In the spirit of Super Bowl 50, what better way to celebrate than with an evening of great food, entertainment, and the opportunity to mingle with a few football greats?

And that’s exactly what nearly 120 guests did on the evening of Friday, February 5, at Legends of the Bay. This event celebrated the Fremont Family Resource Center, a one-stop shop centrally located in Fremont, bringing together 24 state, county, City of Fremont, and nonprofit organizations. Additionally, we celebrated the growing momentum in the Fremont Innovation District in Warm Springs, home to a number of high-profile businesses and BART’s next station in the extension to San Jose. The 880-acre mixed-use Innovation District has been a massive project in the making, with the goal of bringing awareness to Fremont’s rapidly growing cluster of advanced manufacturing and cleantech companies such as Delta Corporation, Lam Research, Tesla Motors and Thermo Fisher, among others.

Guests mingled with football legends who not only call the Bay Area home, but are also huge supporters of the Fremont Family Resource Center and all that it does for our community. This lineup included Charles Haley (five-time Super Bowl Champion), Eric Wright (four-time Super Bowl Champion), Mike Wilson (four-time Super Bowl Champion), John Taylor (three-time Super Bowl Champion), and Cliff Branch (three-time Super Bowl Champion), pictured below with his bling. Event emcee Renel Brooks-Moon was right at home with these World Champions in the room. Renel has been broadcasting iconic sports moments to local fans for over two decades, and since 2000 has been the voice of the San Francisco Giants as the public address announcer for 40,000 fans a night at AT&T Park.

While the purpose of the event was to celebrate these football legends, we also took a page from Hollywood’s playbook and showcased a couple of videos featuring the Fremont Family Resource Center back story and the Fremont Innovation District, which outlined how far Fremont has come and the steps we’re taking to be strategically urban. We appreciate Delta Corporation’s opening its doors and allowing us to hold this special event in its new headquarters located in the Innovation District.

Attendees showed their support throughout the evening, bidding on silent auction items, as well as participating in a live auction, with successful bidders winning pro sports packages, family fun and great adventures, date nights, etc. All in all, we raised $56,000, which will go toward improving and maintaining our Family Resource Center so it can continue to seamlessly connect families and individuals to the services they need most, when they may not have other resources readily available.