I just wanna say thank you to all of those nurses out there, including my own mom who’s a nurse. You guys risk your lives everyday for the health of others. – A thank you can never be enough, but from the deepest parts of my spirit, I wish you well and continue the fight. – A video tribute to healthcare heroes is part of North Texas Giving Tuesday, which is today. Shezad Manjee, the founder of DHD Films is here with more on the project. Good morning, good to see you first of all. – Good morning, Lauren. – Okay, so tell me about this project, explain the idea behind it and explain what you’re asking people to do. – Absolutely. I’d love to actually start with the inspiration because it will show the personal nature of this. So my wife is a nurse practitioner, works in Fort Worth. And at the end of March, my team had gone all remote, and my wife and I went on a walk on a Sunday and I asker her, I said, she hadn’t mentioned anything and she’s pretty thoughtful and plans head. And I said, ‘Are you going into work tomorrow?’ And she said, ‘Now is the time my patients and their families need me the most.’ And that clarity that she had, you know, I was a bit selfish. I was asking because we’ve got an 18-month old toddler and parents who are elderly. And so this was on a Sunday at the end of March, I went back to my team of creators at DHD Films and said, ‘Guys, we can’t be out on the front lines, but we need to find a way to celebrate.’ And fast forward that Friday, we launched Dallas Healthcare Heroes. Simple 10 second elevator pitches, you take 30 seconds to record a thank you message to our frontline healthcare heroes and our corporate sponsor Energy Transfer donates $50. We’re asking everybody for help so we can unlock $100,000 for Parkland Hospital’s Public Health Fund. And as we all know, the need is greater now than ever. – Yeah, I mean, first of all, shout out to Energy Transfer who partner with their company to donate $50, basically up to $100,000 for each of the videos submitted. So if I wanna submit a video, what does it need to look like? What message should I be putting out there? – I love that question. And don’t be intimidated, because we have New York Times bestsellers that have submitted thank you messages. We have a lot of influencers. But the ones that have really touched me are the ones coming from parents thanking and showing concern for their sons or daughters on the front lines. Also, we’ve got I think the youngest submission was somebody around two to three years old, and it wasn’t from Texas, thanking her dad. So I say, we all have healthcare heroes, whether you’ve been to a hospital in the last 90 days or not. And it’s really everybody, whether it’s a respiratory therapist or the floor nurse, we need to celebrate because they’re leaving the safety of their homes so we can stay safe. And I don’t know a greater sacrifice. So you go to DallasHealthcareHeroes.com, it takes 30 to 90 seconds and you would’ve unlocked $50 for two minutes of you time. I don’t know a better way to volunteer virtually. And Giving Tuesday, I mean, this is prime time. – Yeah, that’s what it’s all about. And also, take the time too to look at the other videos ’cause you will get goosebumps because it really shows the respect and the gratitude that this community, all the communities really have for healthcare workers. Thank you so much for joining us, thank you for this idea, it’s pretty amazing. And we’re gonna put a link by the way to North Texas Giving Tuesday as well, as well as more information about DHD Films on our website fox4news.com. Thank you so much, appreciate it Shezad. – Thank you Lauren, have a terrific day. – All right.”
– This is way larger than any one company.
– [Jody] Shezad Manjee is the founder of DHD Films, a full-service video and motion picture graphics studio and creative agency based in Dallas. And this all started when employees of his firm realized they were gonna have to work from home.
– Third week in March, DHD Films, we had migrated into a work-from-home space. We have a small team of creative 13 team members.
– Manjee’s wife is a nurse practitioner at Cook Children’s Hospital in Forth Worth.
– First week I worked from home and we’re on a walk. I asked her if she was going in to work tomorrow.
– [Jody] Her answer was straight to the point.
– She said, “My patients and their parents need me the most,” and it was that succinct and that clear.
– In the back of our minds, we all know it would be next to impossible to live without everyone from the doctors to the lab technicians.
– We’re lucky in that we’ve had a chance to support a lot of incredible healthcare professions and people call them healthcare heroes now but when you’ve worked as close as we have, you know they’re heroes.
– But the unhesitating courage of facing a new enemy, and one against which we had no natural defense, caught Manjee’s imagination.
– They weren’t asking what protection we have or what’s the transmission rate within our healthcare system. They weren’t asking those questions. They were saying, “Okay, what can we do to help?”
– His answer?
– [Manjee] Dallashealthcareheroes.com.
– [Jody] The idea was simple.
– Do you know what I mean by the difference between a campaign and a movement?
– Tell the people fighting COVID-19 on the front lines thank you.
– [Manjee] This selfless sacrifice is happening all around the country, all around the world.
– It was an instant success.
– First week, we had over a million views on our video just on one platform. People started submitting from India and Cuba and Europe, New York, Boston. Our campaign was created strictly to solicit thank-you messages and we wanted to curate the world’s largest collection.
– [Jody] But Manjee and his team didn’t stop there.
– When we saw the response, we said, “There is an opportunity to amplify that.” $100,000 has been committed by Energy Transfer. To unlock it, we need at least 2,000 submissions of $50 a video submission.
– And they got thank-yous of every description.
– [Manjee] We’ve had music videos submitted, we’ve had people created a PowerPoint, we have a dance tribute, we have poems, all kinds of interesting things. A two-and-a-half-year-old toddler thanked her dad who is a doctor in Virginia.
– I’m sure you, in many ways, float out of there on a cloud each day, thinking, “My gosh.” The stories and the warmth and the humanity of these people has just got to be uplifting and inspiring in every conceivable way.
– One thing I didn’t anticipate was how this was gonna save us.
– [Jody] The result was to turn the company’s energy from lost business to found purpose.
– It’s allowed us to focus on hope rather than fear.
– And if I want to submit a video, how do I do it?
– Dallashealthcareheroes.com. You can either have a prerecorded message that you recorded on your phone or you can use our platform to record a message similar to what you would do on Facebook or Instagram. It gets uploaded. You can then share it and just know whether one person sees it or 10,00 people see it, $50 would have been donated because of your two minutes.
– Something DHD Films calls a compilation of gratitude.
– We’ve had personal screenings for physicians in our network and there is no dry eye in the room. So, imagine after a 12-hour shift, or 16 or whatever they’re putting in, to be able to get this from a cross-section of your community.
– You rock! Thank you!
– I think that’s gonna be magical.
– For more information, you can go to dallashealthcareheroes.com. Now, still to come, get ready to tap your Tony Lamas. A Mother’s Day tribute from a Texas music legend when “More Life” continues.
