SAMAR's Student Task Force

Are you Asian?
Are you in college?
Are you interested in
helping the community???
Join the Task Force!!!

What is the Task Force?
The task force has been created to join volunteers of Asian descent to work together in the community to help create blood drives for bone marrow donation. Each task force member is responsible for working with members of the area to attract attention to the low number of participants in the National Bone Marrow Registry of Asian origin. Each member will spread the word through flyers, emails, word-of-mouth of the importance of joining the registry. By reaching out to the various communities, the chances of finding bone marrow matches will be increased.

Where should you go?
Members of the task force should network with various people in the community. It is important to speak in religious institutions, schools/universities, places of work, and any sort of activity where many people gather such as a festival.

Who should you attract?
Funding is available for minority donor testing to increase the chances of minority patients finding a match. Minority Donors for the drive should be between the ages of 18-60 years in good health.

Why should YOU help??
Because you have opportunity to help someone in need. It only takes one person to help save a life. Thousands of people, including the minorities are afflicted with leukemia and other fatal blood disorders. For most, the best cure is a stem cell/ marrow transplant from a genetically matched donor. The odds of finding a donor is 1 in 20,000 from the same ethnic group.

Who to Contact??
South Asian Marrow Association of Recruiter Inc.(SAMAR), a nonprofit organization, is an official recruitment group of the National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP) and is committed to saving the lives of leukemia patients through recruitment of volunteers for the National Registry.
Donor recruitment is an ongoing program and needs to be pursued wherever minority donors are available. National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP) is a congressionally authorized registry, which maintains a database of 5.1 million volunteer marrow donors, but only a small percentage of these are from ethnic minorities. Hence, there is an urgent need to increase the underrepresented minorities to provide patients to find a life saving match.