Winter wasn’t the only thing that arrived early this week. So did the Grinch Dinner in support of the Shepherds of Good Hope.
The popular fundraising dinner is normally held closer to the holidays but, for scheduling reasons, got bumped up this year. Maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing, given how busy life can get closer to Christmas. There are certainly advantages to spreading the holiday season out.
Ottawa’s new premier steakhouse, Harmons, hosted the dreamy dinner last night at its Elgin Street location with the help of Ottawa chefs Michael Radford (Whalesbone restaurant group), Michael Korn (Harmons Steakhouse), Warren Sutherland (Piggy Market), Justin Champagne-Lagarde (Perch), Yannick LaSalle (Supreme Court of Canada), Trudy Metcalfe-Coe (Inuq chef at large) and Wapokunie Riel-Lachapelle (Nikosi Bistro).
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“Tonight kicks off the holiday season really, really early but, for us at Shepherds of Good Hope, it’s a very important season because the need is always so significant in the community,” David Gourlay, CEO of the Shepherds of Good Hope Foundation, said as he welcomed the 48-person crowd to the benefit dinner.
It raised more than $36,000 to help feed the men and women who rely on Shepherds during the cold months ahead.
This year’s Grinch Dinner was co-hosted by a trio of community leaders consisting of: John Peters, a partner at Gowling WLG, former Shepherds of Good Hope Foundation board member Melissa Shabinsky and Ottawa at Home magazine publisher and editor-in-chief Mary Taggart as the brand new addition. They pulled together a guest list of friends, family and colleagues for an intimate evening of fine dining.
The Grinch Dinner isn’t cheap. A pair of tickets is $1,500 (with a $1,000 tax receipt) but, as Shabinsky pointed out, 100 per cent of the money raised goes directly to the cause. “Every single cost of the evening is covered by donations,” she told the room.
The SGH Foundation board chair, retired wealth advisor Mark Roundell, and board vice-chair, retired CPA Kaveh Rikhtegar, attended. So did Monica Singhal and her husband Kevin Yemm from family-owned Richcraft Homes. The family helped Shepherds open its supportive housing facility on Montreal Road in 2021 through its significant donation.
Peter McCallum, majority partner of the Whalesbone restaurant group (which owns Harmons) was there with his business partner, Robert Gravelle. “It’s an honour to take part,” McCallum told OBJ.social. “We’re always looking to get more engaged in the community, so we love having an opportunity to do things like this.”
As for the chefs, it’s “refreshing” to participate in the Grinch Dinner, Radford from the Whalesbone restaurant group said of getting to work alongside others from his industry. “We all have different ideas or things that we bring to the table,” he said of their ability to learn from one another and be inspired.
Marketing and public relations expert Robin Duetta of What’s the Big Idea was back to help coordinate the chefs.
The humble origins of the Grinch Dinner stretch back more than 30 years. It started as a small get-together hosted by Peters when he was a young articling student. He invited a few friends over while the 1966 animated TV special, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, played in the background.
Coincidentally, he was living in an apartment at the time that’s one block away from Harmons.
Peters’ small gathering grew into a proper house party and evolved from there, to different locations. Eventually, a small cover charge was added to raise money for Shepherds. It only became a serious fundraiser once Peters and his friend, Paul Turner, turned the bash into an exclusive dinner involving the participation of local chefs.
Turner told OBJ.social he couldn’t have been happier when Shabinsky volunteered to take over his co-hosting role, allowing him to continue supporting the event as a ticket-paying dinner guest. “I just couldn’t do it anymore,” he said of the challenge of being a volunteer fundraiser and of continually asking people for money.
That the Grinch Dinner lives on is “fantastic,” said Turner. “I’m just ecstatic.”
Peters was recently recognized by Volunteer Ottawa with a VOscar Volunteer Award, in the Leadership in Skilled Volunteering Award category. He’s been on the board of SGH since 1993, currently serving as emeritus officer. He also continues to serve on the board of the SGH Foundation.
This year, Shepherds celebrated its 40th anniversary. Peters good-humouredly reflected on how it started: with a knock on the door one Saturday afternoon from a member of the community, wanting to know if Father Jack Heffernan from Saint Brigid’s parish in Ottawa’s Lowertown could fix him a sandwich. The priest, who was a big fan of the Montreal Expos, had been watching the baseball game at the time. He turned off the TV and went to help the man. Not long after his visitor left, two more men came to his door requesting sandwiches, too.
Years later, when Heffernan was publicly lauded for his efforts, he would joke with humility that his helping to feed and shelter the down-and-out was a means for him to be able to watch the Expos on his Saturday afternoons.
The room also heard that the first person the priest phoned was the late Agnes Devlin when he needed help starting a soup kitchen in the basement of the church. She went on to become one of Shepherds’ most dedicated volunteers, said Peters.
Today, Shepherds serves 2,000 meals a day at its downtown community soup kitchen on Murray Street and at its housing programs across the city, said Peters. As of this year, Shepherds also has more people living in its supportive housing buildings than it has in its shelters. “Most importantly, of the people that get into housing, get into programs, get the support they need, 99 per cent stay in our housing and they don’t go back to shelters,” said Peters. “Shepherds has come a long way from someone answering a knock on the door and answering the telephone.”
