Taylor - Blog #11

Tuesday was actually a pretty exciting day because of some surprising news that Flashes of Hope received. In the middle of the day, Allison got a call from an ABC representative who explained an upcoming ABC reality television show called “Everyday Health Heroes.” Started by the producers of “The Biggest Loser,” Everyday Health Heroes is a show around people “who are making a difference in the world of health throughout their community.” After hearing about Flashes’s work, ABC called Allison to discuss the possibility of focusing the new show around Flashes of Hope. Obviously, this would be a huge breakthrough for Flashes. In 2007, People Magazine did a long article on Flashes of Hope, which led to the donation of hundreds of thousands of dollars to the organization from people who read about the organization in People, and were touched by its work. However, since then, Flashes has not been hugely publicized, which means less and less donations have been made in the past years. So, if ABC were to choose Flashes for their show, more and more people would be educated about Flashes and its work in the health community, which would consequently bring in more donations once again.

Hypothetically, ABC would attend and magnify a number of Flashes of Hope photo shoots around the country. For example, if a patient being photographed dreamed of being a Nascar driver, Jeff Gordon would suddenly appear at the photo shoot to surprise the patient. Also, many of the girl patients talk about how they learned how to pose for the camera from Tyra Banks and her show, America’s Next Top Model. So, hopefully, because of her relationship with ABC, Tyra would also appear at some photo shoots to instruct and pose with the patients who are being photographed.

So, on Tuesday, we basically brainstormed these preliminary ideas for the show for Allison to share with the producers during her Skype conference with them on Monday. Hopefully ABC will decide to focus their new reality show on Flashes and share the incredible impact that this organization has on the lives of these pediatric cancer patients.