Meet your Newest NKDO Board Members!

Joe Haynie:

Joe Haynie is a husband, a father of eight, a grandfather to twenty-six wonderful grandchildren (as of 2025), and a non-directed kidney donor. His family supported and enabled his donation. His dedication to the cause of kidney donation is personal and persistent. He has served as an NKDO Ambassador, dedicating six hours each week at local blood drives to educate and advocate for kidney donation. As a supporter of Modify Nota, he actively advocates for H.R. 2687 through letters to members of Congress and editorial outreach.

Professionally, Joe brings a diverse and global background. Over a career spanning multiple decades, he has held executive positions at Fortune 500 companies including Electronic Data Systems, General Motors, Hewlett Packard, and Johnson Controls, from which he retired as a Vice President. In these roles, he led international complex teams, negotiated/managed multi-billion-dollar contracts, and directed legal and operational strategies on a global scale.

Beyond the corporate world, he has a solid foundation in nonprofit leadership. He served for three years on the Board of Directors for Junior Achievement – Utah, where he supported initiatives to improve financial literacy among disadvantaged youth. After retirement he served as a humanitarian missionary in Cabo Verde, Africa, where he collaborated with local and national government leaders to promote sustainable programs to help and heal the disadvantaged. He spent last Christmas break with his family funding and building a home for a needy family in Tijuana Mexico.

Joe’s hobbies include singing (8 years with the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square), composing and recording music, writing (YA Historical Fiction), cooking, and a recent interest in acrylic painting. Joe has  lived and worked around the world and is fluent in Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and English. 

He hopes his service at NKDO will help lead to a nation where deaths from kidney disease are only a memory.

Debi Kahn: 

Debi retired from her 34-year IT career in January 2020, but she continues her volunteer work in the kidney world that she started back in 2007. She started as a Living Donor Mentor for her local transplant center immediately following her kidney donation.

Shortly thereafter, she connected with the National Kidney Foundation and became a Team Captain for the annual Kidney Walk; as of 2024, Debi helped raise over $160,000. She participated on several NKF panels regarding transplantation from A-Z as the living donor representative, and was even referred by the NKF to a local news station for a TV special segment featuring her family that aired on Father’s Day, 2012. She is currently an Online Community Ambassador for the NKF’s Health Unlocked site for living donors.

Debi became a certified volunteer for the NJ Sharing Network (OPO) when they began to focus more on living donors. She mediated a live donation nephrectomy shared on a screen at the NJ Liberty Science Center for about 250 students interacting with the surgeon as the students’ asked questions during the surgery.

In the fall of 2021, Debi answered a post in the NKDO quarterly newsletter to become a Living Donor Mentor. During the time NKDO employed part-time mentors through the spring of 2025,  she mentored over 60 individuals through the donation process up to and even after their donations. Overall, she was assigned over 1000 candidates. Debi is now a part of the NKDO volunteer mentor team. 

In 2023, Debi was invited to become a Living Donor Research Advisory Council member at the NYU Langone Transplant Institute and the Center for Surgical and Transplant Applied Research (CSTAR). As a council member, Debi works closely with CSTAR researchers to ensure that studies aimed at enhancing the well-being of those who generously donate are understandable, relevant, and useful to stakeholders.

She is currently working to help pass the END KIDNEY DEATHS ACT in 2025, and plans to continue on as a volunteer for NKDO at various events.