The American Heart Association is giving a ball and you donβt need a tux or a gown β or even an invitation β to attend.
The Southern Arizona 2021 Heart Ball has gone digital and for the first time ever, it is open to the community for free online at tucsonheartball.heart.org at 6 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 13.
βHuman beings are pack animals ... we love being together in groups. We will miss seeing folks face-to-face, but with the pandemic, that is not happening this year,β said Dr. Joseph Alpert, co-chair of the event with his wife, Qin Chen. βThis digital event does present an opportunity for people around the country β whether they are in Alaska or Portland, Maine β to hear about all that the American Heart Association is doing and to participate in the online auction, so we are hoping people outside of Tucson will get involved. Hopefully this will help bring folks together across the country.β
The couple are long-time supporters of the association, according to Alpert, a professor of medicine at the University of Arizona Sarver Heart Center. He and Chen, the director of pharmacogenomics and professor of pharmacology at the UA who also performs cardiac research, received grant funding from the association for research early in their careers.
The associationβs grants often serve as seed funding to enable researchers to qualify for larger grants from the National Institutes of Health and other organizations, said Krystal Webb, communications director for the heart association in Tucson.
Currently, the association is funding seven active research grants totaling more than $1.3 million at the UA.
βThe AHA helps many scientists to jumpstart their medical research careers and that is a big reason that we fund research projects throughout the world. It is cool to see two doctors who have benefitted from research grants and remained involved with the AHA throughout their careers. It is very gratifying to see how much the AHA mission has impacted them and their patients,β said Webb.
That mission extends beyond research to education with programs about smoking cessation, healthy eating and lifestyles to help prevent heart problems, strokes and more.
βThe American Heart Association constantly does things that are percolating in the background to help thousands of people across the country,β said Alpert.
With the onset of COVID-19, the association has focused more on advocacy for access to healthy food for all at the state and local levels, including the pursuit of policies to increase SNAP funding. It has also shifted to medical research into the impact of COVID-19 on the heart and lungs and updated CPR guidelines to account for patients suspected of infection with COVID-19.
Additionally, the Kidβs Heart Challenge Program, an educational initiative that teaches children about healthy eating and encourages 60 minutes of daily physical activity, has transitioned to a virtual platform.
Last year, more than 57,156 Southern Arizona students learned about healthy eating and physical activity through participation in school-based physical fitness and health education programs.
βOur staff provides virtual assembles for kids and offers free lesson plans to teachers who are stretched so thin at this time. We are working hard with schools in Southern Arizona to make sure that kids are getting in their physical activity and to ensure that they are emotionally healthy, too, since this has been a stressful year for them,β said Webb.
Moving forward through the pandemic recovery, Alpert expects the association to be more relevant than ever.
βFor the first time this past year, we have had COVID-19, a disease that kills or injures more people than heart disease. But heart attacks, heart failure and high blood pressure arenβt going away. Once COVID is under control, they will still be here. We have made progress against heart disease in the past 50 years, and lots of those improvements have started with work from the American Heart Association,β said Alpert.
Alpert encourages the public to attend the digital Heart Ball and to consider supporting the fundraising goal of $50,000 through the online auction, which will feature more than 30 works of original art gifted from private collections.
βIt is the old story that βgiving is better than receiving,β which I truly believe. I have always been a fan of the Dalai Lama, who says that our goal as human beings is to help each other, and that is our goal in medicine as well with βfirst do no harm.β It is the same thing with volunteerism: Help someone in your community or your neighborhood in some way. Especially in Arizona, ever since the frontier days, people didnβt survive if they donβt help their neighbors,β said Alpert.
