Darryl’s Story: Mission Marrow Origins
A big part of understanding Mission Marrow as an organization comes back to a discussion of our origins. This week we’ll be talking about how Mission Marrow came to be. Many people who have an interest in the activities we do and the area of stem cell donation as a whole, have a personal connection to the field one way or another. For us, that personal connection was through someone who graduated from our high school, Darryl Dugenio. In our sophomore year, our Health Science 1 teacher had a Be The Match representative come and speak to us about the plights that many were facing within the stem cell donation registry. She started discussing Darryl’s story and the struggles he was facing. Darryl was a 19 year old diagnosed with Aplastic Anemia, and was having difficulty finding a match due to the overall lack of diversity within the donation registry. We were instantly captivated by the story of his issues and were motivated to do something about it. Thus, Mission Marrow was formed.
Main Goals
We initially began with 3 main objectives in mind. The first goal was to rally support within our own community for Darryl and his battle. The second goal was to eliminate the widespread fears and stigmas behind the donation process, and the third and final goal was to bring awareness to the prevalent and dangerous ethnic disparities within the stem cell donation registry. While we were able to successfully create a campaign of support for his cause, to this date, we’ve been unable to find a match for Darryl, and are working towards finding one for him as soon as possible. We were lucky enough to educate many on the issues within the stem cell registry as well as the simplicity of signing up, but there's still many people left uneducated, and from here on out, it’s our job as a community to continue to spread awareness and knowledge.
Main Events
Mission Marrow was formed, but what now? We quickly began planning a stem cell swab drive at our high school. We held volunteering drives, swab kit making events, and community awareness presentations, all with the intention of getting as many people as possible to attend our drive. At this drive, we were able to sign up over 150 people to join the registry in just ONE DAY. Following this extremely successful drive, we held another drive at the International Modeling Exposition, held here in Dallas. Along the way, we gained more experience by volunteering at numerous other drives including the Leukemia and Lymphoma’s Light the Night, a Texas Legend’s NBA G-League basketball game, Children Medical Center in Dallas, and even another high school campus within our own district. These events helped us attract the attention of many different media outlets, allowing us to be on the news, and eventually led to us partnering with many different representatives from Congress to film PSAs about the registry.
These events all led to us becoming the first ever Be The Match national ambassadors and allowed us to push forward with many new upcoming initiatives. While the origin stage of Mission Marrow has come to a close, we’re nowhere near done, and with the help of our community, we believe that it is still up to us and the many others supporting the stem cell registry to up the odds for the millions of underserved patients everywhere.
Be on the lookout for our next blog post on September 26!
