Tina Charles Hopey’s Awareness Week
The New York Library has announced that WNBA All-Star and center for the Liberty’s Tina Charles, in conjunction with her Hopey’s Heart Foundation successfully launched her first ever Hopey’s Week initiative on Wednesday-Thursday, April 19-20, hosting four different sports safety clinics over the two-day period, each one in a different New York City borough.
Working with her partner Safe Kids Worldwide, Charles visited Thurgood Marshall Lower School (Manhattan), Kings College School PS 94 (Bronx), Mary White Ovington School PS/IS30 (Brooklyn), and Robert Van Wyck JHS 217 (Queens). Students who participated in the clinics learned about the importance of being prepared with CPR and AEDs (Automated External Defibrillators), concussions from specialists from NYU Langone Medical Center’s Concussion Center, the keys to proper hydration, and medication safety.
Hopey’s Heart Foundation, Charles founded in 2013, naming after her late-aunt Maureen “Hopey” Vaz, who passed away from multiple organ failure, serves as an AED grant program, focused on preventing sudden cardiac arrest deaths across the nation and the globe. Charles donated an AED to each of the schools she visited during Hopey’s Week to ensure that their students and community would be heart safe. Since 2013, through Hopey’s Heart Foundation Charles has donated 262 AED’s across the globe.
“I really want to thank my partners Safe Kids Worldwide and the NYU Langone Medical Center for their support in providing all of this potentially lifesaving knowledge to the hundreds of kids who were able to participate in these sports safety clinics, and positively impact schools in NYC,” said Charles. “Seeing all of these kids learn what sudden cardiac arrest is, that they know where the AED is in their school, in an emergency to start with calling 911 and performing CPR, means the world to me. This is knowledge they can pass on to their friends, their family, and pay it forward.”
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