What is the Red Shoe Run?
The Red Shoe Run for Donor Awareness is a competitive event to be held during National Donate Life Month as we honor donor and recipients families. This fund raising event serves to raise awareness of the critical need for organ, tissue, cornea, blood and marrow cell donors.
Each year more than 35,000 people from all racial, ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds are diagnosed with life-threatening blood diseases such as leukemia and lymphoma. Many could be cured with marrow cell transplant, but they need matching donors. Doctors search the Registry each day hoping to find a matching “tissue type” for their patients in need of a life-saving donor.
The only way to find the matches so desperately needed to live is to grow the marrow registry. The Rock River Valley Blood Center Marrow Donor Program must continually recruit and tissue type more donors.
The cost for tissue-typing is $52 per person added to the registry. Each year we seek to raise money to help the Rock River Valley Blood Center Marrow Donor Program. The funds raised will cover the laboratory cost for tissue typing for prospective marrow cell donors.
Despite the progress, we are nowhere near the need. Today only 2 out of 10 patients will receive the transplant that could save their lives.
- The need in the USA is 3 times our current availability of donors
- And, 4-5 times our current availability of Asian donors
- And, 5-6 times our current availability of Hispanic donors
- And 9 times our current availability of African American donors
We need committed people like you standing ready to save a life. To learn how you can help and to join the marrow donor registry contact the Rock River Valley Blood Center or e-mail www.redshoerun@rrvbc.org. It takes just one special person to save a life – Let it be YOU!
