February is Heart Health month so we had a conversation with Mariko Harper, MD who is board-certified in internal medicine, cardiovascular disease, nuclear cardiology and echocardiography. She practices at Virginia Mason Heart Institute. Along with The Go Red For Women Ambassadors Andrea Engfer a stroke survivor. Just Six days after giving birth to a beautiful baby girl, 34-year-old Andrea suffered a stroke. The cause? High blood pressure during pregnancy. Recovery has been a challenging journey as Andrea has had to re-learn how to walk, read and write. After spending over 43 hours in the hospital and many weeks in rehab, she celebrated by running her first 5K post stroke in October 2020 and Shree Saini, with congenital heart disease and heart block is the reigning Miss World America Washington is also a heart disease survivor and advocate. She was born with a complete heart block, which causes irregular heartbeats, and had surgery at just age 12 to implant a pacemaker in her chest. Shree has volunteered at over 100 non-profits and leverages her platform to advocate for many causes, including heart health. She has been invited to speak about her service work in over 100 cities, 30 states and 8 countries where she shares her story to raise awareness of heart health and provides messages of encouragement and gratitude.

Volunteers of America Western Washington working to meet people right where they are.Joining me is Steve Corsi, Psy.D. – President/CEO, Suzan Sturholm- Board Chair and Jessica Moore- Director of Development. Like all non profits VOA WW also had to pivot with their fundraiser this year, as well as serve more community members than usual. They talk about the services VOA provide including feeding the hungry, helping the homeless and their 211 community resource help line. www.voaww.org

Jenna Berry with Catalyst Mentoring talks about the impact of mentoring, shares stories about kids who have done better due to mentoring and shares the podcast where she gives tips and tricks to the mentors to help them stay engaged with their student, especially during covid. Jenna says if you are looking to start a mentoring program in your community you can contact her at
https://www.catalystmentoring.org/school-of-mentoring

Julie Allen is the founder of the Mary Rose Foundation. Their motto is inspiring hope for a world without eating disorders. By investing in the lives of youth through scholarships to pay for eating disorder treatment and education to promote mental health. https://maryrosefoundation.org/

Movement Ministries with Hampton Conway III is to help men who are victims of domestic violence. When Hampton realized he was at the end of his rope and only saw two choices, hurt himself or hurt his partner, he found a way to get out and get help. It wasn’t easy and there weren’t even support groups for men in these situations. So he started his ministry to support men going through similar experiences. https://movementministries.com/ and the domestic violence website https://www.thehotline.org/ 1-800-799-SAFE (7233)

Marcelle Crooks is a Chef, a Health and Life coach, and she is challenging us to think about ways to include more healthy foods into our daily life. One condition, must be delicious and something you want to try. With Covid we are gaining weight and getting out of our normal routines, so the challenges are to get us back into a healthy place so we can fight off Covid and feel better while doing it. She is a living example that we can begin heal our bodies with good healthy food. https://www.mchealthlifecoach.com/

Birthday Dreams is an organization that provides birthday parties for kids in transition. They are in shelters at the time of their birthday so because Birthday Dreams believes everyone deserves a birthday they go to the shelter and throw a party for the child. Tiffaney Jones, Volunteer Coordinator, and Priya Priyadarshini, Board Chair join us to talk about how they have had to pivot. With Covid things have changed a bit and now they are doing birthday in a box. Due to Covid they had to cancel their gala so they are looking for donations to keep doing birthdays during these challenging times. https://birthdaydreams.org/

You may have heard the name Robert Smiley, he is in the news a lot because of his organization The Hand Up Project. They do needle clean up after homeless camps are moved. They help homeless addicts get detox, rehab, housing and jobs. Roberts latest effort is in using hotels for temporary housing while working with the recovering addict to get all the services they need to get well.

We can never know enough about domestic violence and how to navigate it whether we are the victim or a family member. Special Olympics is excited about their pivot in fundraising to going virtual. Toys for Tots offers a thank you for the donations and ways to start helping for 2021 holidays.
https://dvs-snoco.org/
https://polarplungewa.com/
https://www.toysfortots.org/

Kevin Bolger Host of the podcast “No Longer Ashamed” talks about how important it is for men who have suffered from childhood sexual abuse to share their stories and get help. The podcast is to support men and women but it is very clear that telling your story is very different if you are a man than a woman.
Nolongerashamed.org podcast: https://anchor.fm/kevin-bolger4