The Oklahoma Blood Institute visited SWOSU encouraging students to give blood to meet the state supply demand as well as raise funds for Ukraine.

OBI visits SWOSU about every 56 days and make its appearance on the first or second Monday and Tuesday of the given month.

OBI Account Consultant Melissa Santoro encourages students as well as community members to take every chance they can to give back to their community by giving blood.

“One of the reasons we started the OBI Outreach is we really want more student participation at the blood drives,” Santoro said. “When you look at the age of blood donors, there’s a huge gap in age and 10 years from now that could be a big problem.”

For this blood drive, for every free T-shirt that was donated back to the organization, the OBI sends $10 to the Global Blood Fund to help Ukraine. OBI does this every blood drive to help various causes.

As the OBI account consultant, Santoro oversees planning the blood drives such as the ones on campus. The goal for this blood drive on April 4-5 was to collect 80 units of blood. The OBI sets these goals based on researching and making an educated goal based on the recent history of blood supply demand.

The Oklahoma Blood Institute has created an outreach on campus called SWOSU OBI Outreach to encourage students not only to give blood but to be involved in the process. The SWOSU OBI Outreach gets students involved by meeting about two weeks before every blood drive to help with planning and organizing.

“I got started into it when I was in high school and I just kind of kept with it,” SWOSU student Dalton said. “This is like my 12th time doing it.”

OBI encourages everyone to give blood as often as they can at their local blood drive centers, or the OBI blood drives when they come. The need for blood, while not low, is not quite where they need it to meet demands.