TAUNTON — There’s nothing like giving blood to spice things up on a Friday.
“I just gave,” said Jay Dorsey as he stood inside the Homes For Our Troops building downtown at 6 Main St.
“And I think it’s awesome that they’re doing it downtown,” he added.
Anyone who wanted to donate blood in Taunton to the American Red Cross on Friday was welcome to do so from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.
It’s the first time the Red Cross and the nonprofit Homes For Our Troops have teamed up to collect donated blood.
The five-hour session was held in the ground-floor cafeteria of the Taunton nonprofit group.
Since its inception in 2004, Homes For Our Troops has provided nearly 250 mortgage-free, specially built, handicap-adaptive houses — in more than 40 states — for military veterans who have lost limbs, suffered traumatic brain injury or experienced paralysis while having served either in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Dorsey, who owns two buildings on the other side of the street in the Union Block, said the collaboration between the two organizations makes sense.
“I think there’s probably some ancillary benefit,” he said.
Bill Ivey, the Taunton nonprofit group’s executive director, credits his marketing director Kristi Galanek with hatching the idea of inviting the Red Cross in to conduct a blood drive.
From that point, he said, HR director Judy Barrigas “got the word out.”
Ivey said besides contributing to the cause of collecting blood, Friday’s blood drive was an opportunity to remind people of what Homes For Our Troops does and the fact that it’s headquartered in downtown Taunton.
“We want to be more engaged in Taunton,” said Ivey, who has a house in Texas but flies in each week to oversee the nonprofit.
“It’s our hometown, and we’re proud to be here, and this is an opportunity to give back,” he said.
Some of his 65 workers, Ivey said, volunteered to have their blood drawn.
Sharon Sherman was lying on her back on a cot while a Red Cross worker prepped her arm to extract blood.
“It’s convenient. And it’s not so difficult to walk downstairs,” said Sherman, who works in the nonprofit group’s accounting office.
Nancy Hurley of the American Red Cross said the group is “always looking for sponsors.”
Friday’s blood drive, she said, was “working out perfectly,” mainly because of the effort by Homes For Our Troops to publicize the event downtown.
The most common form of blood donation is whole blood, in which a pint is collected and then separated into "transfusable" components, including plasma, red cells and platelets.
Dorsey said he opted to donate the Power Red version, which entails the use of a special machine that collects red cells but returns most of the platelets and plasma, along with some saline, to the donor.
Power Red takes 30 minutes longer than a whole blood donation, but it allows a donor to give a full two units of red cells, according to the American Red Cross.