$15 million gift to Red Cross: how Teresa and Byron Pollitt are giving the nation’s blood supply a lifeline

Byron and Teresa Pollitt have been donating their own blood for longer than some Red Cross staffers have been alive.

That’s the detail easy to lose inside a $300 million headline, but it’s the one that explains everything else: before they were co-chairing a national campaign or writing an eight-figure check, they were just two people rolling up their sleeves at a local drive, decade after decade, in a relationship with the Red Cross that started small and never really stopped growing.

The urgency behind this moment is real.

The Red Cross had just declared only the second national blood supply crisis in its history — the first came during the darkest stretch of the pandemic — after donations sank to their lowest summer point in years and the country’s supply of type O positive blood, the type doctors reach for most, dropped below a single day’s worth.

Hospitals were pulling thousands more units a week than anyone had budgeted for, and the agency, which quietly supplies close to 40 percent of the nation’s blood, found itself rationing the most critical type to the patients who couldn’t wait.

Somebody needed to step forward. It says something about where the Red Cross still finds its faith that, rather than turning to a corporation or a celebrity spokesperson, it turned to a retired finance executive and his wife.

Byron spent his career as the numbers guy — chief financial officer at Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, then Gap, then Visa — the sort of résumé that trains a person to see gaps in a balance sheet before anyone else does.

He brought that instinct to the Red Cross itself, spending recent years as a senior executive advisor to its International Services Division and once serving a term as vice chair of the international federation’s finance commission.

Teresa’s path ran through the volunteer side rather than the boardroom: she started the founding Tiffany Circle chapter up in the Bay Area, and after the couple resettled in San Diego, she built a philanthropy committee there too, steering support toward military families and international relief work most donors never hear a word about.

Somewhere along the way the Red Cross handed them its Harriman Award, one of the highest honors it gives — less a thank-you for one gift than an acknowledgment of a habit that never wavered.

So when the Red Cross needed someone to make a five-year, $300 million campaign feel like something more than a number — a campaign meant to fix the unglamorous, unseen machinery behind every pint of donated blood, the testing labs and aging facilities and donor outreach nobody photographs — it turned to the Pollitts, and they put in $15 million of their own money simply to get things moving.

Byron framed it the way he might have once explained a business decision to a room of analysts, except the logic here was human, not financial: “Despite all of the advances in modern medicine, there is still no substitute for human blood,” he said.

“The Red Cross relies 100% on volunteer, unpaid donors to give blood for the benefit of others, and it’s up to us as individuals and institutions to support the Red Cross effort.”

Teresa’s version of the pitch sounded less like a fundraiser’s script and more like someone who had actually sat in the room while the hard tradeoffs got made.

“Getting blood from a donor to a patient isn’t as simple as people might think,” she said.

“The amount of sophisticated equipment for testing and some of the rare donor programs is a highly technical process that needs a lot of investment. No one ever knows when the need is going to be there — whether it’s you or a loved one or someone you don’t know — but the need is always there.”

It’s the kind of thing you say when giving has become less about writing checks and more about understanding, in granular detail, exactly where the money needs to go. Years earlier, that same instinct had led the couple to give $3 million to Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, not for a wing or a plaque, but to endow a chair in fetal and neonatal medicine — one narrow, unglamorous need, addressed directly.

Cliff Holtz, the Red Cross’s president and CEO, talked about the Pollitts less like major donors and more like the friends you call when you actually need something to happen.

“Teresa and Byron Pollitt exemplify the very best of volunteer leadership,” Holtz said. “Their passion for the Red Cross mission, combined with their strategic insight and generosity, is inspiring others to step forward at a critical moment.

With their guidance, this campaign is building the momentum needed to strengthen the nation’s blood supply and ensure that no patient is left waiting for lifesaving care.”

Around them now sits a small constellation of other longtime believers who signed on to the campaign committee — Susan Baker of the Betty Bazar Foundation, Erica Dayton of the Golisano Foundation, Delta Air Lines’ Tad Hutcheson, and others including Elissa Gifford, Brenda L. Johnson, Barb Malott Kizziah, Keith Kizziah, Teresa Nacarato, and Kevin and Patricia Terrazas — each presumably carrying their own quiet version of the Pollitts’ story.

There’s something almost old-fashioned about an organization built on the kindness of strangers choosing to sell a $300 million ask not through an institution, but through a married couple who simply never stopped showing up. It’s a reminder that behind every unit of blood sitting in a hospital fridge, waiting for someone who needs it, there was once just a person who decided to give theirs — and, in the Pollitts’ case, two people who decided that giving was something you never really finish doing.