For 10 years, Gift of Life Marrow Registry has participated in World Marrow Donor Day (WMDD), the annual day of recognition thanking donors worldwide for volunteering to save lives. This year, the event fell on September 21, 2024.
Th first WMDD was organized in 2014 by the World Marrow Donor Association (WMDA), which sets international standards for registry operations and manages the worldwide database of donors. Doctors and transplant centers can search the database in the hope of finding matching donors for their patients. Today, more than 42 million volunteers are active in the worldwide registry database.
Even so, not every patient can find a matching donor due to low representation of their ethnic groups in the registries. WMDA emphasizes that many more donors from a wider diversity of ethnicities and genetic heritages are urgently needed to save more lives.
Gift of Life worked with the aerial banner firm High Exposure Aerial Advertising from New Jersey to bring the news about World Marrow Donor Day to everyone in South Florida! The banner was shared along the beaches of Broward and Palm Beach counties and then flew inland to circle over Gift of Life’s offices in Boca Raton and Florida Atlantic University.
The organization also set up a Gift of Life-branded orange tent to publicize the fly-by, which was witnessed by tens of thousands of beach goers from Ft. Lauderdale to Delray Beach on a beautiful September morning.
WMDD also has a delicious component: a “cake-off” contest between the member registries of the World Marrow Donor Association. This year, Gift of Life shrunk the airplane and banner along with the beautiful South Florida beaches down to cake size.
Gift of Life asks everyone to share their support through social media by printing out a card and taking a selfie. Donors post these photos on social media to spread the word that they “Swabbed! Matched! Donated!” For anyone who hasn’t yet donated, Gift of Life provides an #UNselfie flyer. Each year, scores of these photos come in from across the country and even around the world!
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Donors in Gift of Life’s collection center were delighted to learn it was their special day, and shared in the joy, even as they donated stem cells while watching the aerial banner pass by.
World Marrow Donor Day is always a special day for our dedicated staff, who are committed to making sure every donor who registers with us, is called as a match, and gets the chance to save a life is treated with the utmost care, attention, and respect. Our donors save lives by giving a small amount of their cells, and that's still a miracle to every one of us. Thank you, donors!
Please join us again on September 20, 2025 as we thank donors for saving millions of lives.
