Story reposted with permission from The Times-Standard.
Kate Witthaus provides an example of a person I might have thought was conceptually possible but not likely to be a thing. She’s a nepo baby blood banker, someone whose father ran a blood bank in the 80s. He would take Kate to the lab when there was an emergency. She grew up in and adjacent to that environment.
Apparently, it stuck. Kate studied science at Cal Poly Humboldt and, fresh out of college, went to work as a courier for the Northern California Community Blood Bank. She now holds the position of CEO.
Celebrating their 75-year anniversary, the blood bank and its 50 or so staff primarily serve Humboldt and Del Norte counties. This is the area the blood bank draws donors from, and their primary customers are the two counties’ hospitals. There is also some blood donated beyond local needs, and that surplus goes all over the country, which financially helps support the operation. All told in a year, we’re talking about 10,000 donor visits resulting in 7,500 units of regular blood as well as other blood products like platelets and plasma.
To add a human face to the statistics, Kate shared the story of a former employee, one of their telephone recruiters, who had a baby prematurely. The baby needed transfusions.
“When you know exactly who the blood is going to as you’re rushing to the hospital with it, it changes the way you think of the day-to-day job,” Kate said.
I asked what might surprise people about the blood bank. Kate said that one thing is the regulatory complexity of what they do. Blood is classified by the FDA as a drug, so protocols that apply to drugs apply to blood products. “Intense” is the word she used.
When asked what she would most want people to know, Kate said that “nobody wakes up and wonders if there is going to be blood on the shelf if they’re in a car accident.
“That’s because we’re getting the job done,” she said.
But Kate and her colleagues around the country are seeing some big trends that aren’t good. Over the past 10 years, for example, there has been 39% decrease in the number of blood donors under the age of 30. Like the good twin to smoking, people tend to start donating early and keep going. It’s less common for someone to start to donate blood late in life. There’s no age cap, but it’s concerning when there aren’t people coming up behind the people in their 50’s and 60’s who donate the most now.
The blood bank community is making progress in the whole area of who is allowed to donate. The community and the FDA have historically taken the approach of making blood incredibly safe regardless of cost. But with blood shortages, blood banks are taking a look at those screens. For example, travel in malaria-stricken areas and tattoos both used to require one-year deferrals, but recent research says that period can be shorter. People who have travelled to countries with malaria can now donate after three months, while most people with new tattoos can donate almost immediately. Gay men, once banned from donation for life industry-wide, have been eligible to donate since 2023.
The blood bank doesn’t perform continual fundraising. They do conduct capital campaigns and write grants to support major purchases, such as buying a new bloodmobile. Still, like many nonprofits, Kate points out that “we absolutely rely on the goodwill and support of the community” and points out that volunteers perform tasks such as watching donors after they donate and driving blood products around, those sorts of things.
The linchpins of community involvement are the businesses who host blood drives. That would be Kate’s top ask: for organizations to offer to host the blood drives on-site and encourage their employees to donate.
I’ll close by saying that I have given gallons of blood in three different parts of the Western U.S. I used to say, only partly joking, that it was charity I could afford. No longer eligible due to a medication disqualification — Kate tells me that I may qualify again someday — I actually miss it. The people are nice. You feel good. You save lives. You get cookies.
Just visit the Northern California Blood Bank at 2524 Harrison Ave. in Eureka or call 707-443-8004 if you’d like to donate or otherwise help out.
To nominate a deserving nonprofit organization to be profiled, email michael@kraftconsultants.com. Michael Kraft writes the Good Work series, volunteering on behalf of the Northern California Association of Nonprofits (NorCAN). NorCAN, a DreamMaker project of the Ink People, supports connections between people and organizations that work every day to keep our communities healthy and strong by offering professional development, board support, networking connections and more. Learn more at https://norcal-nonprofits.org/.