The 15th Annual Dash for Donor Awareness Ready to Run on April 18
PHILADELPHIA - Fifteen years and tens of thousands of runners and walkers have helped to make the annual Dash for Organ and Tissue Donor Awareness our biggest event each year.
This year's Dash for Organ and Tissue Donor Awareness hits the starting line on Sunday, April 18 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Registration opens at 8:30 a.m. that morning.
The Dash is a collection of different courses, 10-kilometer and 5-kilometer runs, and a 3-kilometer walk designed to help promote organ and tissue donation and highlight the success of transplantation. All the distances depart from the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and continue along West River Drive and the banks of the Schuylkill River, drawing participants such as transplant candidates, transplant recipients and family members, hospital personnel, donor family members and the general public.
This year's event will again kick off with a motorcade of motorcycles, paying tribute to fallen police officers and service men and women who had generously been organ and tissue donors. This effort has been led by liver recipient Luis Torres, member of the Warriors' Watch motorcycle club and a former police officer himself.
The Dash was first created in memory of Mickey Braverman, a liver transplant candidate who died before receiving a transplant. Mickey's widow, Claire, wanted the event to raise public awareness about the 18 people who die each day nationally while waiting for an organ transplant. Claire wanted to ensure that no other family had to go through the pain of watching a loved one die because an organ was not available.
That first Dash was held in April 1996, with 800 people and raised $17,000 for public education programs. But over the years, the event has grown vastly - and last year's Dash raised more than $400,000 to benefit organ and tissue donation awareness.
It's not too late to get involved!
For more information, log onto www.donors1.org or contact Lori Ray at 215-557-8090, ext. 1152 or via e-mail at lray@donors1.org.
About Gift of Life: Since 1974, Gift of Life has served as the link between donors and patients awaiting life-saving transplants in the eastern half of Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey and Delaware. In that tenure, the OPO has coordinated more than 29,000 life-saving organ transplants and hundreds of thousands of tissue transplants. For more information on organ and tissue donation, please call Gift of Life at 1-800-DONORS-1 (1-800-366-6771) or visit our website at www.donors1.org.
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