On September 27, Irvington Red Cross Club and ASG SIA (Students in Action) hosted a blood drive with the cooperation of Stanford Blood Center (SBC). Students ages 16 and above were allowed to participate after filling out a questionnaire and meeting certain conditions, including a healthy weight, iron content, heart rate, and blood pressure. From there, students began the blood donation process.
“We first need to do a venipuncture. That’s where we collect our units, which will be tested in our laboratory and then distributed to patients in need,” begins Dr. Viviana De La Pena, a Stanford Blood Center phlebotomist, “One unit of blood will go to save three lives”. As emphasized by Dr. De La Pena, the impact of blood donations can be astronomical. Student blood donors such as Nathaniel Alexander (12) felt the same. “During advisory, people walked in and spoke about the blood drive, and I was interested,” says Alexander (12), “I just wanted to help. I’m perfectly healthy and I thought I might as well. I was pretty excited”.
In addition to students’ benevolent incentives to donate blood, the Red Cross Club collaborated with the Key Club on September 20th to create bracelets for blood donors, encouraging students to participate. These bracelets would be included in goodie bags gifted to blood donors, which additionally included a $15 digital gift card of students’ choice from Stanford Blood Center and snacks to reinvigorate them after their donation. Furthermore, students would be allowed to select a class period of their choice to skip by attending the blood drive instead, motivating many students to partake in the blood drive. However, student organizers ran into some issues when coordinating the event.
“I’d say we should’ve increased the publicity of the event,” says Red Cross Club president Kristen Villa Gracia (12), “I think we did publicize it a little too late, but despite that we still got a lot of sign ups”. Additionally, Gracia (12) took note of communication errors that occurred the day of the event when it came to notifying students of their time slot at the blood drive and dismissing them from the class that they were in. Fortunately, there was little to no miscommunication during the planning phases of the event according to ASG SIA representative Josephine Sun (10). “We had a little more work when it came to publicizing, but overall, I feel like we got a good amount of donors,” Sun (10) agrees, “Stanford did a good portion of the work because they brought most of their equipment over. All we really had to do was to set up our gym beforehand”. Due to previously established connections with Stanford Blood Center, there were no difficulties in organizing the event. Although there were some issues in publicity, the blood drive was a huge success overall, especially with the number of donations acquired.
Blood drives are hosted biannually at Irvington High School, with the next blood drive planned to take place during the springtime. It will have the same organization and incentives.
Overall, the blood drive was a huge success, and student organizers hope to continue improving Irvington’s community of students by continuing to host blood drives in collaboration with Stanford.
