Bone marrow transplants save the lives of those affected by diseases such as leukemia, but a limited supply of mixed-race bone marrow could prevent multiracial individuals from receiving the life-saving assistance they need.

In response, Syracuse University students will be encouraged to donate bone marrow to help those in need of marrow transplants today from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Thursday from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. in the Schine Underground.

SU’s Multiracial Experience organization and honors fraternity Phi Sigma Pi will co-sponsor the bone marrow drive.

“The drive is part of the MAVIN Foundation, and it’s run to find bone marrow donors for people of mixed races,” said Seth Borden, a junior international relations and economics major and president of Phi Sigma Pi.

Matt Kelley, president, CEO and founder of the MAVIN Foundation, also multiracial, will speak at 8 p.m. tonight in Maxwell Auditorium about his experiences. He will also stop by the Marrow-Thon drive to promote the event, said Kim Davidson, president and co-founder of the Multiracial Experience.

SU’s drive is one of 30 held at college campuses around the country this November, and is organized by the national mixed-race bone marrow donation program called MatchMaker, said Katie Raffaelli, the secretary of the Multiracial Experience and a junior psychology and political science major. MatchMaker is a division of the Mavin Foundation.

Marrow-Thon is important because people of mixed races donate the bone marrow, Davidson said. This marrow is essential because people of mixed races who need bone marrow transplants can only receive marrow from others of mixed-races.

Only 2 percent of bone marrow in the national registry comes from people of mixed races, she added.

“We attended the National Pancollegiate Multiracial Conference last April at Cornell University, and they told us all of this information that we didn’t know; no one was telling us this information anywhere else,” said Davidson, a junior public relations and international relations major.

Davidson explained that speaker Kelley delivered this information at the conference. She said that the Multiracial Experience members at the conference realized the importance of bringing him here to push the cause.

Once Kelley was scheduled to speak at SU, he asked the Multiracial Experience if it would also run a Marrow-Thon on campus.

“Matt asked if we would be willing to do it if there’d be interest, and we thought there was, so we agreed to do it,” Raffaelli said. “It sounded like a good project.”

The Multiracial Experience and Phi Sigma Pi applied together for a grant the university gives for minority programming. The drive at SU is being paid for by the grant, according to Borden.

“We’re getting volunteers, having people put up signs — we’re basically doing the grunt work,” Borden said.

The MAVIN Foundation also produces the quarterly magazine “MAVIN,” which Kelley started at 19 as a student at Wesleyan University, Davidson said. This magazine was the first magazine to focus on multiracial experiences.

“It’s a magazine he started for multiracial people, a support network,” Borden said.

Published on November 12, 2002 at 12:00 pm