Good music, tasty food, delicious desserts, micro-brewed beer, and fun games will be on tap Friday night when the inaugural McLaren Loves Lansing event is held at the Lansing Brewing Company.
The festivities will start at 7 p.m., when Grant Hendrickson will be the first of five musical acts to perform during the event whose proceeds will support the Sacred Space project of the $450 million McLaren medical facility being built on land purchased from the Michigan State University Foundation in its University Corporate Research Park.
The new hospital will be a nine-story, 240-bed structure that will consolidate McLaren Greater Lansing and McLaren Orthopedic Hospital into one facility. It will also include a cancer center and a medical services building. The current estimated timeline to open the facilities is late 2021 or early 2022.
“We want everyone to come and have fun and celebrate Lansing,” said Dr. Charles “Chip” Taunt, who is serving as co-chair of McLaren Loves Lansing with his wife, Katie. “We’re really focused on everything being local. Local food. Local music. We’re not going to bring in acts from outside of the area. Even Grand Rapids is too far away. We’re focusing on what is great about our town.”
Chip has been a surgeon with Michigan Orthopedic Center since 2005 and a member of the McLaren Greater Lansing Foundation board of trustees since 2012. Katie is a former biologist with the Environmental Protection Agency who is a stay-at-home mom.
The University of Notre Dame graduates were initially approached by the Foundation about serving as co-chairs of its Annual Gala. But when it became clear their vision for the Gala was different from what the black-tie optional event has been in recent years, they were asked if they would be interested in co-chairing an event the Foundation had been thinking about creating.
“We had a vision for something that was more casual and maybe a little more high energy than the Gala,” Chip said. “We wanted to put together an event that provided you with entertainment, essentially from the minute you got there until it ended.”
Katie describes it as an effort to “cast the net in a different direction” when it comes to engaging McLaren Greater Lansing supporters and prospective supporters who might not go to the Gala.
“A lot of people are just really busy and have school-age kids,” she said. “They don’t get a lot of free evenings, and when they do, they want to have fun in a causal setting. They want to be able to see their friends, mingle, and talk with people.”
In addition to Grant Hendrickson at 7, The B’s are scheduled to perform at 7:45, followed by Whiskey Diski & the Barrel Boys at 8:35, Starfarm at 10, and Apollo at 12:15 a.m.
Food options will include pizza, sliders, wings, quesadillas, barbeque, and paella, with after-dinner sweets consisting of cupcakes, dessert pizza, donuts, and ice cream.
There will be an open bar with attendees age 21 and over eligible for one free drink. Games will include cornhole and an over-sized Jenga. A photo booth will also be on site.
While McLaren Loves Lansing is a fundraising event, much of the Taunt’s focus has been on attendees having fun while appreciating McLaren’s support of the Greater Lansing community.
“We’re celebrating that McLaren is making this commitment to this community by building this great new hospital,” Katie said. “It’s a big deal and we want to celebrate that.”