At 73, Jeana Moore is spending 45 days walking more than 350 miles for a cause that became deeply personal nearly two decades ago. In 2009, she founded the Jada Bascom Foundation after her granddaughter, Jada, was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia at just one month old. Today, Jada is 19 and healthy, thanks in part to a stranger in Germany who had joined a donor registry and turned out to be her perfect match.

Now, Jeana is walking again—not for herself, but to help other families have the same chance. On September 7, she set out from Seattle with her own pack and no support vehicle, beginning Steps to Marrow 5, a 45-day, 356-mile journey through Washington, British Columbia, and Vancouver Island before returning through the Olympic Peninsula and finishing in Olympia on October 21.

More info: jadabascomfoundation.org | youtube.com

“It took thousands of people to save Jada’s life,” Jeana shared. The first was a nurse at Holy Family Hospital who spotted a tiny red dot on the newborn’s skin. Jada had already needed a blood transfusion within hours of her birth in 2007, and at one month old she was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. When chemotherapy wasn’t working, her doctors told the family she would not survive without a bone marrow transplant.

That meant finding a donor whose tissue markers, known as HLA, closely matched her own, and no one in the United States did. The match came from Germany, where Torsten Huber had joined a donor registry after reading a newspaper article, more than a year before Jada was born. That’s less unlikely than it sounds. Germany has more than 10.6 million registered donors, and nearly 40% of unrelated stem cell transplants worldwide involve a German donor. Jada received her transplant at seven months old. The family met Torsten in person in New York City in January 2011, and he calls Jada his “genetic twin.”

Not every family they met in the hospital was as lucky. Jeana watched other patients who never found a match and passed away, and in 2009 she and her daughter Issa, Jada’s mother, started the Jada Bascom Foundation. Jeana could have kept the work online, but she wanted to reach people “face-to-face,” so she started walking. Thousands of people joined the registry during her first walk alone.

Today the foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit based in Deer Park, Washington. It organizes registration drives, partners with registries around the world, and helps cover tissue-typing costs so money never keeps anyone from joining. Jeana also volunteers as an ambassador for NMDP, the US national registry.

Jeana walks with a QR code on a tag around her neck and another on the back of her pack, and strangers stop her to scan them. In her first weeks on the road, gas station clerks photographed the code, a group training in trail first aid signed up on the spot, and she asked Everett’s City Council to proclaim a bone marrow awareness day.