9th Annual Summer Gala! Danke!
May 21st, 2024
Thank you to everybody who attended our 9th Annual Summer Gala at Liberty Warehouse last week for celebrating our school with such joy and generosity.
In an evening filled with highlights, we will especially remember the energy that spread through the room as GSB’s rising 8th Graders performed Don’t Stop Believing and Living on a Prayer. We are honored to witness our students continue to thrive (while having some fun)!
We also enjoyed the thoughtful speeches by the Consul General of Switzerland in New York, Ambassador Niculin Jäger, and the Head of Cultural Affairs and Science Department at the Consulate General of Germany, Consul Mariella de Carvalho. Thank you for your support of our school. It means the world to our entire school community.
Another highlight was our Deputy Head of School Melissa Bourgeois’ Laudatio honoring GSB founder Muriel Plag, as well as Muriel’s acceptance speech which recounted GSB’s founding a decade ago in 2014. Both speeches brought the guests to tears and to their feet for standing ovations celebrating our dedicated faculty and staff, including a jubilant applause for Co-Founder Sonja Einoedter.
Additionally we want to thank Eddie Shieh for creating this year’s gala film which beautifully captured the spirit of our school and illuminated with humor and warmth the nuances of the German language, even in its smallest of phrases. Click below to watch!
And the thanks do not end there. As you know, it takes a village to host a gala, so drum roll please for MC-extraordinaire Yah Jeffries; hands-on-day-of-the-event-life-saver (and Raphael Hillisch’s wife) Olga Tibocha; Gala-planning-and-support-dream-team Jan Bornebusch, Melissa Bourgeois, Tanya Faude-Koivisto, Kaeppler Rissmann, and Julia Sommer; house-band-for-life The Engagements, and photographer-plus-creative-sounding-board Claudia Mandlik.
Last, but by far not least, a heartfelt thank you goes out to the many supporters and silent auction donors. We surpassed our goal by raising an astonishing $160,801! Thanks to your support we will be able to continue to provide tuition assistance to make a bilingual international education accessible to more families, offer competitive salaries to our talented faculty, and grow our academic programs to provide your children with even more diverse learning opportunities. The special initiative to bring German-language libraries to every GSB classroom was also fully funded! Thank you!
With deepest gratitude,
The GSB Team