Hillel is participating in Gift of Life’s Match Madness competition, which encourages people to get swabbed and perhaps donate bone marrow to those suffering from leukemia.
Nearly 18,000 people a year could benefit from a bone marrow transplant, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Hillel at Ohio University is doing its part by swabbing potential donors in order to connect them with patients in the form of a friendly competition: Match Madness.
Match Madness is a national competition hosted by Gift of Life, an organization located in Florida that facilitates bone marrow transplants. The competition was formed with the well-known NCAA basketball tournament in mind, which has the slogan “March Madness.”
Divided into four sections, North, East, Midwest and Southwest, sixty-four universities will compete for the highest score.
“It’s a bracket system,” said Lauren Goldberg, the assistant director of Hillel at Ohio University. “There’s a couple of different goals, not only collecting the most swabs, but also partnering with the most organizations or using social media. There’s all different ways to score points.”
Shoshana Blair, the Got Swabbed intern at Hillel, said that social media is a big aspect of Match Madness, so there is a lot of posting, tweeting and tagging involved.
“The only way that (Gift of Life) knows that you’re teaming up with other organizations is if they see pictures,” said Blair. Each organization is twenty points.
Participants have from the beginning of March until the end of April to collect, connect and match their way to the top of the brackets. Goldberg is confident that Ohio University will make its way up near the top, and maybe even to first place.
While the competition is only in its first year, Hillel has been swabbing since 2009 with some amazing results.
Not only is OU the leading campus in swab collection, but with a registry creeping over 10,000, it had its own spot in the Guinness Book of World Records. In 2009, OU collected 2,400 swabs, which broke the record for most bone marrow registrants collected in one day.
“My goal this semester is to surpass our expectations,” Blair said, adding that the fall semester came together beautifully with a myriad of support from volunteers and those getting swabbed.
Goldberg cites Judaism as a core reason for Hillel’s voracious activity in swabbing on campus.
“There is a value in Judaism that says to save one life is like you are saving the whole world,” Goldberg said, paraphrasing the Talmud.
Goldberg estimated that they have 400 volunteers throughout the year working on different drives and trying to convince students to get swabbed.
Traci Schreibman, a senior at OU and a volunteer for Hillel, said that some students are apathetic and that getting them interested is all about a quick, informative first sentence.
“It’s definitely a difficult process,” Schreibman said, “Now that I have done the donation process, I kind of just discuss to them my whole story.”
And it’s quite a story.
According to a previous Post article, Schreibman swabbed herself while going through training and that swab resulted in a perfect match to a nine-year-old girl suffering from leukemia.
Blair said that there are two upcoming drives, one in Shively with Alpha Epsilon Pi on Wednesday at 11:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. and one in The Convo March 21 at 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.
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