Our Impact

With more than 317,000 patient visits at the Stollery Children’s Hospital in 2019, we know this number will continue to grow right along with the child population of Alberta. And, it’s not just the children in Alberta who count on the Stollery.  There are children from northern BC, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, plus Nunavut, the Yukon, and the Northwest Territories that depend on the Stollery.

The Stollery Children’s Hospital hosts the only pediatric emergency in northern Alberta, it is the referral centre for all complex pediatric heart surgeries and transplants, a major organ transplantation centre, home to Canada’s largest regional program for neonatal intensive and intermediate care, and provides some of the most advanced treatments for child-health issues in the country. Through donor support, the Stollery Children’s Hospital Foundation continues to give the sickest kids the best chance to live a long and healthy life.
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The money that you raise through Extra Life will go directly to the Stollery Children’s Hospital Foundation as ‘unrestricted funds’.  This means that the hospital decides where and how to spend the money to ensure the dollars you raise make the biggest impact in the lives of the kids they treat.  For example, the money you raise will go to fund research and training, purchase life-saving equipment and pay for uncompensated care.

Creating Community

When we created the Extra Life Edmonton team in 2011, we just wanted to bring together some of Edmonton’s diverse and active gaming community together for 24-hours of fun and fundraising. Over the six years that’s followed, our community has exploded into something bigger and more awesome than we could have hoped.

In 2011, we started with a little over 50 marathon participants, raising just over $25,000 for the Stollery. In 2023, we had over 800 participants at our marathon, doing their part to help Edmonton raise over $428,000 for our local children’s hospital! It’s an astounding feat and one that rests solely on the willingness of Edmonton’s geek community to band together and fundraise year after year, bringing more of their friends along for the ride.

So where can you find this group of nerdy philanthropists? Our community is spread all over Edmonton’s digital sphere, across our Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Our community grows larger every day, and we couldn’t be prouder of, or more humbled by, their endless drive to use their passion for gaming as a force for good.