For 11 years, Gift of Life has organized a team of highly-motivated interns at colleges and universities across the country through its Campus Ambassador Program. Since 2023, selected high-performing interns have been invited to visit the organization's headquarters in Boca Raton, Florida, to learn from each other and Gift of Life team members about the donation process and how to better serve their communities. This year, 65 of the top Campus Ambassadors participated in two educational retreats, one from July 20 – 23 and the second from August 10 – 13.

For two education-packed days, students learned about running successful recruitment drives on their college campuses, managing volunteers, and the science that makes curing blood cancer and inherited autoimmune disorders possible. Students also toured Gift of Life’s state-of-the-art Adelson Collection Center and visited each department to understand how the registry helps to save so many lives.

Since the program’s inception, the Campus Ambassadors, or CAPs, have added more than 136,000 new donors to the registry through holding on-campus recruitment drives, resulting in over 9,100 matches for patients, and 939 completed lifesaving stem cell and marrow transplants. Because the stem cell donors most often requested by transplant centers are 18 to 35 years old, college campuses are the idea places to recruit volunteer donors. 

This year, the curriculum featured in-depth sessions on partnering with other on-campus organizations to hold drives, becoming a registered student organization on campus (required by many schools in order to run tabling events on campus), and panel discussions highlighting the experiences of other CAPs, including two students among them who were also transplant recipients and cancer survivors.

“The purpose of the retreats is to celebrate the successes of our Campus Ambassadors and to give them the opportunity to learn from their peers,” said Gift of Life’s Donor Recruitment Director Chris Camacho, who leads the program. “These retreats are a reward and a form of advanced training for our top ambassadors based on performance and community impact.”

On top of the peer-to-peer roundtable discussions and tours of Gift of Life’s facility, these inspiring college students also heard from the organization’s Chief Medical Officers and team members from the Center for Cell and Gene Therapy. 

The retreats weren’t all education, though! These dedicated college students stayed at a hotel minutes from the beach in downtown Boca Raton, and were treated to a fun evening event at Top Golf and dinner at Yard House restaurant.

“The Campus Ambassador Program stands at the forefront of Gift of Life’s mission to grow our lifesaving registry,” said Camacho. “I am continually inspired by how our ambassadors not only achieve remarkable results, but also raise the bar year after year. Our CAP Retreats celebrate these incredible achievements while collaborating on bold new strategies that will propel the program into the future.”

In the 2025-26 academic year, 527 CAPs will represent Gift of Life at 130 universities across the country. These students will be making educational presentations on campus about the registry’s mission and running hundreds of recruitment drives to add new donors and diversify the registry. A list of upcoming drives and their locations, sortable by state, may be found on our Events page.

If you or a family member would like to serve as a Campus Ambassador, please visit our website for more information and to apply.