Give Blood on Saturday (and donate to Be the Change Wellness Today)

If you're healthy, employed, and traveled less than you wanted this summer, please make a donation to a nonprofit organization(s) that matters to you and share the donation link on social media with the hashtag #MyNonprofits - encouraging others to do the same. I hope you take part - thank you. 

Like a lot of you I have good days and bad days in terms of Coping With The Pandemic - and sometimes the former can flip unexpectedly to the latter with almost no warning. 

One time that happened was in late May - one of #MyNonprofits, Good Karma Bikes, was hosting a blood drive. I'm afraid of needles but I give blood anyway, so I was excited to do it. When I got there - masked and ready to go! - I marveled at how well that had everything planned out so donors could be safe distance from each other and the staff.

I filled out a questionnaire on a tablet, but when I got inside the Bloodmobile the nurse gave me some bad news about my answers: On the travel questions I wrote I had traveled to Hyderabad, India late last year, which is considered a malaria risk area - which meant I would be ineligible to give blood again until December. 

As professional as the nurse was, it still felt like a bad breakup. I shuffled out of the Bloodmobile without a cookie and no bandage on my arm. The reasoning was the worst part: all I've wanted to do for months is travel - the #MyNonprofits initiative was born from a trip in Italy I never got to take - and I couldn't even go across town to give blood because of travel I had done before the pandemic. 

It left me demoralized for days.  

That brings me to now: Garvin Thomas of NBC Bay Area is coordinating the 4th Annual NBC Bay Area Proud blood drive this Saturday, September 12th at 1375 Blossom Hill Road (Princeton Plaza) from 9am to 2pm. As I mentioned, the social distancing and other safety measures the staff at Stanford Blood Center engages is great but they just can't accommodate as many people as they did in pre-coronavirus times, so every appointment counts. If you're eligible to give blood visit the NBC Bay Area page of the Stanford Blood Center site and make an appointment. You can also go to the Stanford Blood Center site and enter the sponsor code of 2440 (and when you give blood use the hashtag #GiveBloodSBC

In the meantime, please consider taking part in #MyNonprofits by donating to the nonprofits that matter to you - and on the off chance we share one I urge you to please make a donation to Be the Change Yoga and Wellness - a nonprofit yoga studio. The pandemic hit them hard - they quickly moved to hold classes through Zoom but they still had to close their physical studio this summer. 

And the organization is going to pause with even the Zoom classes later on this month - which I can tell already isn't going to be good for my own well being. So please, help them out if you can.

Donate to Be the Change Yoga & Wellness here 

That's all I've got for now - hope you stay indoors today (it's over 100 degrees in San Jose right now) and make donations to some of your nonprofits and tell the world about them with #MyNonprofits. Thanks for reading and thanks for riding.