This past weekend, 580 people in Milwaukee did something that seems almost too simple to be true: they played board games for a weekend and raised over $46,000 for cancer care at Aurora Healthcare.
That’s it. They showed up, did something they love to do, and walked away having made a meaningful difference in people’s lives. The event was Gaming Hoopla and the people who organized it combined two things they were passionate about: gaming and helping people get through cancer, stronger. And the results every single year are nothing short of extraordinary.
I had a blast at Gaming Hoopla and left the weekend thinking about how often we underestimate what happens when we stop treating our passions as separate from our purpose and start treating them as the same thing.
The Intersection Is Where the Magic Happens
There’s a concept in career coaching (expressed often as an Ikigai diagram) that puts your reason for being at the intersection of what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. The idea is that fulfillment lives at the center, not at any single point.
I think something similar applies to impact. The most sustainable, joyful, and often most effective contributions people make to the world tend to happen at the intersection of what they genuinely love doing and what someone else genuinely needs (this applies to starting a business too!). Not as an obligation. Not as a sacrifice. But as a natural extension of who you already are.
The board gamers at Gaming Hoopla weren’t giving up a weekend. They were all living their best lives and channeling that time toward something that matters.
That’s a model worth paying attention to.
Gamers Who Changed Children’s Healthcare
The Gaming Hoopla event is not alone in this idea. One of the most compelling examples of passion-meets-purpose in the gaming world is Extra Life, a fundraising program started in 2008 by a gamer named Jeromy Adams who wanted to honor a young girl named Victoria Enmon, who lost her battle with acute lymphoblastic leukemia.
Adams hosted a 24-hour gaming marathon with his podcast community in 2008, the first of what would become known as Extra Life Game Day. The novelty of playing games for 24 hours to help local communities spread like wildfire through the gaming world. It grew from that first event into a global movement. Since 2008, Extra Life has united gamers, streamers, and creators to raise over $145 million for Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals. In 2024 alone, it brought together nearly 18,000 participants from over 90 countries.
$145 million to help kids get the treatments they need, from people playing games.
The genius of Extra Life and of Gaming Hoopla is that the ask isn’t “please sacrifice your time for a good cause”. The ask is “get together with your friends, do the thing you already love, and let’s donate the proceeds to something that matters”. That’s a fundamentally different proposition, and it produces fundamentally different results.
A Nightclub Promoter Who Brought Clean Water to 20 Million People
One of my favorite examples of combining seemingly unrelated passions for outsized impact is the story of Scott Harrison and charity: water.
Before creating his nonprofit, Harrison spent almost 10 years as a nightclub promoter in New York. But he knew something wasn’t right. Harrison said, “I realized I was the worst person I knew. I was leaving the most meaningless legacy a person could leave.” He quit his job, sold his possessions, and signed up to spend two years volunteering as a photojournalist on a hospital ship off the coast of West Africa.
His camera became a tool for storytelling, capturing not just suffering but also resilience and hope. Through his lens, he noticed a recurring theme: many of the diseases and illnesses treated on the ship stemmed from one cause: contaminated water.
When Harrison came home and founded charity: water, he brought his nightclub promoter skills (branding, storytelling, making people feel something) to the world of nonprofit fundraising, which at the time was doing neither particularly well. By leveraging the power of visual storytelling through photography and video, he was able to show people the stark reality of water poverty and the impact clean water could have on a community, turning them into donors who felt personally connected to the cause.
What started in a tiny apartment became a global movement, bringing clean water to over 20 million people.
Harrison didn’t become impactful despite his background as a nightclub promoter. He became impactful because of it. The skills he’d spent a decade developing turned out to be exactly what the world of charity needed.
Charity Runs, Bikes, & Other Races
Maybe you’ve even been involved in an event that does this already? If you’ve ever run a race on a weekend, signed up for a long bicycle event, or entered a triathlon, chances are you were raising money for something. Thousands of people run charity marathons every year, not because they were asked to raise money, but because they were already going to run.
The Boston Marathon, the New York City Marathon, and the Chicago Marathon all have robust charity bib programs where runners raise money for causes they care about in exchange for guaranteed entry into sold-out races. For some, like one Boston Marathon runner whose father battled cancer, the logic is simple: “There’s nothing I can do to help them directly. So the one thing I can do is use my passion for marathon running to talk about it with everybody I meet and encourage them to donate money for cancer research”.
Don’t want to run a marathon to raise money for something you care about? (I don’t blame you!) There are thousands of other events from short walks, to hikes, to bike rides that allow you to do something you wanted to already while contributing to a worthwhile cause. And, you don’t even have to organize it or fundraise, just sign-up, pay your entry fee and you’ve made a difference! You can find a race near you right now.
How to Think About Your Own Intersection
I’ve been turning this question over in my mind since the weekend: what are the things I love that could be aimed at something beyond myself?
Here’s a framework I find useful. Start by making three lists:
List one: What do you genuinely love doing? Not what you think you should love, but what you actually look forward to. Board games. Running. Writing. Cooking. Photography. Music. Teaching. Building things. Telling stories.
List two: What are you good at? What skills have you acquired over the years that are useful and transferable? Think about hard and soft skills: Website Design. Writing. Facilitation. Event Planning. Social Media Marketing. Accounting. Teaching.
List three: What problems or causes actually bother you? The things that, when you read about them, make you want to do something. For me, every time I read an article about another environmental injustice, I get emotional. I care deeply about the Earth and it makes me want to do something. Yours could be anything. Cancer care. Clean water. Kids in hospitals. Hunger. Literacy. Animal welfare.
The question is: is there a connection between your three lists? Is there a connection even just between List One and List Three (you can learn new skills, after all)? Get creative. What do you wish you were doing all day long and imagine what it would look like if that supported a cause you cared about. You can find connections more often than you’d think. If you love cooking, you can feed people who need meals. For those who love photography, you can tell stories that change minds. If you love games, you can fill a convention hall with people who’ll raise $46,000 on a weekend in Milwaukee. Shout out to the Hoopla Team, by the way, you did an awesome job this weekend and you inspire me!
The key insight is that the most sustainable impact tends to come from the place where you’re not fighting yourself to show up. Where the contribution doesn’t feel like giving something up, but like channeling something you already have.
The Multiplier Effect
One more thing worth saying: when you combine your passion with your purpose, you don’t just get addition. You get multiplication.
The gamers at Gaming Hoopla weren’t writing checks by themselves. They were doing what they love, surrounded by people who love the same thing, and that communal energy amplified the impact. Scott Harrison’s visual storytelling didn’t just raise money, it created a movement that inspired thousands of other people to ask their networks, donate on their birthdays, and run their own fundraising campaigns. Runners raising money through charity bibs bring their entire social networks into a cause those networks might never have engaged with otherwise.
When your passion is already something other people share, combining it with impact creates a community around that impact. And community, it turns out, is the most powerful tool for change that exists.
What do you wish you were doing more of? What could you combine it with to make a big difference?
Gaming Hoopla takes place annually in Milwaukee. If you’re a board gamer looking for a weekend that combines the hobby with genuine impact, it’s worth putting on your calendar. And if you’re a gamer looking for a year-round way to combine your hobby with children’s healthcare, Extra Life at extra-life.org is a great place to look too.
What passion of yours could be pointed at something bigger? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.