The stretch Hummer maneuvers carefully between the buildings, getting as close as it can to the main entrance where a knot of people wait expectantly. The big building at the Del Norte County Fairgrounds is already teeming with guests and volunteers; light and music pour from the open double doors. An older woman in a long gown steps from the Humvee and pauses to hike her dress up and show a friend her satin bloomers and fancy shoes.
It’s Del Norte’s Night To Shine — an annual faith-based celebration for the special needs community, a community that doesn’t ordinarily have events like this thrown for them. Part of a worldwide celebration, the Night To Shine was founded in 2014 by the Tim Tebow Foundation, and is celebrated the Friday before Valentine’s Day in 800 cities across the United States, and in other locales as far-flung as Burkina Faso and the Philippines.
Each Night To Shine follows the same script, as the Tebow foundation’s website explains: “Each event is unique to its location, but some cornerstone activities included across all of them are a red carpet entrance complete with a warm welcome from a friendly crowd and paparazzi, hair and makeup stations, shoeshines, limousine rides, karaoke, gifts, a catered dinner, a Sensory Room, a Respite Room for parents and caregivers, dancing, and a crowning ceremony where every guest is honored as a King or a Queen — the way God sees them each and every day.”
Kenna Gavin, the event’s local coordinator, has made sure Del Norte’s iteration checks all the boxes. She, along with more than two dozen volunteers, gathered the day before to start decorating and setting up tables. Concerns ranged from where the shoeshine station will be to how much space should be left between the large round tables.
“Most of them are adults, so they’re not in small wheelchairs,” she explains. “I want them to be able to sit anywhere they want, with their friends, and not have to be confined to one little area.”
This will be the third Night To Shine held in Crescent City, and Gavin, the parent of Skylar, a 24 year old woman with Down Syndrome, has been instrumental in all of the events. In fact, it was Gavin who brought the Night To Shine to Del Norte in the first place.
“I spent four years trying to get this here in town, because I love Tim Tebow,” Gavin says. “When I saw the email [from the Tim Tebow Foundation] with the approval, it was the middle of the night and I thought I can’t call anybody!”
This year’s Night To Shine was expected to be the biggest yet, with 117 honored guests, plus their friends, family, and support staff. Gavin says she’s expecting almost 250 total attendees, a number of whom will be coming from Brookings.
“I’m trying to bridge that gap between Crescent City and Brookings because we are so close together,” Gavin says.
Friday night, as the line of honored guests stretches along the red carpet from the registration table to the doors, two “paparazzi” snap pictures, coaxing smiles and poses from their subjects. Each guest receives a gift bag filled with donated items. A photographer waits in an adjoining room to take photos in front of a Frozen-themed background. The women are given a chance to sit and have their make-up done, while Del Norte County Supervisor Darin Short waits to shine shoes.
“I think this is a wonderful thing,” Short says, standing in front of a full-length mirror. “I’ve participated in this one time before, and to see all these people come together and have an absolute blast, having dinner, dancing, getting all dressed up…it’s just a wonderful thing.”
For the first time at the local Night To Shine, Guests will be served a sit-down dinner catered by Norris Family Kitchen. Former City Councilor Kelly Schellong-Feola stands waiting to help serve the food. She smiles as she surveys the room.
“Everybody’s the same,” she says. “Everybody’s here to have the best time. My favorite part is pretty soon they will ALL be on the dance floor. They have so much energy and everyone is laughing. There’s nobody in here who’s upset about anything.”
Pastor and erstwhile mayor, Blake Inscore, moves jovially through the crowd, laughing and talking with the Honored Guests. His First Baptist Church is the host church for the Night To Shine.
“The Tim Tebow Foundation requires that there is a host church for every event,” Inscore explains. “One of his tenets of the whole thing when he started it was that he wanted it to remain faith-based, and one way to do that is to have a host church coordinate everything, all the donations,”
Asked why his church chose to take on the responsibility of hosting the event, Inscore recounts the perspective shift he underwent as a young man working in a residential care facility and then later in a job training program for people with disabilities. “It shaped my perspective. And then having the opportunity to see all this at this level…how do you NOT feel good about this? This is a part of the community that oftentimes doesn’t get noticed, certainly doesn’t get recognized in the way that it should. Having this part of the community know that they are celebrated and honored and respected at the highest level, No. 1, it says to the community at large that we should be doing this everyday. But beyond that it says to this community gathered here tonight that ‘you matter.’”
It’s a sentiment Gavin echoes. “They like to have fun, and I just feel like they don’t get enough community involvement. Some of them have their day jobs, and then they just go home. They get to feel like this is their night to shine.”
Gavin’s daughter, Skylar, in sparkly dress and matching hair band sits at a nearby table. When asked what she’s going to do with the rest of her night, she yells “Dance!”and flashes an emphatic thumbs-up.
