By Tashi McQueen
AFRO Staff Writer
tmcqueen@afro.com
LifeLink of Georgia’s Multicultural Donation Education Program (MDEP) has partnered with eight of Georgia’s historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), including the Morehouse School of Medicine, to address a shortage of Black doctors in the organ donation and transplant field.
The partnership is currently in its fourth year and aims to broaden students’ career options by providing in-depth education on transplantation and organ donation. At the end of 2025, there were more than 100,000 people waiting for a transplant nationally, according to LifeLink. On average, 17 people die each day as they wait for a transplant.
Now, experts are taking the fight to HBCUs. Last year, Georgia’s Black institution took part in the “Battle for Life HBCU Challenge,” resulting in 222 new registered organ donors.
Bobby Howard, a kidney recipient and director of the MDEP at LifeLink Foundation, said the first goal of the program is to broaden the horizons of medical students.
“Only about 5 percent of all of your transplant surgeons in the United States are African American,” said Howard. “Only about 6 percent of nephrologists in the country are African American.”
“Providing that information in their first and second year gives them that opportunity to maybe shift what they thought they wanted to do,” Howard continued. “What we’re truly trying to get out of this is to expand the knowledge of organ, eye and tissue donation within the African-American community.”
Howard emphasized how vital this effort is for African Americans who are disproportionately represented among patients needing transplants, but are significantly underrepresented among the medical professionals who treat them.
Experts say representation in the transplant field is about trust. They report that patients tend to feel more comfortable with providers who look like them, speak like them and come from similar backgrounds. Howard said it helps people feel more comfortable when facing difficult conversations, such as needing an organ donation and beginning the process.
For students who don’t pursue transplantation, Howard hopes the program still equips them to share accurate information about organ donation, helping increase the number of willing donors.
“It’s two-fold…to educate the HBCUs and their students, but to also have them be a mouthpiece, have them carry the information that they’ve learned so that they can talk to their family, their fellow students and co-workers,” he said.
At Albany State University, the partnership has been in place for around eight years. It has evolved into a campus-wide integration of LifeLink within university initiatives and events, including organ donation drives, seminars and guest speakers sharing personal donation experiences.
John Williams, chair of the Department of Natural Sciences at Albany State University, has partnered with LifeLink for seven to eight years to help educate pre-med and pre-health students on organ donation.
“Rather than wait for someone else to address it, I want to leverage my position here as well as the needs of my students and their desire to also make a difference,” said Williams. “I want to leverage that to try to help solve these problems as much as we possibly can within my lifetime.”
Williams encourages Black Americans to learn more about organ donation, and consider giving.
“Inform ourselves, learn more about the process and then make the best decisions that we feel for ourselves, understanding that selflessness is something that we can pass on to others through organ donation,” said Williams. “Because you never know, it could be you one day.”