The first of ten days she stays put

In her own words, this is what an awareness day is: "I stay where I am to educate about donors, transplants, how and why they should join." There are ten of them spread across the route, and Everett gets the first. No miles, no schedule to keep — just a day somewhere public in the downtown core, available to whoever comes by.

The questions she can answer are the ordinary ones people are slightly embarrassed to ask. What is actually taken, and from where. Whether it hurts. What the swab is — a cheek swab, in a kit that arrives in the mail. Why age matters. Why ancestry affects the odds of finding a match. What happened to her granddaughter, and what a stranger in Germany did about it.

It is worth being exact about what the Jada Bascom Foundation is and is not. It is not a registry. It does not mail swab kits, it does not do HLA typing, it does not collect anyone's cells, and it does not decide who is eligible. It points people to the organization that does. In the United States that is NMDP, whose own published requirements are: between the ages of 18 and 35, a resident of the U.S. or its territories or freely associated states, able to meet NMDP's health guidelines, and not already registered through another U.S. organization. You order the kit online, swab your cheeks, and mail it back in the prepaid envelope. There is no charge. If you join, NMDP says you stay listed as a potential donor until you are 61, unless you ask to be removed.

Nobody has to decide anything standing on a sidewalk in Everett. Going home to think about it, or to talk it over with family, is a perfectly normal response. The point of the day is that the question gets asked out loud at all — because the whole system depends on people who are not sick, and have no reason to be thinking about marrow, choosing to be findable anyway. Torsten Huber made that decision more than a year before Jada Bascom was born.