Kidneys for Communities was built upon the power of community.
Our community-directed kidney donation model helps groups like the MIT Alumni Association find lifesaving kidneys for fellow members and their families. This way, living kidney donors can support an MIT Alumni Association member or their family members who are in need of a kidney – even if they don’t personally know the recipient.
Whether you are in need of a kidney transplant, know someone who is waiting for a kidney donor or are looking for a way to help others in your community through living kidney donation, Kidneys for Communities has the experience and expertise to guide you through the donation process. Kidneys for Communities offers a concierge approach to support you every step of the way during your journey. We provide expert guidance, best practices, resources, insurance, a kidney commitment, connectivity to communities to amplify your kidney search and coverage of out-of-pocket costs for living kidney donors – all at no cost to you.
Addressing the shortage of living kidney donors.
With a severe shortage of lifesaving kidneys, many patients cannot find a donor, while others have a potential donor – a relative or a friend – but their blood group or tissue type do not match. In a pool of recipients and donors, there is obviously a higher likelihood of finding matches. It can often unlock a series of paired transplants and save more lives. The larger the pool, the better the odds. Kidneys for Communities developed the first-ever national community-directed donation program. The community-directed donation model relies on paired kidney exchange, where a person can donate their kidney on a community member’s behalf. The member in need and their community donor are entered into a pool, where they’re matched with a viable donor. This creates a chain that allows for at least two people in need to receive a kidney: the member of the respective community and another recipient in need.
Paired kidney exchange is based in part on Nobel Prize winner and Stanford economist Alvin Roth’s contributions to algorithms that help match patient-donor pairs to one another so that each patient receives a transplant of a well-matched kidney.
