UNCASVILLE, Conn. (AP) — Tina Charles has been helping to save countless lives for more than a decade with her charity — Hopey’s Heart Foundation.
On Saturday, the Connecticut Sun in partnership with Yale New Haven Health donated $20,000 to help Charles reach a milestone of donating 500 AEDs (automated external defibrillators). She’s 17 short right now. Each AED can cost thousands of dollars.
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“We’ll get there this fall now and I’m very thankful that the Lord chose me to be able to carry out this mission,” Charles told The Associated Press before her team faced Phoenix. “It’s really just my heart and been a blessing in memory of my late aunt.”
Charles teared up during the on-court presentation before the game.
The organization, started in 2013 and named in honor of her aunt, is dedicated to curbing deaths in the United States from sudden cardiac arrest. The organization works to ensure schools and public places have lifesaving equipment such as defibrillators on hand.
Yale New Haven Health was thrilled to help Charles reach the impressive milestone.
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“We felt it was important as not only, a leading health care institution in this region, but also a supporter of everything of women’s sports, Tina Charles and the Connecticut Sun,” said Paul Mounds Jr., who is the Vice President of Community, Corporate and Government Relations for Yale New Haven Health.
Mounds Jr. said that his organization will also work with the American Heart Association to make sure that each group that receives an AED also gets heart health education alongside it.
The 36-year-old Charles said that before she started the foundation she didn’t realize how common and deadly sudden cardiac arrest could be until she read about Wes Leonard, a high school basketball player who suffered a heart attack and died after basketball practice in 2011.
And when her aunt died a few years later from organ failure, Charles committed herself to helping to solve the problem.
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Connecticut team president Jen Rizzotti has been impressed with what Charles has been able to do.
“It’s really inspirational. If I’m being honest. I think that’s what’s special about the WNBA is that impact the players make off the court and Tina has led the way for over a decade now,” Rizzotti said. “From the beginning when she donated her salary to her foundation, she really kind of understood the bigger picture.”
In 2017, when Charles was playing for the New York Liberty, she was surprised by the team by a man who was saved by one of the AEDs that the star had donated.
That moment has still left an impact on her years later.
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