Jonesboro, AR – (JonesboroRightNow.com) – The Community Health Education Foundation’s (CHEF) AED Awareness and Placement Program gave out several new AEDs to Northeast Arkansas organizations and announced new programs on Thursday.

During the program, CHEF awarded eight AEDs to nonprofits, churches, schools and law enforcement agencies in Northeast Arkansas, which are listed below:

• Blessed Sacrament Catholic School in Jonesboro
• Valley View Missionary Baptist Church in Jonesboro
• Food Bank of Northeast Arkansas Warehouse
• Brookland Police Department
• St. Anthony’s Catholic Church in Weiner
• Pocahontas Police Department
• Walnut Ridge Police Department
• Mt. Harmony Baptist Church in Mountain View

Coach David Daniel, CHEF AED committee member, said the organization is always excited to give out the machines, noting that CHEF has placed 115 AEDs (automated external defibrillators) over the last few years across Northeast Arkansas.

“We love this program because what it does, it oftentimes it will give an opportunity for a second chance at life,” Daniel said, noting some of the local people whose lives were saved by AEDs, such as a young student, a teacher, and a man leaving church with his wife. “We’ve raised a lot of money over the last few years, and that gives us the opportunity to award these AEDs.”

Daniel also spoke about the new PulsePoint AED mobile app, which is designed to notify users when someone nearby is experiencing cardiac arrest, allowing them to provide lifesaving assistance.

“If there’s an incident, call 911; but if you hit that app… and the AED is registered… it will tell you if there is an AED located near you,” he said. “We know that just takes you seconds to save a life. So, it’s a pretty good thing.”

The PulsePoint AED app is available on the App Store and Google Play.

Members of the Jonesboro Roofing Company were also present to give testimonies on the importance of AEDs.

Austin Vance, son of the late David Vance who was the vice president of Metal and Safety at Jonesboro Roofing Company before his cardiac arrest in March, said he was a firm believer in CHEF’s AED program.

“I would like to think that we might have had a chance if that AED device was available that morning,” Vance said. “It’s not just one thing to have it… They’ve got batteries, they’ve got pads… Take care of it because you never know when you might need it or when your loved one might need it as well.”

Scott Moore, president of the Jonesboro Roofing Company, said there is now an AED in the office and employees were trained to operate it.

“Hopefully we don’t need it, but if we do, we’ve got the knowledge to use it,” he said.

Afterward, Emily Lard, executive director of CHEF, announced one of its new programs, the “David Vance Heartbeat of Our Businesses Program.”

“We can’t give AEDs to businesses because we’re a nonprofit,” Lard explained; however, she noted that CHEF had been working with its partners, Defibtech AEDs and Cardio Partners, on this new program, which will give businesses the chance to buy AEDs through CHEF.

“Businesses will now get to buy their AEDs through [CHEF] at 60-70% off and they get to buy any accessory at our cost. We get nothing from it. We get no piece of it. We just negotiate for businesses,” she said.

The first to buy AEDs through this new was Tiger Commissary in Jonesboro, which bought four AEDs, which it also received at the event.

Lard also announced another new event, the “Heart of the Farmers” Conference, made possible through a partnership with Farm Credit Mid-America and the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture Research and Extension.

This event will feature Farming Sessions covering farm safety, financial literacy, legislative agriculture updates, as well as mental health, and free comprehensive health screenings provided by NEA Baptist Hospital.

Heart of the Farmer will be Nov. 18 from 9 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. at the Northeast Rice Research and Extension Center, located at 15327 Hwy. 1 in Harrisburg.

“Farming is in a really, really bad way this year and people are losing third and fourth generations of farms. Rice around here is sitting in bins, not being sold because the price is too low,” Lard said. “Arkansas’s biggest purchaser of rice is China, and we can’t sell it to them. And they’re literally going broke. Pray for them,” Lard said.

For more information, or updates on this event visit the Heart of the Farmer Facebook page.