Welcome to Donor’s Digest
Welcome to The Donor’s Digest! The Donor’s Digest is a blog started by the student organization, Mission Marrow, meant to educate the community on stem cell donation, and the disparities patients of ethnically diverse backgrounds face when looking for a stem cell donation match.
On this blog you can find a new post every Saturday detailing information about the stem cell donation community, ranging from patient & donor stories, fun facts, educational material, and updates on current Mission Marrow events.
For this week’s post, we will be discussing what Be The Match, Mission Marrow, and the National Marrow Donor Program are, and how all three of these organizations work together.
Be The Match
Be the Match is the larger non-profit organization which manages the largest and most diverse stem cell donation registry in the world. At Mission Marrow, we recruit potential donors to the Be The Match registry so that they can go on to possibly donate stem cells to patients in need. Here’s a quote from the official Be The Match website about who they are:
“Be The Match manages the world’s largest and most diverse donor registry. We match patients with blood cancers like leukemia, sickle cell and other diseases with genetically matched donors, willing to donate life-saving blood stem cells. Since patients are most likely to match with someone who shares their ethnic background, Be The Match is looking for more diverse donors to join the registry to up the odds of finding a cure for all patients.”
National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP)
The National Marrow Donor Program is the Be The Match parent company, and oversees many of their initiatives such as Be The Match On Campus, and Be The Match Couch 2 Cure. They are in charge of making major executive decisions and working to establish and roll out new programs. They also keep track of registry numbers and statistics, and oversee the official Be The Match donation registry.
Mission Marrow
Mission Marrow is a student organization founded by four high schoolers working to raise awareness about stem cell donation and diversify the registry to help all patients in need of a match find their cure. Mission Marrow's goal is to raise awareness about the disparities that patients of ethnically diverse backgrounds face when looking for a stem cell match. Mission Marrow started under the Icla Da Silva Be the Match Recruitment Center, working to add new members to the donation registry. The co-founders of Mission Marrow are now the first ever Be The Match National Ambassadors, and are working to educate as many as possible on the realities of stem cell donation.
How do they all work together?
All together, Mission Marrow, along with Be The Match and NMDP work together on one common set of goals, to educate the community and recruit new members to the registry. Mission Marrow adds members to the registry and educates the community with the help of Be The Match employees, and NMDP oversees all of these drives and events, as well as the final numbers and official donation registry.
Be on the lookout for our next blog post on July 25!
