During a ceremony held in Griffis Faculty Club on Monday, Sept. 18, the Gift of Life Foundation presented NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center with a gift of $120,000 as part of the Roger Madoff Bone Marrow Donor Recruitment Program.
The Gift of Life Bone Marrow Registry is a Florida-based organization with whom NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell works to recruit bone marrow donors and facilitate bone marrow and blood stem cell collections. Over the course of the last four years, the Gift of Life has helped register more than 40,000 donors, helping them to reach their goal of registering 100,000 donors, which are also added on to the rolls of the National Marrow Donor Program.
"We've worked very closely with the Gift of Life and this has become one of the most important donor registry relationships that we have, by far," said Dr. Michael Schuster, professor of clinical medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College and director of the Bone Marrow and Blood Stem Cell Transplant Program at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell. "We have worked together with [Gift of Life founder and executive director] Jay Feinberg and his team in a thousand ways, and I think that this gift really cements our relationship and formalizes what has been true to us for many years, just how important Gift of Life is."
Currently, Weill Cornell conducts over half of the Gift of Life's bone marrow donations annually, a process which is largely coordinated from the Gift of Life Foundation's headquarters in Boca Raton, Fla. The foundation's gift to Weill Cornell will create a permanent donor coordinator position in New York City.
"With such a tremendous workload for Dr. Schuster and his staff, we've made a decision that it's really important to have an in-house coordinator here rather than adding more people in Florida," said Jay Feinberg. "It makes sense to have coordinators on the ground here in New York where most of the donors are."
The gift was funded by an anonymous donor as part of the Roger Madoff Bone Marrow Donor Recruitment Program, a program created at the Gift of Life Foundation by the family of Roger Madoff, who died in April after a courageous four-year battle with leukemia. He was a patient at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell.
Speaking to Madoff family members present, Dr. Schuster said, "Roger Madoff is someone who is not only part of your family, but someone who became part of our family as well. He managed to make his way into all of our hearts, from the woman who cleans the rooms on the floors — and who thought Roger was her best friend — to every single nurse to every doctor."
September 25, 2006
