Transplant Community Coalition
The Transplant Community Coalition was founded shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic hit with the vision of developing a central resource hub to help our members navigate uncertain times.
Joining forces illuminated the impact that we could make as a united front and inspired us to keep the momentum going to address the transplant community’s most pressing challenges as a team. In 2022, the Coalition expanded its mission to address the following four core pillars:
Diversifying donors to get organs to minority communities that are disproportionately represented on the transplant waiting list.
Engaging donor families by developing custom support resources and opportunities to elevate the mission and impact of donation.
Guiding transplant recipients as they navigate COVID-19 and life as an immuno-compromised individual.
Supporting those awaiting transplant and their loved ones with custom resources and opportunities for connection.
Mission
The mission of the Transplant Community Coalition is to address the most pressing unmet needs of the transplant community at each stage in their journey.
Vision
The vision of the Transplant Community Coalition is a world where no person ever has to wait for a life-saving transplant and post-transplant donors, recipients, and families are supported every step of the way.
Coalition Members
As the one of the nation’s leading advocacy nonprofit for the transplant community, the Transplant Life Foundation works every day to support, serve and advocate for transplant recipients, donor families, living donors, future recipients, and caregivers. The Foundation’s initiatives, Transplant Games of America and TransplantNATION magazine, bring together a diverse audience who demonstrate the impact of donation and transplantation and increase public awareness of the advances in the medical and pharmaceutical industries. Lastly, the Transplant Life Foundation works hard to broaden and expand the national and state donor registries by encouraging the public to register.
Transplant Life Foundation (Coalition Lead)
American Transplant Foundation
Our mission is to save lives by reducing the growing list of women, men, and children who are waiting for a transplant. We do this by maximizing living organ donation, which is the most effective way to fulfill our mission. We provide a three-tiered approach with educational, emotional, and financial support for living donors, transplant patients, and their families across the country, with a specific focus on Colorado.
The Association for Multicultural Affairs in Transplantation (AMAT) supports our partners in the transplant field as they save and heal lives in our diverse communities.
Multicultural communities play a critical role in America’s transplant system. They save and heal lives as donors of organs, eyes and tissue, need life-saving kidney transplants in disproportionately high numbers, and serve patients and families as healthcare professionals.
Donation and transplant professionals face unique challenges when communicating with grieving families, transplant candidates and patients, hospital staff, and the public with African American, Hispanic/Latino, Asian and other multicultural communities.
Through professional development, cultural competency training, and other expertise born of front-line experience, AMAT’s members offer a valuable perspective to help our partners in the transplant field accomplish their life-saving mission in our diverse communities.
Association for Multicultural Affairs in Transplantation
Ava’s Heart is a non-profit organization that gives critically needed assistance to organ transplant patients who are unable to access or afford it. We focus on providing the doctor-mandated pre & post operative housing, at no cost, for patients who must travel away from their homes to receive transplant-related care. Additionally we assist donor families with cremation and burial expenses, and promote organ donation. Because without the donor there is no life.
Ava’s Heart
We advocate for organ, eye and tissue donation by educating others on its importance, inspiring those touched by donation and registering more organ donors nationwide.
Chris Klug Foundation
The Children’s Organ Transplant Association (COTA) provides fundraising assistance and family support for children and young adults who need a life-saving transplant. The most successful organization of its kind in the country, COTA provides a lifetime of support to transplant families. COTA uniquely understands that parents who care for a child or young adult before, during and after a life-saving transplant have enough to deal with, so COTA shifts the responsibility for fundraising to a community team of trained volunteers. COTA is a 501(c)3 charity so all contributions to COTA are tax deductible to the fullest extent of the law, and these COTA funds are available for the patient’s lifetime. In most cases, we pay for co-payments and deductibles; travel and lodging; the families household expenses while living at transplant; prescriptions; and numerous lab draws and other normal medical costs for the child’s lifetime.
Children’s Organ Transplant Association
Donate Life Coalition of Michigan
Founded in 1999, the Donate Life Coalition of Michigan is comprised of hospitals, organizations and individuals dedicated to educating the public of the dire need for more registered, informed organ, tissue and eye donors. Our mission is to ensure that every individual in Michigan understands the concept of organ donation, has an opportunity to make a personal decision about organ donation and realizes the importance of signing up on the Michigan Organ Donor Registry and the National Donate Life Registry.
At Gift of Hope, we coordinate the organ and tissue donation process and provide education about the importance of organ and tissue donation to the public and healthcare professionals in Illinois and northwest Indiana.
As one of 57 organ procurement organizations (OPOs) that make up the nation’s donation system, we work with 180 hospitals and serve more than 12 million people in our donation service area.
Since 1986, our efforts have saved the lives of more than 23,000 organ transplant recipients and improved the lives of hundreds of thousands of tissue transplant recipients.
Gift of Hope
The John Brockington Foundation
The mission of the John Brockington Foundation is to create a culture in which organ donation is commonplace; to provide financial and resource support for those donating, awaiting, and/or receiving organs; and to promote health education to minority communities who are disproportionately represented on the transplant waiting list.
Keep Swimming Foundation is a nonprofit organization that provides financial relief to families of critically ill patients who require extended inpatient medical care at an accredited USA hospital.
Keep Swimming Foundation
The Michigan Donor Family Council (MDFC) is a non-profit 501(c)3 organization consisting of donor families, transplant recipients, Gift of Life Michigan and Eversight liaisons, and donation advocates. The MDFC is an all-volunteer organization established in 2004. The MDFC gives back to the donation community by assisting transplant recipients with prescriptions, medical and personal needs by contributing to the Gift of Life Foundation. We sponsor donor families to attend the Transplant Games of America, provide college scholarships to the donation community, and comfort blankets to donor families at the time of their loss. We make thousands of personalized buttons featuring the donor family's loved ones at the Donor Family Gathering.
Michigan Donor Family Council
TRIO is a non-profit international organization committed to improving the quality of lives touched by the miracle of transplantation through support, advocacy, education, and awareness.
TRIO is widely recognized and respected as the leading voice of transplantation, representing donors, candidates, recipients and their families.
Through the TRIO Headquarters and a network of Chapters and members-at-large, TRIO serves its members in the areas of support, advocacy, education, and donor awareness.
TRIO
Corewell Health (Formerly Spectrum Health)
Our new name signals our bold commitment to health and wellness. At our core, we are here to help people be well so they can live their healthiest life possible. We bring together 22 hospitals, 300 outpatient sites, 5,000 licensed hospital beds and telehealth services. We are proud to work with 11,500 physicians and advanced practice providers and over 60,000 team members. We are striving to make health care and health coverage simple, affordable, equitable and exceptional. Patients, families and health plan members can expect to receive high-quality care, services and outcomes with a wider breadth of services now available throughout our system.
Mission: Improve health, instill humanity and inspire hope.
Vision: A future where health is simple, affordable, equitable and exceptional.
Values: Compassion. Collaboration. Clarity. Curiosity. Courage.
