Peace, Love, and Chairity: two’s 2022 benefit for local causes delivers good vibrations
by Paul Mabe
For Chairity 2022, we cooked up nothing less than a revolution—of peace and love—and the design community stepped up to join forces for good. In Chairity tradition, Bay Area design teams crafted groovy upcycles of castoff furnishings and raised significant dough ($70k and counting) for local nonprofits in the process. Many also accepted the challenge to sport some hippy threads at the final party. All in all, I couldn’t have been prouder.
I’m Paul Mabe, Market Development Manager at two. This was my second year leading the charge on all things Chairity. For a bit of the backstory on how we built this love-in, read on.
Giving peace—and love—a chance
We chose Peace, Love, and Chairity as our 2022 theme because it captured the vibe we all need now. Frankly, it’s been a rough year in current events, and we wanted to “give peace a chance,” as Lennon penned during a “bed-in” with Ono. We envisioned a relaxed gathering celebrating love for our community. After last year’s successful Roaring Twenties-themed Chairity, our first I-dare-you-to-wear-a-costume version of the benefit, we jumped ahead 40 years to yet another theme that would inspire a reprise of festive period dress.
The theme also gave us a chance to raise glasses to our industry relationships. This was on full display at Chairity ’22 fete: I was chatting a few people who happen to work at different dealerships, and someone walked up to me afterward and said, “Hey man, those cats are competitors and you’re… talking to each other?!” And I replied, “Our competition? Who cares? Tonight's about getting together and giving back - so cheers to that!”
The good-vibe theme also unleashed the flaunting of some funky garb—tie-dyed hippy, beatnik, Easy-Rider, and Rhinestone Cowboy styles were all represented. My personal highlight featured our fearless super leader, One Workplace CEO Mark Baker, rocking a Grateful Dead t-shirt, who said, “Hey Paul, if you’re throwing a party, of course I’m going to get dressed up!”
Even those shy about time-traveling getups brought tons of goodwill in the form of their checkbooks! Collectively, we raised the roof, and the funds, to support four amazing Bay Area organizations—Hamilton Families, Muttville, Friends of the Urban Forest, and Project Color Corps.
Far out: beyond the cat’s meow
One main hurdle in planning Chairity 2022 was our own past success. The pressure was on to top last year’s Roaring Twenties blowout—which was the perfect release for coming out of the pent-up anxiety of the pandemic. Our first costumed fundraiser, it was a wicked time, as F. Scott Fitzgerald would say, “The bar had been raised.”
My jitters were for naught because our celebration of the Flower Power era ruled. People reveled in the chance to relax, relate, and give back. Everyone really showed up with love in their hearts for the community, channeling the theme’s Up-with-People sentiment.
Going where the sun always shines
As we planned Chairity 2022, we put a lot of thought into what the right digs would be. We wanted to be sensitive about the economic challenges everyone has been weathering, which can make it harder to give back. So we set out to find a venue with a price tag that would allow more funds to flow toward the initiatives at the center of the benefit. The venue also needed to be a place where people could just show up—a laid-back, stroll-down-the-Haight circa 1960s ambiance.
On the hunt for affordable and chill, I stumbled upon another element to factor in: locale. During a meeting at Steelcase, I was yammering on about Chairity (yes, I am obsessed), when my colleague Jennifer Hunziker divulged that her husband, Joel, was the brewmaster at Almanac Brewery, an Alameda brewhouse that hosts events! We’d held the Chairity soiree in San Francisco proper since 2015, but this opportune news flash had me thinking: was it time to shake things up? Cue Chairity zoom call where I took a quick poll of who lives where. Of all the people in the meeting, I was the only San Franciscan.
This insight was the catalyst for a move eastward for Charity 2022. Ultimately, it made all the sense in the world to roll on over to Alameda. At its core, two is a Bay Area firm connected to an A+D community that includes not only San Francisco, but also Fresno, Sacramento, North Bay, South Bay, and the East Bay. Even more, the Almanac has a super-fun indoor-outdoor space, and everyone knows the weather is always better past the boundaries of Fog City.
Tripping: how we made it easy to drop in & split
A good trip was essential to our event’s popularity. In the literal, not the psychedelic sense, of course. To get SF-ers over the psychic and physical barrier of the bay, we mapped out an easy-travel itinerary, organized transport, and narrated the go-with-the-flow ease of it to our guests. We planned the evening so that those traveling from San Fran hopped the same ferry to arrive twogether at start time. And like clockwork, at 6 p.m. sharp, 150 of our business BFFs, fresh off the ferry, converged on the venue—ready to party like it was 1969.
To make the exit equally easy, we road-mapped another collective getaway. To avoid scores of exasperated designers waiting around for Ubers, we chartered a bus—a true hippie’s favorite form of rideshare—to get back over the bridge. This leg of the journey was coordinated to bring riders back to two headquarters—for a righteous afterparty!
Communal Living
In the end, we raised $70k and counting for local nonprofits. I am also proud that we achieved a less easily measurable goal: community building. Chairity brought people in our community together to celebrate one another and the work that we all do. I am blissed out by all the generosity. Until the next Chairity communiqué, peace out my friends.