2019 Rose Parade Recap

Happy new year from LifeCenter Northwest!

This New Year’s holiday, LifeCenter Northwest accompanied the family of organ and tissue donor Joel Eggert to the 130th Rose Parade in Pasadena, California to celebrate Joel’s legacy of generosity through his gifts of life. Joel became a donor at Harborview Medical Center in 2016 and his legacy lives on in recipients of his organs, corneas, and tissue.

Organizations from across our nation sponsored donor families, living donors, and transplant recipients in participating in many activities coordinated by OneLegacy. These activities allowed individuals and families to connect and share their own connections with organ and tissue donation, while seeing firsthand the impacts of the decision to donate and providing the gift of life.

Donor families met the decorators who created their loved one’s floragraph, which are the floral portraits that were placed on the Donate Life float to honor the donors’ generosity. Joel’s family had the opportunity to meet his floragraph decorator, Ellen Green, who shared that honoring donors with these floral portraits at the Rose Parade is a “positive way of informing people about organ donation.”

Joel’s family also had the opportunity to join LifeCenter in decorating the Donate Life Float with other donor families and the 2019 float participants, which included living donors and transplant recipients who were float riders and float walkers. The decorating process was followed by a float judging the following day, in which awards were given out. The Donate Life float won the “Most outstanding float design and dramatic impact” with its theme “Rhythm of the Heart.”

LifeCenter joined Joel’s family in ringing in the New Year at the celebration in Hilton Pasadena Hotel’s International Ballroom and shared the touching moment of watching the Donate Life Float pass by at the Rose Parade on New Year’s Day. It was an immensely beautiful way to honor Joel and celebrate his legacy as we begin a new year.

This eventful trip was capped off with the notable Rose Bowl, where the University of Washington (UW) Huskies faced off the Ohio State Buckeyes. Though the Huskies lost by 5 points, it was still a great way to wrap up the weekend.

LifeCenter would like to give a huge shout out to OneLegacy for their commitment to uniting the donation and transplantation community in an eventful holiday full of impact and celebration in Pasadena. The Rose Parade always serves as an impactful way to promote the importance of organ, eye, and tissue donation.

LifeCenter is thankful for another memorable and successful year of celebrating the New Year and honoring the legacy of a local donor at the Rose Parade, and for such a touching way to simultaneously wrap up 2018 and enter 2019. LifeCenter is also thankful to be a part of a community that continues to raise awareness on the impacts of organ and tissue donation.

For more photos from the 2019 Rose Parade, check out our Facebook page.