Outreach commission helps annual Stanford blood drive

Partnering with the Stanford Blood Center, the outreach commission will host its annual blood drive in the Small Gym on April 19.

Students 16 and older will be able to sign up on Facebook to donate blood and will be pulled out of class on the designated day between 8 a.m and 12 p.m. Each volunteer will donate around a pint of blood.

Outreach co-head commissioner senior Stacey Chen said that the club’s goal is to get 80 volunteers from the school and the surrounding community. The club fell short of this goal with 65 donations last year due to last-minute dropouts. To counteract this problem, the commission is aiming to persuade more than 90 volunteers to donate in order to have cushion to fall back on.

To increase participation and as a thank you, the commission will give volunteers a coupon for a free pint of Baskin Robbins ice cream.

Eighty volunteers each giving a pint may seem to be a large amount of blood, but, in reality, it may not go very far.  

“One drive might only be able to help one person in the end, if one person who’s sick really needs a ton of blood,” Chen said.

In just one car accident, an individual can lose 50 pints of blood, Chen said. In one C-section, a woman can lose over 30. In a liver transplant, the minimum amount of blood needed is 120-140 pints. Consequently, hospitals are in constant need of donations.

To individuals who may be reluctant to donate, co-head outreach commissioner Sahana Sarin said she is confident that the experience will be very gratifying.

“Donating blood is completely worth it,” she said. “Twenty percent of all blood that's donated comes from high school and college students, so if anything else, you should do it simply because you want to help others and would want them to help you if you were in a similar case.”