As part of the Organ Donation Week celebrations, Geolife Foundation, the CSR wing of Geolife Agritech Pvt. Ltd. requested MOHAN Foundation to conduct an awareness session on organ donation for its employees at a pan-India level. Geolife Foundation has been actively engaging in different social causes and has organized many blood and eye donation camps.

On 13^th of August, awareness sessions in 5 different languages were organized over the Zoom meeting platform.  Ishwarya Thyagarajan, Research Associate from MOHAN Foundation addressed the Tamil Nadu based employees in a session that was moderated by Mr. Rajkumar S, Regional Manager, Tamil Nadu. The session began with an introduction of Ishwarya by Ms. Sathyakala.

Ishwarya began by talking briefly about blood and eye donation. The following topics were explained in detail to the audience:

• Organ failure and causes
• Circulatory and brain death
• Difference between brain death and coma
• Types of donors
• Organ and tissue donation while living and after death
• Hand and uterus transplants
• How are the donated tissues used
• Age criteria to donate organs
• Importance of family consent in organ donation process
• Transplant waitlist, organ allocation and TRANSTAN
• Transplantation of Human Organs Act
• Organ Donation Statistics from Tamil Nadu, India and world
• Myths and misconceptions around organ donation
• Whole body donation
• How to pledge organs

22 people had joined the session and were very enthusiastic about learning more about organ donation. Mr. Vinod Kumar Lahoti, CMD of Geolife Agritech joined the session and addressed his employees about the importance of organ donation and how fortunate we are to have been provided with the opportunity to save lives.

The following are a few questions that were asked:

• How is skin donation done?
• Is it possible to donate organs before whole body donation?
• How to register for whole body donation?
• How old should a person be to be a live donor?
• How is donated blood allocated?
• How is donated bone used?
• Can diabetic people donate their pancreas and other organs?
• How does plasma donation help in COVID 19 treatment?

The session lasted for more than 1.5 hours and was highly interactive. Participants were from different districts of the state and also included a few farmers. Mr. Rajkumar informed the participants that those who wish to pledge could fill up a Google form which would be shared. The session ended with the participants sharing their feedback and thanking Ishwarya for the informative talk. MOHAN Foundation would like to thank Geolife for its commitment and Ms. Kshitija, Senior HR Executive for organizing and coordinating the entire event.