How to Help if You Don’t Meet Registry Requirements
The registry is a diverse and incredible thing, however there are some restrictions that are imposed for the safety of the donor and patient both. People are prevented from joining the registry due to any number of reasons, and the one that will most likely affect most of you reading this is the fact that you MUST be between the ages of 18-44 to sign up as a donor. Because of this many high schoolers are limited by their age, so in today’s blog post we’ll be discussing some things that you can do to help the mission and spread awareness if you aren’t old enough to join.
Spread the Word to People of Age
Perhaps the most important thing to diversifying the registry is to make sure that people are aware that there is in fact a donor registry you can sign up for. A lot of people are completely unaware of the existence of a stem cell donation registry, so having conversations with people in your community that are within the allotted age range and convincing them to sign up helps the donor registry expand immensely. In addition to this, there's many pieces of educational content that you can share out to members of your community through methods such as social media channels, community newsletters, and more! Spreading these pieces of educational content helps to further inform people of how the registry is being impacted by various issues and unavoidable restrictions, pushing them to help and push the mission forward!
Talk to your Fellow High Schoolers
We understand that talking to people outside of your age range can sometimes be uncomfortable, so we also encourage you to talk to your fellow classmates. People who are educated about the registry and the simplicity of the donation process at a young age are much more likely to sign up to donate when they do actually reach the proper age requirements. There’s any number of ways for you to create outreach within your high school, but one way that we noticed was particularly effective was reaching out to our principal and creating a presentation that was shown school wide. This way, we were able to educate the entire student body and faculty at once and inform thousands of people who were previously unaware of the issues we were combating!
Organize a Drive
This is one of the most direct and effective ways to truly diversify the registry while underage. Organizing a drive is no small task, but if done correctly you have the potential to add a large amount of donors and educate many more simultaneously.
The main steps to doing this include:
Reach out to a Be The Match representative to assist you with the organization of the drive.
Create outreach regarding the drive.
Organize a location for the drive to be held at.
Hold the drive!
Identifying your local Be The Match representative and contacting them is the most important step in this process, because without their help you’ll be unable to continue with the drive. Not everyone will have a representative in close proximity, and if you don’t have one nearby, we still highly encourage you to pursue one of the other two methods of helping! Contact us with any of your questions about how YOU can get involved.
Be on the lookout for our next blog post on August 29!
