Give blood, save a life 

Kathleen Mcnary
VP of Member Relations
Carlsbad Chamber of Commerce

Though the Carlsbad Chamber is coming up on our 100th birthday, there will never be a time where new opportunities aren’t welcome here. The Chamber is constantly looking for new ways to utilize our location, community connections, and ability to reach just about all of Carlsbad to help others and make our community stronger.

As many know, beginning this past January there has been a blood shortage while every two seconds someone in the U.S. needs blood. It is essential for surgeries, cancer treatment, chronic illnesses, and traumatic injuries. We immediately thought “How can we help? Why don’t we set-up blood drives here?” The Carlsbad Chamber has a large real estate property centrally located in the community.

Once brought up internally, I then contacted the blood bank and was so surprised to learn we had not ever done a Carlsbad Chamber blood drive before! We have allowed others to use our space to host a blood drive on their own, but now we would like to host our own and best use our abilities to aid the community.

To get started we gauged the interest of just a few of our active members to ensure we would have enough interest. Thank goodness for you members! We went above and beyond how many people the Red Cross will typically start a blood drive partnership with, and we were able to expand our scheduling with them this month. Essentially, the more the merrier…and bloodier! We will be setting up the next date for more blood drives soon.

We are thrilled to use our space in a new way to benefit the community. Our space is not known as well as we’d like it. We have a lot of space and we are open to ideas, so please reach out to me anytime at [email protected].