From Nick Brock, Blood Drive volunteer coordinator extraordinaire

The annual TA blood drive kicked off on a blustery April 10th. While volunteers continuously re-arranged the sign-in table to keep it from blowing away, Red Cross was hard at work getting the bloodmobile ready for the influx of donors. The day started slowly as most donors were taking a late lunch during their workday, but quickly picked up speed as the day wore on. Soon, our volunteers were assigning donors numbers to keep track of who was next in the donation queue.

All of our experience with line culture was obviously paying dividends. The waiting was taken in stride, as people stopped by with tasty baked goods, fluffy puppies and the occasional laughing baby. With donors munching on their free pizza slices (Thank you, 107IST partner HotLips Pizza!) and sporting their nifty complimentary pins, the table volunteers checked off the last donors of the night, folded up the table and put away the supplies that somehow miraculously had not blown down the street. All told, we wound up having 51 people attempt to donate, with 49 of them being successful. That is a potential of 147 lives saved, which is fantastic.

A very big thank you goes out to everyone who attempted to donate; Hot Lips pizza for donating pizza slices and soda; Holly Duthie for creating the awesome pins; the Timbers front office for supplying the space and restrooms; and, of course, to all our table and canteen volunteers who made this a very successful event. We would never be able to pull this off without all of your help, so a very sincere thank you to you all. We look forward to having another amazing blood drive in the future.