NFL Wife Continues Husband’s Legacy
August 2021:
After Jacksonville native and former Buffalo Bills player Leonard Wayne Larramore died while waiting for a heart and kidney transplant, his wife Naishanda decided it was time to speak directly to communities of color. 
“I truly believe my husband would be alive if more people were organ donors,” Naishanda said. “Now his name will live on through me and my efforts to bring awareness to the importance of registering to become an organ donor.”
To honor the memory of her husband, Naishanda started a podcast on YouTube. Transplant Talk with Naishanda is designed to educate minorities about organ donation and save a thousand lives by registering donors from multiethnic communities.
LifeQuest is proud to partner with Naishanda’s mission by providing guest speakers each Thursday at 7 p.m. Eastern Standard Time in the month of August. One voice. One vision. To save and heal lives.
The series of four podcasts will feature an inspiring multiethnic donor story on Aug. 5, a chaplain chat on Aug. 12, and a panel of multiethnic youth on Aug. 19.
Legendary Dr. Clive O. Callender will be our guest on Aug. 26. A trailblazer in minority organ donation, Dr. Callender founded the National Minority Organ Tissue Transplant Education Program (MOTTEP). The Howard University Hospital surgeon focused his career on increasing awareness of transplant medicine among multiethnic segments of the population.
Ethnic minorities make up nearly 60 percent of the people waiting for lifesaving organs but only a third of registered donors, according to United Network for Organ Sharing.
August is National Multiethnic Donor Awareness Month (NMDAM), a collaborative effort by the National Organ, Eye and Tissue Donation Multicultural Action Group to improve the quality of life in diverse communities by creating a positive culture for organ, eye, and tissue donation. NMDAM stems from National Minority Donor Awareness Week, founded in 1996 to bring more awareness to health disparities and organ donation and transplantation’s impact in minority communities.
Our voices are united to address the number one problem in transplantation: the gap between the demand for organ transplants and supply of donated organs. There is a critical need for multiethnic registered donors.
There are more than 106,000 patients on the national transplant waiting list. Of those, there are more than 3,400 Blacks on the waiting list. There are about 21,900 Hispanics and more than 9,000 Asian Americans on the waiting list. About 80 percent of those who are waiting need a kidney.
In 2019, nearly 40,000 transplants brought renewed life to patients and their families and communities (from close to 11,900 deceased and about 7,400 living donors). Another person is added to the nation’s organ transplant waiting list every 10 minutes.
For Naishanda, the importance of organ donation hits home. April 25, 2021, marked the three-year anniversary of the death of her husband, Leonard.
“I know in my heart I must continue this journey and help bring awareness, especially in the African American community,” Naishanda said.
To learn more about organ donation or to register as an organ, eye and tissue donor, visit https://www.donatelifeflorida.org/.
To view Naishanda’s podcasts, visit https://www.youtube.com/c/transplanttalkwithnaishanda.
