GLHS Students Campaign for Blood Donations

About the Authors:
Asa Mattson, Marleigh McFarland, Samantha York and Annabella Zingale
We are four high school students at Gahanna Lincoln High Schoolk who are also enrolled in the Eastland-Fairfield Career and Technical School program. Our specific program is Bioscience. Bioscience is a STEM-focused program that provides students with a variety of laboratory skills to prepare them for future careers.

What is HOSA:
HOSA is a program that we are involved with due to Bioscience. HOSA stands for Health Occupations Students of America. Through HOSA, there are many tests, projects, and competitions combined. The project that we have decided to do is called Community Awareness, where we bring awareness to an issue in an attempt to help spread knowledge on what can be done to help.

Our Project:
For our campaign, we are doing community awareness on the importance of blood donation. Both Marleigh and Annabella started this project last year. Together, they raised over 90,000 interactions and placed 4th in the state. However, we decided we did not want to end there. We are continuing the same campaign this year while adding two new group members (Asa and Samantha).

What To Know:
To put it simply, we are in a national blood crisis right now, which was declared by the American Red Cross in January of 2022. The hospital demand for blood is currently exceeding the rate of incoming donations, this is causing a 25% decrease in the Red Cross national blood supply. The only way to fix this is to increase the number of blood donors. However, it is estimated that less than 10% of eligible donors actually donate blood each year.

Our Goal:
Our main goal from this campaign is to help inspire people to take action and donate blood. We are hopeful that by educating our community, we can help break the stigma on blood donation and encourage people to take action to help save lives.

What's Next?
We were able to partner with the American Red Cross to host our very own blood drive on November 3rd at Peace Lutheran Church in Gahanna. On January 19, we compete at regionals to see if we will advance to the state competition. If we place top 3 in the state, we will then advance to the national competition this summer in Texas.

What You Can Do:
We encourage everyone to look into signing up for our blood drive. To sign up, go to the American Red Cross website and search for blood drives near you. Either type the sponsor code “HOSA” in the search bar or search by the date November 3rd.

Questions:
If you have any questions about our blood drive, our project, or blood donation in general, please reach out to us. Our email is savealife.hosa@gmail.com. You can also follow our Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook @savealife.hosa, our DMs are always open.