Helping potential kidney donors lose weight to qualify: Project Donor at RISC

 Many potential kidney donors fail to qualify for reasons involving their own health status. Most commonly they are asked to lose weight before donating, which may not be at all easy to do.

Here's a post on the Effective Altruism Forum about an effort to help donors qualify:

Introducing Project Donor: A cost-effective approach to increasing the number of kidneys available for transplant   By Daniela Shuman, Ruby Rorty, and Steven Levitt

"We can save lives by helping eager living kidney donor candidates who fall short of eligibility requirements (e.g., BMI thresholds) overcome these barriers and qualify for surgery. 

• Project Donor is an initiative incubated at the Center for RISC, a think tank at UChicago founded by Steven Levitt. Project Donor is scaling eligibility support for living donor candidates by offering free weight loss, smoking cessation, and emotional support resources to help candidates safely achieve transplant. 
• In a 2-year pilot program with 353 previously rejected candidate donors, 14% ultimately donated "

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Here's the front page of the Project Donor website:

"Transplant centers and nonprofits refer organ donor candidates to our program if they have been screened out for BMI or smoking.

Interested donor candidates consult with a case manager, who enables free access to top-of-the-line resources like nutritionists, Noom, WW, smoking cessation products, and more! "

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And here's the webpage of Chicago's RISC: Radical Innovation for Social Change

"The Center for RISC is the brainchild of Steven Levitt, professor of economics at the University of Chicago and co-author of Freakonomics."