HRSA staff honored 25 living organ donors from eastern Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey and Delaware at a Feb. 11 ceremony in Philadelphia sponsored by the Gift of Life Donor Program. The honorees were joined by 200 people, including donation recipients, organ and tissue transplant professionals and public health officials.

The Gift of Life Donor Program, one of the oldest of the 58 donor programs in the United States, links donors and patients awaiting transplants in a three-state region near Philadelphia. The organization has coordinated more than 25,000 vital organ transplants and tens of thousands of tissue transplants over the past 32 years.

Ginny McBride from HRSA's Division of Transplantation presented a Surgeon General's Certificate of Recognition to each donor. Music at the event was provided by the "Special K Band," formed by a kidney recipient and her living donor. The ceremony concluded with an exchange of special two-piece lapel pins between donors and their recipients.

The Philadelphia event was one element of HRSA's efforts to mark National Donor Day on Feb. 14. That same day, HRSA announced the results of a 2005 Gallup Organization survey indicating that Americans continue to strongly support the donation of organs and tissues for transplantation. More importantly, the survey also found that far higher percentages of Americans have taken personal actions to become organ donors since a similar 1993 survey on donation.

HRSA also worked with the Department to promote "Give Five, Save Lives," which urges employers to give their workers five minutes from a workday to register as organ donors. In a Feb. 12 e-mail to all HHS employees, Assistant Secretary for Health John Agwunobi urged colleagues to support donation by taking five minutes to enroll in a state organ donor registry or sign a donor card and to share that decision with family members.

The "Give Five, Save Lives" campaign grew out of HHS's Workplace Partnership for Life program, which launched a "Twelve Weeks of Giving" effort to sign up 400,000 new donors by the end of February. The Workplace Partnership unites thousands of corporations, businesses, and organizations of all sizes in a national network of employers that offers their personnel the information, support, and opportunity to choose to donate life.