Her background in communications and social work led Michelle Nostheide to the nonprofit sector, and as the executive director of the American Heart Association — Richmond, she’s proud to work for an organization dedicated to supporting longer, healthier lives for all people.
Nosetheide and her team work to engage and educate the community about heart disease and stroke. Now, as the COVID-19 pandemic sweeps the world, their mission has become that much more important, and she’s working even harder to ensure that resources are going to underserved populations that are already more at risk for worse outcomes than those with easy access to health care. “We’ve always been working for public health and combating health disparity in our community,” Nosetheide says. “With the pandemic we are just shining light on what was already a big problem, which is of course health equity. We’ve been able to shift our focus from things that we were already working on like food insecurity to getting food into the hands of people that are unemployed or struggling with the pandemic locally.”
When the AHA’s annual Heart Ball fundraising event had to be postponed due to the pandemic, Nostheide and her team held an online auction on their original date of April 25, only this time instead of auctioning off experiences or art, they had donors bid on meals for health care workers and youth athletic league kits to help coaches learn CPR. “Everything became, ‘How can we help?’ ” Nostheide says. “Rather than our usual mission of just longer and healthier lives, it came with this new lens of coronavirus and what can we do in the community right now that’s going to make a difference today.”
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