Loretto Academy’s National Honor Society (NHS) held its Bi-Annual Blood Drive on Thursday October 25, 2018.

The Blood Dive takes place 2 times every school year, a Fall and Spring drive, on the Loretto Academy campus.

The events are organized by the National Honor Society, a nationwide organization which recognizes the accomplishments of outstanding high school students, and is sponsored by Vitalant Blood Center.

NHS is involved with high school and middle school tutoring at Loretto, and volunteer for multiple outside events.

Previous years, the members of NHS have been asked to bring in a minimum of 5 people to donate blood.

However, things went a little differently this fall.

The members of NHS collectively surpassed their initial goal of donors by a landslide, signing up nearly 200 participants.

Julia Jones, Vitalant Blood Drive Coordinator, said, “They set the bar high for their NHS students to sign up at least 5 or more [students] to get their hours, and they went above and beyond.

They were asked to get 127 people signed up to donate; 2 days before our blood drive they called to tell me they had 200 signed up to donate”

The amount of donors the girls put together was so unexpected, that a second day had to be organized to be able to get all the donors.

“These girls did a really good job of organizing it, calling and reminding donors, making sure that donors showed up.

Our blood drive was such a success that we may have to come back on Tuesday to finish seeing some of our Loretto girls,” Jones said.

Tuesday, October 28^th another bus was brought on campus to finish collecting blood, with a total of 20 more donations.

President of NHS at Loretto Academy Carolina Gamboa, Vice President Andrea Hernandez, and secretary Sofia Cortez worked tirelessly for weeks leading up to the event.

Gamboa said, “We couldn’t have done it without the Loretto community who’s been so supportive, and the NHS girls who worked really hard to get so many donors”.

Looking forward, the girls are excited for the activities NHS has coming up as well as the next Blood Drive in the spring.

Vice President Andrea Hernandez said, “I’m excited and I hope we are able to get as many donors as we had this time.

I hope the girls are motivated to get an even better outcome because it’s important for us to give back to the community”.

Donating blood is a longstanding tradition at Loretto Academy which the girls in the National Honor Society hope to continue, impacting many lives each year.