

Highlighting Our Dads

Several of our Ambassadors and Coaches joined for the evening as well, sharing their own personal stories of childhood, struggle, overcoming, and now of influence in their communities as a helper and model for others facing obstacles like those they’ve faced.

It was an honor to be able to give our team members a platform to share, and our guests seemed to enjoy their captivating demonstration and communication of just how impactful Fathers’ UpLift is in our community.

The First of Many

Thank you to all who attended! We look forward to making this Uplifting Vision Dinner into an annual event, sharing our evolving story all along the way. If you’re interested in attending in a future year, please let us know! We would love to gauge interest early on.

If you would like a copy of our presentation sharing the goals and vision of Fathers’ UpLift going into the 2020s, please contact our Development Director, Christopher Haylett, at [email protected].