Canadian Blood Services needs you to roll up your sleeve.

Donating blood may have escaped many people’s minds as smoke filled the valley for much of the summer. But, those who kept us safe are literally giving their blood, sweat and tears.

First responders are joining up with Canadian Blood Services for the Sirens for Life campaign to encourage blood donors this fall.

“It was a great tie in, especially here in the Okanagan, when we have such challenging fires in our summers and lots of different emergencies," says Gayle Voyer, with the Canadian Blood Donor Clinic in Kelowna. "So it is a great way for us to say thank you to those emergency services people.”

West Kelowna Fire Chief Jason Brolund says his team donates blood regularly and takes pride in being able to give back.

“It is amazing to see the number of donations that some of our people have had – it is pretty inspiring.”

To spark even more donations, the various emergency services are challenged to see who can bring in the most support.

“Each week in our clinics, we are going to do a fun little tally that basically gives the public ... a way to say who they are going to vote for or who their donation is going to count towards. We just do a manual tally and each week we will post the results,” says Voyer.

Donors will be able to give blood for teams such as police, fire, search and rescue or paramedics; and at the end, it will be a fun way to see which first responder team brought in the most donations.

“It's not difficult for me to encourage them to say come in and let's get some marks near the fire department’s box here. We don’t want to be shown up by the police or the ambulance or search and rescue, so that makes it fun and it makes it easy.”

Teresa Oyer, a search and rescue volunteer, kicked off the campaign with a blood donation on Thursday.

The Sirens for Life campaign runs Sept. 1 to Oct. 31 in clinics across B.C.