Blood drives decrease national shortage

By having three blood drives a year, LT successfully helps in reducing the blood deficit

Mikayla Larson, Reporter

Since 1981, LT has been partners with Heartland Blood Centers (HBC) where multiple times throughout the year, they join together to host blood drives where students and faculty can give back by donating blood to an organization that provides aid to the Greater Chicago and Northwest Indiana area.

In 2016 alone, HBC had over 2100 blood drives and worked with 130 different high schools. Yet only five percent of eligible students chose to donate blood, Heartland Consultant to LT Alessandro Vazquez said.

“We usually get around 70 kids on average for our blood drives,” Student Activities Director Peter Geddeis said. “Our first drive is always the most popular because we have first time donors and the fall sports season is usually wrapping up so it’s easier for people to participate, whereas the other ones tend to fall in the middle of the other athletic seasons.”

By opening their doors to HBC, LT helps to provide blood to 74 different hospitals throughout Chicagoland and Northwest Indiana during a time where blood shortages plague much of the United States. A recent report from the Red Cross states that they are averaging around 39,000 units less than what they need, leading to problems if a disaster of some sort occurs.

“Blood cannot be manufactured in a lab or shipped in overseas,” Vazquez said. “We need local donors to help our patients in our communities that are in need of life-saving blood transfusions.”

By donating, students and faculty help in the fight to minimize this problem, and often get some sort of incentive for donating.

“[When I donated] I got the joy of helping people,” Abby Ahrens ‘18 said in regards to contributing to the Nov. 9 blood drive. “And I also got ice cream, which was nice too.”

Incentives vary from drive to drive so that students will not get the same thing every time Geddeis said. Rewards have included ice cream vouchers, Subway gift cards and coupons to Noodles and Company. There was a time where LT would also get scholarship donations in addition to the incentives students got.

“[In the past] Heartland incentivized schools by donating to their scholarship funds if they met certain goals like number or drives in a calendar year or amount of blood donated, but that has since ended,” Geddeis said. “I think we still continue to do it though because it is a good cause for the community.”

Since Heartland is a nonprofit organization, they greatly rely on the generosity of communities such as LT’s to keep them running and to host drives so that this national blood shortage can be combated, Vazquez said.

“I gave blood because it was a good cause and I would probably do it again,” Ahrens said. “I expected to be very scared but they made sure I wasn’t freaking out and were very professional. It’s important [to give blood] because people can get hurt or need blood for medical conditions and I can provide that to them.”