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Red Cross, CIAA Increase Minority Blood and Bone Marrow Donations
Written by
Lesly Hallman
, Staff Writer, RedCross.org
Monday, March 01, 2004 — This year more than 90,000 fans attended the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association’s annual basketball tournament, many of them potential American Red Cross blood donors. The Red Cross has become an integral part of the festivities—from recruiting students to become blood donors at the tournament’s “Career Day” to awarding prizes to schools with the largest increase in on-campus blood donations during the final ceremonies.
For the fourth consecutive year, the Red Cross was a proud participant in the tournament, held Feb. 23-28 in Raleigh, N.C. The tournament has become more than just an athletic event, and now includes five days of events including a fashion show, concerts, a step show, and a career fair in addition to men’s and women’s basketball.
Student volunteers encourage blood and bone marrow donations during the tournament. |
The oldest conference of Historically Black Colleges and Universities in the country, the CIAA is made up of 12 schools located in the Southeastern United States. CIAA Commissioner Leon Kerry, a recipient of a life-saving blood transfusion, has invited the Red Cross to participate for the past four years to promote its goal of increasing blood and bone marrow donations among African-Americans.
Every year at least 200 bone marrow donors are typed and added to the National Marrow Donor Program Registry during the tournament. The Red Cross, led by the Carolinas Blood Services Region, partnered this year with Carolina Organ Donor Services, the area’s organ procurement agency, and the Duke University Sickle Cell center, to promote their important missions as well
“The ultimate objective of the Red Cross-CIAA partnership is to educate more African-American college students about the importance of becoming regular donors,” said Merle Schneider, Red Cross Biomedical Diversity Officer. “Working with the CIAA has just been an incredible opportunity. The value that the Red Cross gets from meeting with and educating so many people at one event is phenomenal.”
In addition to the awards given out on the basketball court, participating schools win for their commitment to blood donation on campus. Trophies are presented to the Homecoming Queens of the winning colleges or universities that collected the most blood over the previous year, those who made the greatest improvement, and also to those with the most bone marrow and sickle cell screening numbers.
The Red Cross-CIAA partnership began in the early 1990s when students and faculty at North Carolina Central University decided to commit themselves to working with the Red Cross in a way that benefited both the school and the community at large. The school also added volunteer work in the health services to its curriculum.
“We wanted to teach our students how to communicate an important health need, for example, and blood donation is a part of that,” said Dr. Ted Parrish, a member of the Red Cross National Diversity Council and a professor at North Carolina Central State, a CIAA-member school.
The program has grown by roughly 100 students a year and now nearly 800 have participated in programs supporting the Red Cross and other public health initiatives. “The students loved the idea of getting publicity for their schools while performing such positive community service activities,” Parrish said. Those students make up many of the volunteers that represent the Red Cross at the CIAA tournament each year.
The program developed at NCCU has become a model for colleges and universities nationwide, including others in the CIAA.
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