I Was Diagnosed With MS. Then My Community Showed Up in Orange.

8 years. 8 years. Every single March, our team swaps out yellow shoe covers for orange, and every single time it gives me chills. This episode is a little different from our usual home comfort content. Today I want to slow down, pull back the curtain, and tell you what this Orange Out MS campaign is all about, where it started, where we are now, and where it's going. Hey, welcome to the Home and Life Comfort Podcast YouTube video. I'm Derek Cole, and today we're standing on $12,441. We have raised and donated that amount over 7 years of Orange Out MS. And we haven't asked the community for donations, we're just trying to raise awareness. And we're doing that by wearing orange to your home when you call us over. And if you take a photo, hashtag it #OrangeOutMS, we donate $10 for every single photo. So if you're new to our community, let me get— let me back up a little bit and kind of tell you what's going on. So back in 2012, I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, MS. The biggest factor you can tell physically is by my speech. Some folks say on social media, they ask, am I drunk? Have I had a stroke? That's a new one. I haven't heard that one until this year. But MS, it affects a lot of things. It's one of those diseases that doesn't follow a script. No two people are experiencing MS in the same way. It could be fatigue, muscle spasms, stiffness, vision problems, memory fog. It can really hit you from every direction, and it can change day to day, and it's very unpredictable. And that's one of the hardest parts because, uh, depends on where it affects you in the brain as to what the side effects of the disease are for you. Now, for me, It's towards the middle and the back, so I do have some speech problems, vision problems, fatigue, balance, things like that. But I've learned that you can't control what's happening inside yourself, inside the body, but you can control something bigger than yourself. And that's exactly what we're trying to do here. You can control your attitude, you can control what you're doing, you can control the food you eat, you control your exercise, you can, can control all these things versus dwelling on what's happened. 8 years ago, we came up with this campaign. I decided to do it in March. Decided, first of all, it's MS Awareness Week is in March. My birthday is in March. So, you know, after my diagnosis in 2012, again, we decided to take this on. Every year, the whole Simmons One Hour team, the whole Simmons team, they go orange, okay? Typically at the home, we wear our signature kind of yellow shoe covers. Yellow is our main color for the One Hour brand. So in March, we go orange to, to raise awareness and to make a difference. We call it #OrangeOutMS. So if you follow that hashtag on social, you can see some of the photos I'm talking about. Hashtag OrangeOutMS is how you get there. So let me walk you through how this thing actually works. So all month long, our technicians wear orange. They come to your home, they show up, they tell you the story of MS. They're in orange, why they're in orange, what MS is. We also have some cards that briefly tell you about MS and, and my journey and, and what the cause is all about. So when you take a photo, anything orange counts. It could be the flyer, it could be a shirt, could be shoes, could be a wristband. It doesn't need to be a Siemens technician with you in the frame. Anything orange. Again, orange shirt, uh, Syracuse, Miami, uh, whatever you have, snap it, post it on social. Orange out, MS. #OrangeOutMS. We'll find it, we'll see it, we'll post it on our feed, and we'll also donate $10 to the National MS Society. For every photo submitted, we donate $10 at the end of the month. It's that simple. I want to be really clear about something. This campaign doesn't run on corporate sponsorships. There's no big check from some company that put their logo somewhere. There's none of that. It's literally, it's literally built one photo at a time. Uh, one person, one moment, $10. That's the model. The model is to raise awareness, to get people involved, to get the community involved, and you do that by stamping orange, stamping a photo in orange, Orange Out MS. That's what $12,441 actually means. So this is the 8th year we've donated that much to date. And when you say that number out loud, $12,000, uh, it kind of hits a little different because again, it's not a sponsorship, there's no gala, there's there's no golf tournament. It's just one photo, one post, one client at a time who decided to take a moment of their day to hold up the card, take a photo in orange to support the mission. And that really gets to me, and I want to be really clear, uh, it's not a marketing play. The mission is very personal. Again, we do it every March, but raising awareness, raising money for MS is very important, and it's personal. I mean, I have the disease. You know, MS doesn't have a cure yet, but the more we can give the research, the more we can have awareness Every dollar goes to the National MS Society, and that funds the science and the programs and the support systems that people with this disease depend on every single day. So here's what I need from you this month. Number 1, grab something orange. It doesn't matter what it is, doesn't matter how much orange it is. It doesn't have to be a whole orange. It could be a hint of orange in there somewhere. It can be Miami, it can be Syracuse, whatever the colors are, um, that's fine. Grab that, take a photo, put it on your social media feed. Put it on your social media feed. Hashtag OrangeOutMS. That's it. That's your job. That's all you gotta do. We can handle the rest. And if you want to go further, if you want to take it another step and actually donate as well, you can go to simmons1hour.com/ms. Also, I made a place on the simmons1hour.com website, uh, says Year 8, orange out, MS. That's going to take you to the same spot, but it's simmons1hour.com. If you see one of our trucks this month or a Simmons One Hour Techs come to your house and he's wearing orange shoe covers, give him a smile. They're carrying out the calls, every single call, one call at a time. I couldn't be more prouder of my team for doing this for me and for the community. Thanks for listening to the Home and Life Covered Podcast. I'm Derek Cole. Take care of yourselves, and somebody take a photo in orange today.