August 2015, Vol 5, Issue 8

Rakta Kranti

Dengue continued to be the biggest challenge to deal with for all teams at Sankalp. For Rakta Kranti, it was to maintain a steady supply of blood in the city. The plan was to have atleast 15-20 blood donation drives in this period. However, in total 13 blood donation drives were organized by the team leading to a collection of 1078 units of blood.

November 14 2011 saw the birth of a new commitment for volunteers at Sankalp. From a bunch of volunteers taking up emergency blood requests and organizing a few blood donation drives, we took up something more serious and potentially game changing.

When people go beyond their zone of comfort and honestly work hard towards something, the results are always good. The actions of such individuals are inspiring to people around. This story is of one such individual. An individual who is a blood donor hero by himself. Sankalp has been organizing blood donation drives at ITPL since 2007. Thanks to the support from Ascendas and Applied Materials, the drive at ITPB campus is held regularly once in 4 months. ITPB has more than 15,000 people walking into their campus on any given day.

Voluntary blood donation drives are the cornerstone of a continuous supply of safe blood in India. Organizing a voluntary blood donation drive means not only making necessary infrastructure arrangements but also creating awareness and education among a large potential donor pool to motivate them to come forward and donate blood. Donor recruitment and retention have been key challenges for blood banks and voluntary blood donor organizations across the world. Sankalp India Foundation has been organizing regular voluntary blood donation drives since March 2007.

It is said that if you stop learning, you stop creating history and become history. At Sankalp a practice of striving to improve continuously is imbibed in all volunteers. Hence training and knowledge sharing sessions form an important aspect of projects. In the last 2 financial years, Sankalp has organized 300+ blood donation drives. In this financial year more than 70 have been organized in 4 months’ time. We have blood bank teams from 7 institutions coming in for drives, close to 200 staff including technicians, doctors, volunteers manage the show.