Hi Shannon, this is pretty easy to do but unfortunately not something I can spend time in the forum telling you how to do. It should only take about an hour max to get something fairly complete setup if that helps for your eLance estimate. Basically you just need to setup a custom query for your events on the home page and pull in the data and style with CSS.
This is a good idea for a future blog post/tutorial here and I’ll put it on the list to do but we have a lot of other things to do so I won’t be able to get to it anytime soon.
Good luck!