Bone Marrow Transplants

The topic I chose to delve into for this course is bone marrow transplants. This topic is appealing to me because it relates closely to my current professional work.

I work at a local nonprofit (NTAF) that helps transplant (solid organ, bone marrow and stem cell) patients, as well as individuals living with catastrophic injury (spinal cord injury, brain trauma and burns), fundraise for their uninsured medical expenses.

NTAF has a 24-year record (and counting) helping transplant patients nationwide afford life-saving medical care. (Our Catastrophic Injury Program was initiated in 2000, as we discovered how our services to the transplant community could be emulated to accommodate the financial needs of individuals living with catastrophic injuries.)

As a celebration of our upcoming 25th anniversary (October 2008), we launched our Save a Life Initiative--a year-long commitment (started in October 2007) to educate the local community about the importance of bone marrow donation, with a goal of registering 250 potential marrow donors to the National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP) Registry.

We have chosen this initiative as a fitting means to commemorate our silver anniversary, because part of our mission as an organization is to conduct transplant donor awareness. (The need is great. Currently 97,000 individuals await transplantation. The need to raise awareness is critical.)

NTAF is currently working with 102 bone marrow transplant patients, many are holding marrow donor registration drives (in search of life-saving marrow donor matches) in their hometowns, nationwide. As cancer becomes a more prevalent word in our world-- 35,000 diagnosed with blood cancers alone each year-- NTAF would like to extend a helping hand to the thousands who search for a life-saving donor match, daily, in hope of a second chance at life.

As part of our education efforts, NTAF has and will hold several bone marrow "lunch and learns" in our corporate community (Radnor, Pa.) and several marrow drives in the local and surrounding communities.

I am responsible for publicizing these efforts and creating promotional materials for correlated events. I'd like to gain further knowledge of this topic so that I can better communicate our objectives and the "need" through beautiful and action-driven materials (for web and print).