About

Built by students who are annoyed at a form.

Not sad at you. Annoyed at a fixable design flaw in a government form that's costing lives — and convinced it can be fixed.

Mission

Organ Access Initiativeexists to close the gap between the Americans who support organ donation and the ones who are actually registered. We believe the bottleneck is not willingness — it's a registration system built on the wrong default. So we work on the system: advocacy for mandated choice, research that holds up in front of policymakers, and student chapters that turn the argument into signatures.

The story

OAI started the way most fixable-problem projects do: someone noticed the numbers didn't add up. Ninety percent support, sixty percent registered — and the difference wasn't apathy, it was a checkbox buried on a DMV form. So a handful of students decided to stop being annoyed and start organizing. That's still what this is: young people who think a design flaw in a government form is worth getting organized about.

Team

The people behind it

Anvit Divekar
Founder & Executive Director
Georgia Institute of Technology
Anvit is a neuroscience undergraduate on a pre-med track at Georgia Tech, doing wet-lab research on vascular biology and endothelial dysfunction at Emory — but his real lab is policy. OAI started from a question: roughly 90% of Americans support organ donation, yet more than 100,000 people are stuck on the transplant waiting list. His answer is mandated-choice registration — turning donation from an easily-missed opt-in into an active, documented decision. Since founding OAI he has built a national network of student chapters, authored a quasi-experimental analysis of active-choice policy, and presented at medical conferences including PERT, AANS, and AATS. He also founded ISRM, a global research-mentorship program, and serves as an Undergraduate Research Ambassador at Georgia Tech. His conviction is simple: no one should die waiting, and no one should wonder whether their decision was recorded.

Legal & financial status

Organ Access Initiative is a student-led organization. Fiscal sponsorship is in progress; we are not currently a registered 501(c)(3), and contributions are not tax-deductible at this time.

We'd rather tell you exactly where we stand than imply a legitimacy we haven't earned yet.

The people behind it

Anvit Divekar

Founder & Executive Director

Georgia Institute of Technology

Anvit is a neuroscience undergraduate on a pre-med track at Georgia Tech, doing wet-lab research on vascular biology and endothelial dysfunction at Emory — but his real lab is policy. OAI started from a question: roughly 90% of Americans support organ donation, yet more than 100,000 people are stuck on the transplant waiting list. His answer is mandated-choice registration — turning donation from an easily-missed opt-in into an active, documented decision. Since founding OAI he has built a national network of student chapters, authored a quasi-experimental analysis of active-choice policy, and presented at medical conferences including PERT, AANS, and AATS. He also founded ISRM, a global research-mentorship program, and serves as an Undergraduate Research Ambassador at Georgia Tech. His conviction is simple: no one should die waiting, and no one should wonder whether their decision was recorded.