Good afternoon, everyone.
I felt like since I had some time today, I’d maybe talk to you a little bit more about Extra Life.
I want to talk about this picture above. Now, this isn’t really showing where I was around this time last year exactly. But, about this time last year, I had already surpassed my goal of $200 and had started approaching my new goal of $300. As you can see, by the end of 2014 (to be more specific, at the end of the 24-hour event on October 25th), I had surpassed the $300 goal by a couple of bucks!
For those who don’t know, I’m raising this money for Extra Life which is a videogame-based charitable organization founded in 2008. It was a way to honor a young lady named Victoria Enmon who had unfortunately lost her battle to acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Since then, it has grown into an international phenomena where people (not just gamers, but people) from all over the world have come together to donate time and money to help raise millions (yes, MILLIONS) of dollars for the Childrens’ Miracle Network! For more information about Extra Life, you can click here.
I’ve been participating in Extra Life since 2010 when I heard about it from the GameEnthus Podcast. Extra Life, at first, was an excuse for me to play videogames and not feel guilty about doing so. I felt it as a challenge to stay up for 24 hours to play videogames. Over the years, I became more involved and started to understand what it was I was actually doing (or supposed to be doing). Since then, I personally have raised $500 over the 5 years I’ve been doing this. I found out that Duke Childrens’ Hospital (the CMN Hospital I play for) in 2014 has treated 66,000 kids and that money raised went to help facilitate some of the treatment along with the entertainment that the kids get to enjoy while they are staying which is an average of about 10 days. Below are some other things that Duke Childrens’ Hospital has been able to do with the money we’ve been raising:
After life-threatening scare, Sampson County family makes flu vaccine a priority
Duke Pediatric Blood and Marrow Transplant Program Celebrates 25 Years
Duke opens center for transgender adolescents
So, who’s with me?! I think we can do this! You can help out by going to my Extra Life donation page. You can share this on the social networks of your choice and reach out to other family and friends!
If you would like know more about Extra Life, you can visit their about page. From there, you can sign up to participate on the big day on November 7th, 2015!
If you would like to talk to the participants and get more information from the community, I recommend that you go to the Official Extra Life Community Site and you can find me there under MajorLinux, of course!
Again, thank you for listening, thank you for your time, most of all, thank you for your support.
–Marcus “MajorLinux” Summers
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