Acknowledgements

Gift Your Organ Foundation today owes its existence to various people / organizations. From the moment this was conceived by three friends, which incidentally began as a project for the Self Expression and Leadership Programme of Landmark Education, various people have stepped up and have provided all kind of support to us.

This page on the website is dedicated to all the people who recognize the importance and the need for the Gift Your Organ Foundation. We also want to thank the various people, who began initially having reservations to pledging their organs, and then for giving us an opportunity to rest their doubts.

Board of Advisors

Perhaps one of the more important reasons for our successful launch is our Board of Advisors. It is not only about who they are in their respective fields in this country, but more importantly about what they have done for Gift Your Organ.

In a meeting, one of the most prominent doctors of the country, Dr. Devi Shetty agreed to join us on the Board of Advisors. The mention of his name has helped us in various places and we’re very grateful for that.

Tarun Katial, the second member to join the Board of Advisors, is a young, dynamic and an extremely successful man from the world of media and entertainment. Tarun not only has kindly agreed to advise us on how we can use the mass media to reach out with this important cause to the general citizenry of this country; his organization, Big Network Ltd has given us Radio support.

And finally, and certainly not the least, we have Lt. Gen (Dr.) J R Bharadwaj, earlier occupying the very prestigious post of Director General Armed Forces Medical Services of India, is today also on our Board of Advisors.

Zonal Co-ordination Committee of Karnataka for transplantations (ZCCK)

ZCCK is the Zonal body appointed by the State Government to co-ordinate organ transplantations in the State of Karnataka. Dr. Ramesh, the secretary has been supremely supportive and actively encouraged us to set up the Gift Your Organ Foundation. His colleagues Patricia and team have spent hours with us and provided us with all the finer details of organ donations and transplantations.

The design team

From the time Gift Your Organ was conceptualized, we bounced off our ideas with Joy (Joy Ghoshal of Marching Ants). Joy has been a personal friend and gave us the philosophy behind Gift Your Organ. He wanted us to make Gift Your Organ a happy organization, to Celebrate Life. The first symbol of Gift Your Organ was courtesy Mr. Ghoshal and we have pasted it below for the sake of posterity, because we still love it – it symbolizes life, which has been presented to us as a gift!








We then decided to change this symbol only because we wanted the phrase ‘Gift Your Organ’ in the symbol itself. This is where Manoj of Thousand Suns came in. Manoj has not only done the new symbol, he created a badge for people to use once they pledge their organs and as well as an icon. Manoj has been instrumental in creating a lot of other designs for the Gift Your Organ Foundation.








From the moment Dimakh Sahasrabudhe, head of Dimakh Consultants, (one of the better know website design agencies in Pune, and perhaps the country) found out that we were planning to work on this project, he immediately volunteered to develop our website. As we went along, Dimakh gradually took on the responsibility to develop the Facebook micro page and ensured that we had a functional and a secure payment gateway so that we could receive online donations.

Events

We would also like to thank Pickafight.com (a platform that showcases various causes and NGOs) for featuring us on their website. They have also shown us a lot of support with designing the collaterals for the Transplant Co-coordinators Workshop that was organized by ZCCK in association with Gift Your Organ Foundation & MOHAN Foundation.

The Gift Your Organ Film

When we informed Sheel about us planning to set up the Gift Your Organ Foundation, he suggested that we develop a short 1 minute film that we could use to spread awareness on organ donations. Sheel took on the entire responsibility of making sure we had fantastic film ready. He first spoke to Shirsha, who has been an awarding winning director of a film for an NGO, to direct this. Shirsha and Sheel not only worked on this film without charging us a penny, then even went about making sure all their contacts were reached out to for this and that all of them worked pro bono. The following people supported Shirsha and Sheel in the making of this film:

Sponsors

Our sponsors have been very magnanimous in their support to the Gift Your Organ Foundation. Tarun Katial, our advisory board member, and the Chief Executive of BIG FM (which has the largest network of radio stations in the country) has adopted this project for radio advertising across all their stations.

We requested Mr. Huzaifa Khorakhiwala of the Wockhardt Founation to support some of our printing requirements and we received approval from him for our brochures and other promotional material. This was instrumental for our ‘on-the-ground’ activities to commence.

Ishaan of OOH Media, as a part of OOH Cares has very graciously agreed to support the Gift Your Organ Foundation. Which means the film developed by Sheel and Shirsha will now be shown across all the OOH Media flat screen TVs across the country.