by Jay Feinberg, Founder and CEO, Gift of Life Marrow Registry, and WMDA President, Forbes Councils Member for the Forbes Nonprofit Council
(pictured above with WMDA leadership)
When a child in Brazil is diagnosed with leukemia, the donor who could save her life may be living in South Korea. That’s not a hypothetical; it’s the reality of stem cell transplantation, where 47% of donations cross international borders. The match that could mean survival often exists only because organizations in dozens of countries have chosen to work together rather than in isolation.
As the current president of the World Marrow Donor Association (WMDA)—and as someone who is alive today because a stranger donated her stem cells to save my life—I’ve seen firsthand what international cooperation among nonprofits can accomplish when it’s built on trust, shared standards and a genuine commitment to the patient on the other end of the search.
My organization is a global backbone of the transplant ecosystem. It coordinates a worldwide donor pool of over 43 million volunteers and 745,000 cord blood units, supports more than 130 registries across 56 countries and facilitates approximately 25,000 unrelated donor transplants every year. None of that happens without sustained, deliberate cooperation between organizations that operate under different laws, different languages and very different resource levels.
What has made that cooperation work over three decades offers real lessons for any nonprofit navigating the challenge of doing more through partnership than it could ever do alone.
WMDA’s global Search & Match Service, which handles over 200,000 new patient searches each year, took years to build. It required merging two major international platforms into a single, streamlined system, with the goal of full international adoption by 2027. The reason it’s achievable is that the trust and technical groundwork were laid long before the need became urgent. Nonprofits that wait for a crisis to start building cooperative systems will find themselves constructing the bridge while the patient is already waiting.
One of the most counterintuitive lessons from WMDA is that helping smaller, newer registries in lower-income countries strengthens the entire global network, including the largest, most established ones. Because stem cell compatibility follows ancestry, expanding representation in underserved populations expands the options for every patient worldwide. WMDA provides education, travel grants and direct support to help emerging registries meet international standards.
This is the opposite of a competitive mindset. It’s a recognition that the gaps in someone else’s system are ultimately gaps in yours, too.
One of the most powerful things WMDA has built is a certification program that applies the same standards to a registry in a developing country as to one in a major Western city. Smaller registries don’t get a scaled-down version of best practices—they get the same attention and support. That consistency is what allows a transplant center in Germany to trust a donation sourced through a registry in Argentina.
For nonprofits in any field, this is a model worth studying. When organizations within a coalition hold each other to the same benchmarks, the credential means something. It creates a common language that makes collaboration faster, more reliable and more durable.
The WMDA community has a phrase I’ve come to believe deeply: This work depends on the willingness of members to think beyond national borders. That willingness doesn’t come from a memorandum of understanding. It comes from years of shared conferences, joint training and the kind of relationships that mean a program director in one country will pick up the phone for a colleague in another at 2 a.m. when a patient needs an urgent search.
Nonprofits building international or cross-sector coalitions should invest early in the human connections, not just the formal structures.
When WMDA was founded, stem cell transplantation treated a handful of diseases. Today, it treats more than 75, and new cellular therapies are expanding that number every year. The global infrastructure WMDA has built doesn’t just serve today’s patients; it positions the entire field to respond to tomorrow’s discoveries.
Capacity building, at its core, is about making sure your organization can meet a need you can’t fully predict yet. The nonprofits that will matter most in the next crisis are the ones investing in their systems now, not in response to it.
The lessons offered here to the broader nonprofit world aren’t really about marrow registries. They’re about what becomes possible when organizations commit to cooperation over competition, to shared standards over siloed practice and to the patient—or the person or community—at the center of it all.
Because wherever that child in Brazil is searching for a match, the world should be ready to help find one. And the organizations that make that—and other feats like it—possible will be the ones that prepared long before the need was visible.
Reposted from the Forbes Nonprofits Council website, published June 10, 2026.