How a 24-hour, Utah-based gaming event benefits children’s healthcare
SALT LAKE CITY ( ABC4 ) — Fundraisers come in many forms — and Saturday, Nov. 2 was the biggest fundraising day for the Children's Miracle Network Hospitals , as a 24-hour-long gaming event was in full swing.
Gamers and streamers across the United States participated in the 24-hour fundraising event (called Extra Life Game Day ) which was aimed at raising donations to go to local hospitals — and, in turn, fund critical life-saving treatments, healthcare services, and innovative research.
The heart of the fundraiser? Salt Lake City.
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Tucked in a room on the first floor of the Children's Miracle Network Hospitals headquarters in Salt Lake, lives were being changed one game at a time.
"There's peer-to-peer fundraising, and it is gamers — it's people who play video games, people who play board games — and they come together, all year round to raise money, but they have one day a year called Game Day, and that is where they really come together to up their fundraising," Aimee Daily, CEO of Children's Miracle Network Hospitals, told ABC4.com.
All over the country, from professional to casual, gamers rallied together by streaming, competing, and sharing — all with the goal of raising money for hospitals all over North America.
But, more specifically, for kids like Nellie Mainor, who was diagnosed with a one-in-a-million kidney disease called dense deposit disease at the age of 6.
"It's, like, important to me because it can be used for so much more than just having fun, you know?" Mainor said. "And also, it helps me calm down, helps other people calm down."
Her early life was a series of hospital visits and chronic kidney failure. At age 9, she received a transplant, but she is still on dialysis.
"When I was in the hospital, I used to play Minecraft a lot," Mainor said.
However, she uses therapeutic gaming during her infusions at Primary Children's Hospital in Salt Lake — and she says it completely transformed her life.
"It's helped me calm down when I was, like, in pain or when I had an IV in. It helped me move my hands a lot and like ... just distracted me from where and what was actually happening," Mainor said. "And it just helped me a lot to get through things."
On Nov. 2, Mainor and her family stopped by the CMNH headquarters to not only show off her gaming skills, but to meet with Sam Steffanina, a Salt Lake City-based gamer who has raised more than $67,000 for Extra Life. Those funds will be used to treat kids at Primary Children's Hospital.
"I really hope that we're able to both, you know, obviously save children ... help them recover, and then hopefully inspire them to start their own streaming careers and be able to give back in this beautiful, like, cyclical way," Steffanina said. "Extra Life just kind of creates this amazing ripple of, you know, new streamers that are moved by the cause because they were personally affected by it."
The fundraiser has been running all year, with Saturday's live-streams pushing for more donations — but donations will still be accepted up until the end of the year. Come 2025, the fundraiser will start over again.
"We have a mission that's all about bringing people together, to raise money to impact children's healthcare, and we know that we're doing that," Daily said. "And we're doing that for Intermountain Primary Children and 169 other hospitals."
Extra Life Game Day began in 2008 to honor the memory of a young girl who passed away after her battle with leukemia. In its first year, a 24-hour gaming marathon was hosted with a podcast community.
In 2010, Extra Life became a part of Children's Miracle Network Hospitals — and in 2011, the initiative raised $1 million. In 2012, the streaming platform Twitch began supporting Extra Life, and more than 100,000 participants and donors were part of the event in 2014.
As of 2020, Extra Life had raised more than $70 million for hospitals in the United States and Canada.
"It doesn't matter where you're at or where you live. People need children's health care to be thriving within their community. And that's our goal, is to help raise funds to be able to do that," Daily said.
