Twitch donates $40,000 to kick off St. Jude’s annual gamer fundraising month

Twitch kicked off this year’s St. Jude PLAY LIVE fundraising month with four $10,000 donations to participating streamers.

For those not familiar, PLAY LIVE is an annual fundraising effort for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital where hundreds of streamers spend all of May donating and/or encouraging their followers to donate to St. Jude. The Memphis-based hospital provides no-cost healthcare to children suffering from cancer and other life-threatening illnesses, plus no-cost support–including housing, if necessary–for their families.

This past weekend, St. Jude launched 2023’s PLAY LIVE with a summit that brought over 100 creators and Twitch executives to its campus for tours, meet-and-greets with young patients, and a special episode of Twitch’s monthly community PSA stream, Twitch Public Access.

During the episode, co-hosts Merry Kish (Twitch’s Director of Community Marketing & Productions) and Ray Apollo (Twitch’s Community Marketing Manager) surprised its four streamer guests smirky, bloodyfaster, goodgamebro, and littlesiha, with $10,000 apiece to launch their PLAY LIVE fundraising efforts.

In addition, Twitch pledged to match up to $25,000 of donations to lilsimsie

‘s upcoming PLAY LIVE charity stream. lilsimsie is up with DrLupo as one of PLAY LIVE’s biggest fundraisers. In 2022 alone, she and her community raised more than $366,000 for St. Jude. She hopes to break $1 million total raised this year.

“It means a lot to us to help our streamers achieve their goals and for St. Jude to accomplish their important mission to cure childhood cancer,” a Twitch representative tells Tubefilter. “Twitch’s community has consistently shown up to fundraise for causes they believe in. We are honored to celebrate our community and their charitable efforts while also increasing charity awareness and demonstrating the value our streamers and their communities bring to fundraising efforts. Livestreaming is one of the best ways to raise money together for charity.”

To date, PLAY LIVE has collectively raised over $50 million for St. Jude, and it has become has become St. Jude’s largest source of individual donations from international donors.