No, it’s not some kind of weird sex party. Red Rocks is pushing its partnership with Love Hope Strength, a music-centric cancer charity with headquarters in Denver, by hosting one of the organization’s tents at the venue’s shows and signing up bone-marrow doners — boners, as Jimmy Fallon refers to them in his new public service announcement. Click through to view Fallon’s PSA, as well as another featuring Saturday Night Live‘s Seth Myers, Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig.
As part of the “GET ON THE LIST” campaign, Love Hope Strength will be signing up donors at 25 Red Rocks shows this summer and has released some new public service announcements that will be airing at the rest of the Film on the Rocks screenings. This is the third year Love Hope Strength has been stationed at Red Rocks, and in that time, it has found 26 potentially life-saving bone-marrow donor matches.
“Our presence at Red Rocks has changed over the years,” says Shannon Foley, executive director at Love Hope Strength. “We started off by asking people if they wanted to be a marrow donor, and you can imagine what their faces looked like when we asked them that. They said, ‘That’s too painful, I don’t want to do that.’ We’ve started to give away guitars and other things to entice people over to our tent. Now we have a lot of people coming over and saying, ‘My friend did this last year and I’ve wanted to get involved.'”
Love Hope Strength is known mainly for registering marrow donors free of charge at concerts, but it also puts together concerts in extreme locations to raise money — and also produces documentary footage of everything it does. Last year, the organization hosted a concert at the base of Mt. Everest that raised enough money to buy Nepal its first mammography and internal radiation machines, crucial machinery for cancer detection and treatment.
Key Bank’s sponsorship makes it possible for Love Hope Strength to operate at Red Rocks, where it gets to speak to each Film at the Rocks audience. The organization will be at the Steve Miller Band show this weekend, as well as other concerts over the summer, including Kings of Leon, Flaming Lips and Wilco. The Fallon and SNL PSAs debuted at Film on the Rocks earlier this summer.
“Last week we registered thirty people in an hour,” says Foley. “Our number one goal is to register donors, and secondary to that is raising awareness. Red Rocks has been great for that. People might walk past our tent three and four times at concerts over the course of a year, but then remember the logo and come up to us and say, ‘What is this?’ Red Rocks has been like home office for us.”