Our Team

Elaine Perlman, Director

Elaine leads the Global One Kidney Club meetings & founded the New York City One Kidney Club, Kidneys 4 Strangers, & Vegan Kidney Donors. Elaine is an NKDO kidney donation mentor, a member of the National Kidney Foundation’s kidney advocacy committee, & mentor with Plant Powered Metro New York. Elaine donated her kidney to a stranger in 2020 and launched a kidney chain of 4 recipients.

Elaine has taught for 33 years in schools ranging from the American International School of Budapest to New York City public schools. Elaine has been a teacher of early childhood and grades 2nd-11th. From 2016-2022, she was a professor & the Director of the Peace Corps Fellows Program at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Josh Morrison, Co-Founder & Executive Director

Josh was a corporate lawyer when he donated his kidney to a stranger in 2011. Deeply moved by the experience, he decided to join the transplant field in 2013. He founded Waitlist Zero in 2014 with a grant from the Open Philanthropy Project. At Waitlist Zero he has advocated on behalf of kidney donors to make transplants easy to ask for and easy to give. His work on donor support was instrumental in securing kidney donor reimbursement as part of the Trump Administration’s Advancing American Kidney Health Initiative, a policy achievement that should reduce the burden of lost wages and other expenses by an average of $4,000 per donor and increase donation by as much as 20%. In 2016, he founded the Rikers Debate Project, a national volunteer-run organization teaching debate to current and formerly incarcerated students in six states. Josh’s work has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times

Thomas Kelly, Co-Founder & Board Chair

Thomas is a PhD candidate in Political Science at UC Berkeley studying lobbying in the American political system. In graduate school, after learning about kidney paired exchange he decided to donate his kidney to start a donation chain. He also became interested in transplant policy and met Josh at a conference. The story of Thomas’s donation was published in the Washington Post online, here.