Love Your Melon x DKMS = 13,629 new chances for patients

When two organizations dedicated to helping cancer patients join forces, the possibilities are lifesaving.

02/08/2021

When two organizations dedicated to helping cancer patients join forces, the possibilities are lifesaving.
In early 2019, Love Your Melon announced that DKMS was the recipient of a $25,000 grant to support registration efforts with the LYM Campus Crew program. The Crew program “is an exclusive Crew made up of students who are determined to improve the lives of children battling cancer. In communities across the country, our Crew Members raise awareness for childhood cancer, represent the brand through promotional events and personally engage with our charitable programming initiatives.”
And year one was a success! The LYM Campus Crews across the country worked with DKMS donor recruiters to host 261 drives on 175 campuses and registered 13,629 potential lifesavers.

“The impact of this success out of the gate is tremendous for the patients who are searching for matching bone marrow and blood stem cell donors,” said DKMS CEO John Spinnato. “It’s truly a reflection of the missions of both organizations to support cancer patients and it shows that with the right alignment and motivated teams, anything is possible.”

“We are excited that we could make an impact both financially and through the recruitment of individuals to the registry,” said Zachary Quinn, co-CEO of Love Your Melon. “We laid the groundwork between our two organizations for an even more impactful 2020 and we can't wait to see what is possible.”

LYM worked closely with the DKMS donor recruitment team to create a process for successfully servicing all 250 crews to help them reach their donor drive goals. Each crew is tasked with reaching certain levels to become accredited with LYM. Level 1 involves registering 100 new donors to the DKMS registry and level 4 involves registering 700 new donors to the DKMS registry.
Seventy-three campuses reached their Level 1 goal with approximately 82 continuing on to finish level 1 in Spring of 2020. LYM estimates that 25 new crews will begin their level 1 accreditation and 75 to 100 will begin level 4 accreditation.
At the end of 2019, Love Your Melon gifted DKMS a gift of $100,000 to support 2020 program initiatives. This will fund the tools and costs associated with hosting more swab drives and registering new donors to the national bone marrow registry with LYM Campus Crews.