This Wednesday evening Premier Doug Ford will be the featured honouree at a Reena Foundation gala, capping nearly nine years of his involvement with and support for this very special organization.

He will be introduced by the 2016 honouree, Toronto’s top cop Mark Saunders, who has an autistic son, Graham.

Full disclosure: I sit on the Reena board and first introduced Doug and his late brother and Toronto’s former mayor, Rob, to Reena in 2010 when my in-laws were the honourees.

Ford co-chaired the 2016 gala.

Executive director Sheila Lampert said she’s absolutely “thrilled” the premier is coming, adding that he truly understands community engagement and the value of being able to share with people he’s the honouree.

“He’s certainly heightened Reena’s profile and attracted new supporters,” she said.

Reena and its funding arm, the Reena Foundation, do tremendous ground-breaking work providing services to both children and adults with developmental disabilities and autism. They offer group homes and independent living, outreach, respite care, day programs and camps.

Lampert says they’re aiming to raise $1 million from this week’s gala, which will go towards vital respite and enrichment and will help launch a capital campaign for their new multi-storey residential building in Vaughan.

That new $30-million building, she says, will be modelled after another four-storey, 60-unit residence on Vaughan’s Joseph and Wolf Lebovic Jewish Community Centre campus that offers independent living with supports for 84 residents.

She said their plan is to include all sort of features for a variety of disabilities in the new building design, which is being decided from the ground up. She adds that they hope for participation from all levels of government in the project.

For more information on the gala go to https://reenafoundation.akaraisin.com/ui/2018GALA

SLevy@postmedia.com