On the second and third full weeks of July, Donate Life holds a national two-week event called ECHO. ECHO stands for Every Community Has Opportunity and focuses on organ and tissue donation within multicultural communities. Donate Life ECHO was started in 2015 when Donate Life partnered with Multicultural Affairs in Transplantation (AMAT) (Source)
This year, ECHO will be celebrated from July 9th through July 22nd. This means that I will be making blog posts throughout these two weeks related to ECHO. Any unrelated blog posts will be scheduled to be released after July 22nd. For those two weeks, this blog will be dedicated to raising awareness in hopes to increase the number of people of color who choose to sign up to be an organ donor.
Why is this cause important to me? I’m a person of color. Not only am I a person of color, I’m someone who wants to help people of color make a positive impact, especially in a presidency where we’re made to seem like we’re less than human. People of color have just as many opportunities to make a positive impact on someone’s life as white people.
If you would like to help raise awareness of ECHO, there are many ideas that are given by Donate Life. For example, there is a video contest from July 11th through July 22nd. The video you upload to YouTube must be one minute or less, an original video, and uploaded to Donate Life’s Facebook page by 5 PM Eastern Time on July 22nd. Contest rules. There are social media images you can use that are found here (scroll down to Social Media Graphics and Phrases) and are mainly in English and Spanish, although the sample phrases also come in the languages of Korean, Tagalog, and Chinese.
Be on the lookout for my upcoming posts related to ECHO, and I hope I won’t be the only person on WordPress talking about how every community has the opportunity to save a life.
Diary of Self 