<p>I'm involved in my school's biannual blood drive, and I think it's really fun but really overlooked. Do any of you have school blood drives? Any suggesstion for attracting donors, other than assemblies and posters and the usual?</p>
<p>Also the food and drinks we have for donors afterwards is crap. Is it possible to get a place like WaWa to donate about 100 drinks and pretzels/cookies?</p>
<p>Yeah, we had a school blood/bone marrow drive mainly because a girl at our school was diagnosed with cancer and needed a bone marrow transplant so we wanted to find a bone marrow match or something</p>
<p>We ordered bright tshirts that everyone wore around like a week or two before the blood drive to attract attention etc because we all live in different towns and we sold some to people at other schools, we told a bunch of people from our brother school and other schools, and we put flyers up around our towns in like grocery stores and those bulletin boards around. We got way more people than we expected</p>
<p>I think people from our school just donated food but we got a printing place to print our colored flyers for free so definitely see if anyone at your school has connections to a food place</p>
<p>Do it during school.</p>
<p>That way everyone who does it can skip some of their classes or something.</p>
<p>Yeah, we have our blood drives (2 a year) during school, and there's always a plethora of kids lined up to give blood.</p>
<p>I guess if you have a lot of kids at your school and do it during school you'll get a good amount of people but for us it definitely worked better that it was on a Saturday because the adults that work could come and the kids from other schools and all that. </p>
<p>Plus most of the kids at my school can't even give blood because in our state you have to be 17, and we're such a small school so we really had to get other people to come</p>
<p>How the hell did you have a bone marrow drive at your school? A friend of mine donated her bone marrow to her brother and she said it was the most invasive and painful things she's ever had done to herself.</p>
<p>Ah yeah I think it was like just to find potential donors like to match whatever type the girl had, not to actually give the bone marrow?</p>
<p>Don't you have to be over 17 in every state to give blood? Our blood drives keep running after school let out. They don't end at 3:05. I'ms till an advocate of during school.</p>
<p>We have 2-day blood drives anyway. You could possibly set up a Friday-Saturday one.</p>
<p>I believe in some states 16 yr olds can give blood with parental permission</p>
<p>^ that's what we do at my school. As long as you have the right weight, you can give blood if you get a permission slip signed.</p>
<p>Yeah...you can donate at 16 (In NYS at least) with permission. I was going to last year but I had a race that day. A lot of kids in our school do it. One of the incentives is that it counts as 3 hours of community service (Our school requires 15 hours to graduate and NHS require 20 to remain a member). The free t-shirt is nice as well that we get. I don't think improving the drink/food is going to be the reason someone does it, but I think it's a cool idea to try and get good ones to imrpove the quality of the blood drive. Just make sure all the organizers of the blood drive harass their friends to come.</p>
<p>We have them like every month, you have to be 17 and they give you food and such.</p>
<p>It's the same at my school--you can give blood if you're 16 with parental permission and if you're over 110 lbs. </p>
<p>When I was tested to see if I could be a bone marrow donor for my brother, they took blood--and they took a LOT of it. Fortunately, there's are new way to test for bone marrow donor matches that's just a cheek swab, I believe. That should make it much easier to do bone marrow donor drives in schools. I wish we had them at my school. I'd think they would be popular, as we've had several students over the past few years be diagnosed with and die of leukemia (also one who went into remission, but that was ten years ago and even I don't remember her name--though I met her once). On the other hand, our memory over those sorts of things tends to be short, so the real, emotional feeling (as in, they know why they are participating without anyone having to put up posters with the names and photos of students who could have used a transplant) wouldn't be there to push kids to participate.</p>
<p>Ya, my school does it during school. We have around 200 eligible student donors. If you set it up for like, 11-2 PM you could get adults to come on a lunch break or something.</p>
<p>Yeah see the problem at my school would be that there would only be like 65 or so possible donors, and that's just going by age and doesn't even take into account those students who are under 110lbs, or like me have other circumstances like anemia, poor circulation, etc.</p>