Goal of 20 million new organ donors set
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Last year, Donate Life America, the nonprofit that advocates for people to donate their organs, reached an important, 5-year-old goal.
Beginning in 2006, the organization pushed the number of adults who had registered to donate their organs, tissues and corneas from 60 million to 100 million -- a stunning achievement finally attained in October last year, reaching 105 million by the end of 2011.
Still not satisfied, though, Donate Life America said last week that it has a new goal for 2012: to register 20 million new donors, a figure that would be nearly three times the average number of people it registered each of the previous six years, but clearly needed when there are about 112,000 people currently waiting for a donation and about 15 of them will die every day while waiting.
Twenty million "is absolutely a huge number," said David Fleming, president and CEO for Donate Life America. "But ... setting this seemingly unreachable goal is making us think differently."
A big part of thinking differently will come from two projects being developed in this region through the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health and the Center for Organ Recovery & Education, the Pittsburgh-based regional agency responsible for organ procurement in Western Pennsylvania, most of West Virginia and part of New York.
"CORE is one of the best regional organizations out there and always forward-thinking," Mr. Fleming said. "We expect these kind of ideas from them."
The national projects the Richmond, Va.-based Donate Life America will roll out this year include the Flaunt Your Blue and Green campaign that seeks to get local celebrities and everyday people to wear Donate Life's colors, similar to how Susan G. Komen for the Cure has made pink associated with breast cancer awareness.
Other programs include a series of flash mobs around the country sometime this spring to bring attention to organ donation, and creation of a Facebook page project called 365 Stories that will tell a different story every day of someone whose life was changed by organ donation.
The projects CORE and Pitt are working on are still in the research and pilot stage and won't be rolled out nationally just yet.
First Published February 6, 2012 12:00 am
