Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
News

How We Crunched the Numbers on Kidney Donation

Here’s how we arrived at our estimate that .

Last year, the United Network for Organ Sharing recorded 180 people who donated their kidney without specifying a recipient. UNOS does not include Renewal donors in this pool.

Instead, UNOS included Renewal’s donors among the 1,273 people who directed their kidney to an “unrelated” person. But the majority of donors in this group are friends, neighbors and work colleagues who have a personal relationship with their recipient.

Renewal says that 38 of its donors gave their kidney to a stranger in 2014.

To arrive at an estimate of Renewal’s impact, we added the organization’s 38 donors to UNOS’s 180 nondirected donors, making a total of 218 people who gave their kidney to a stranger last year. Renewal’s donors made up 17% of this group.

This method is by no means foolproof. It does not take into account other people who donated to strangers in 2014. That might include people who responded to social media campaigns or who responded to advertisements, such as those on MatchingDonors.com.

Renewal could argue that its donors are in a separate category from these donors.

Renewal donors know only the barest details of their recipients’ lives, often just the age, sex, family background and one or two other details. People who respond to publicity campaigns often know far more about the person to whom they are donating.

Nevertheless, given the fact that such people exist, Renewal’s share of donations to strangers nationally may actually be closer to 10%. But until UNOS creates a new way of categorizing people who donate their kidney to a stranger, the imprecise method we used for our story will have to do.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.