MDN Episode 2: Million Dollar Garage Sale

Ah yes, the Million Dollar Garage Sale. What a great event! This was the first initiative that the community came together to achieve ourselves. With many strong personalities, and people with great skills and successful experiences of pulling events like this off in the past, we were bound to have some conflicts on the road to the event itself.
Yes, we only had a week to pull it off. No, we didn't know where it would be held until Thursday, I believe, and the garage sale happened on Saturday. Yes, there was conflict between the PR team, the Logistics team, and Force Four (the production company). We were still getting to know one another, and not always liking one another. Most of these people have become strong friends through these events.

I was on the Entertainment sub-committee. You hear on the episode Bruce Sellery saying, "Let's put entertainment with food and beverage". I still don't really understand the rationale behind that, but the Entertainment group rocked! I co-led this sub with Liane, who has coordinated entertainment for many events and had a number of contacts and leads. We discussed entertainment options like clowns and roving entertainers, but we settled on focusing on bands. I had leads on equipment, Liane had leads on bands, and other committee members (the Smart family) had other leads.
We had some great entertainers at the event, including Jared Fowler and The Joel Brown Band, and MDN's own Jacey Gillis. The entertainers had plenty of footage shot of them. Unfortunately, none of it, not one mention, showed up in the show. I was particularly upset about this, not because I was involved in the committee, but because if you were there you would know that the music and the stage was a MAJOR part of the garage sale. Everybody was talking about it - both the families involved and the guests/shoppers. They were awesome. I don't know why the whole thing was ignored. I heard people's interviews on the show with all mention of the bands and entertainment cut out.
Because I was so involved in the entertainment - setting up the stage and sound, and running the sound - and because my family had done our own garage sale a month earlier, we didn't have a lot to sell and we didn't sell a lot. We got rid of a stroller, and some clothes. I think we made about $50.

Jeanette was painted in a negative light in this episode. Many people who watched the episode wondered why on earth she won the money. More attention was placed on the Sperger family, and rightly so. But the reality at the time was that we didn't know much about the Sperger family at all. Many people, even this week as we watched the episode, were surprised to learn about their loss. The real story that week was bringing about a consensus on location and time between the various groups (and when a consensus was not possible, people taking leadership and making decisions) and getting the job done. Jeanette did an awesome job of both of those. The time constraints were put on us by the production company, not Jeanette, maybe to give us more drama. But Jeanette did an awesome job all week. She attended meetings every night, and worked all day Friday setting up, spent all night on security watching the stuff, and spent all day Saturday working. She was a warrior.

This was an amazing event that we put together in 4 days. It showed me that it can be done. It inspired me how everybody came together to get it done. I haven't seen that before, even in the church. I don't think I'll see much of that again. It was a great event, a great week, and a great community. It's a real blessing to live in Aldergrove with each one of these people!