Mayor, legislators help raise the banner for Organ Donation Month

Waltham non-profit coordinates organ donations across New England 

April is National Donate Life Month, and New England Donor Services (NEDS) and the Waltham Lions Club will host an event at Waltham City Hall on Tuesday, April 1, at 11 a.m., to strengthen community awareness of the importance of organ and tissue donation. 

The event will also honor donor recipients and families and encourage people to register as potential donors.

Waltham Mayor Jeannette McCarthy will speak at the event along with State Senator Michael Barrett, Representative Thomas Stanley and Massachusetts Motor Vehicles Registrar Colleen Ogilvie. 

NEDS is a nonprofit organization headquartered in Waltham that coordinates organ and tissue donations in most of New England. 

Matthew Boger, head of government relations at NEDS, says that “the vast majority of donors” register their decisions to donate on their drivers licenses. Still, Boger notes, “Only 3% of all deaths have the potential” to involve organs that can be donated. The need for organs is great; 104,000 people in the U.S. – and 6,000 in New England – are on waiting lists for donated tissues or organs. 

At the event, donor recipients and families will share their stories about how receiving a life-saving transplant has affected their lives. 

One of the speakers will be Kenny Laferriere, a Charlton resident who received a heart transplant 24 years ago will be one of the speakers. His transplantation story began when he was 8 years old and diagnosed with a grapefruit-sized cancerous tumor in his liver. The disease was successfully treated with surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy. Then, at age 16, he was diagnosed with chemotherapy-induced cardiomyopathy and placed on a waitlist for a donor heart; the time from diagnosis to transplant was 14 months.

Laferriere says that many people “think of transplant as a temporary thing…. Transplant did so much more. It enabled me to finish high school, attend college, obtain my bachelors degree, marry my wife Kim.” He is “happy to report that transplant had a role to play in bringing two new lives in the world, my two sons, Kameron and Kaiden.” Now a transplant donor strategist at NEDS, Laferriere says his work is related to his gratitude. “It gives me great pride to pay it forward at my career at NEDS and help those who need a transplant the way I once did.”

Boger emphasizes, “We need as many people as possible to get that heart on their license,.” – referring to the symbol placed on drivers licenses to indicate an organ donor. Without transplant, Laferriere says, “Folks like myself would not be alive today.”

NEDS was co-founded in 1968 by Nobel Laureate Dr. Joseph Murray, who performed the world’s first successful organ transplant in 1954 at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston. 

InIn 2024, NEDS coordinated organ donations from 648 deceased donors resulting in 1,570 life-saving transplants, placing NEDS among the nation’s top three organ procurement organizations by donor volume, according to the organization’s 2025 press release. For the fourth consecutive year, NEDS achieved a record number of life-saving deceased donor organ donations and transplants in its New England service area. Since 2020, NEDS has increased the annual number of organ donors by 80 percent.