By Scot Kersgaard, JVA Consulting

I give blood.

I know it’s not much to brag about.

I want you to know though that I don’t like it. I still don’t like getting shots, don’t like the whole needle-in-the-arm thing.

Actually, more often that not, it is platelets that I give. Instead of spending 30 minutes at Bonfils Blood Center, giving platelets means lying there for two hours or even a little longer. For some reason it makes people cold. You can see us lying there shivering under our blankets.

I don’t even know what platelets are. Truth to tell, I don’t know my blood type either.

Doesn’t matter, really. They tell me they need what I’ve got, and I believe them.

I am not a rich man. Oh, I give to plenty of nonprofits—nobody’s going to name a building after me though. With blood or platelets, I’ve got as much as the next man. After every gift, my blood account replenishes itself. It’s a mystery to me, but it’s true.

So I go. It can’t hurt anything, and maybe it helps. I’m guessing here, but between my wife, one of our two sons and myself, we have to have had a dozen surgeries in the last dozen years, and broken close to two dozen bones. My other son, oddly enough, is unscathed.

Again, I have no idea if any of us have had any blood transfusions (so, I’m not the savviest medical consumer), but it seems likely. Given our history of hitting hard things at speed, I can probably predict more trauma coming up.

So I give blood.

Cool thing about Bonfils is, even though they are a nonprofit, they never ask blood donors for money. I asked them about that once, because it seemed that those who give blood would be natural, captive (!) givers of money as well. They told me they don’t ask donors, because it is enough that people give blood, and they don’t want to scare off blood donors by asking them for money.

They always encourage donors to have a snack or a bottle of juice before leaving. I asked about that too, hoping the snacks were donated. Nope, they explained that they have tried to get snacks donated, but they go through so many that they can’t find anyone willing to donate that much, and it is too much trouble to ask for a little here, a little there.

I’m not pitching for Bonfils, I’m just saying that giving blood or giving platelets might be a way to help make the world a better place. Isn’t that all any of us want?