Gift Of Life Volunteer, Donor And Ambassador
The Gift of Life Bone Marrow Foundation was established in 1991 as a donor recruitment organization to help save the life of New Jersey leukemia patient Jay Feinberg. Between 1991-95, the organization launched an ambitious grassroots campaign to recruit donors of Eastern-European Jewish ethnicity throughout North America and abroad.In 1995, the very last donor tested turned out to be Jay's match, and he was transplanted in Seattle. Although it started as a grassroots effort to save one life, the campaign facilitated transplants for hundreds of other patients also in need of donors.Today, Gift of Life manages a registry of over 120,000 bone marrow donors and a bank of over 800 umbilical cord blood units. Since 1991, Gift of Life has facilitated transplants for over 1,500 patients in need, over 400 of them from 2002-2007 alone. During that same time period, Gift of Life made 4,400 matches and processed 18,100 searches for patients worldwide. One in 1,000 of the donors in Gift of Life's registry are called to donate their marrow or blood stem cells each year, a statistic that exceeds by twofold the international average.Gift of Life has been a leader in the world of donor registries. It was the first to: utilize bloodless (buccal swab) testing routinely at donor recruitment drives; launch an online registration system for donors to join the registry; establish a Jewish umbilical cord blood bank; establish a donor registry dedicated to recruitment in the Jewish community; develop a secure online system that made it possible for transplant centers and international registries to search and request donors realtime for their patients; fully type donors on a routine basis; become a domestic associate donor registry of the National Marrow Donor Program; establish formal recruitment partnerships with Jewish campus groups, making the recruitment priority to enroll younger donors who will remain in the registry longer, facilitating more transplants over time.