Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello, everybody. Welcome to Health Chatter on this cold day in the state of Minnesota. Actually, it's going to get even colder as we go here for the next couple of days. So everybody dress warm, stay cuddly and snuggle. Welcome to Health Chatter. We've got a great show today on Bubba's Fund and stay tuned on all the logistics on that. It's a really interesting initiative.
We have a wonderful crew that's been with us since day one on Health Chatter. Maddie Levine-Wolfe. who actually did our background research for this show. Aaron Collins is recording our show today. DeAndre Howard does research for us. Matthew Campbell is our production guru who does wonders getting these shows out to you, the listening audience.
Sheridan Nygaard is our marketing and transcriber for the shows in case any of you want to read the show instead of listen to it. Clarence Jones is my co-host since day one since Wonderful, wonderful colleague, as is Dr. Barry Baines, who provides a great medical perspective to our shows. You know, Clarence and I kind of bring the public health side. Barry always kind of gives the medical twist.
So thanks to Barry as well. Human partnership.
Chapter 2: How did Bubba's Fund originate and what is its mission?
is our community organization and sponsor for these shows. It's a wonderful community health organization that provides great, great programming and connections for a lot of people in the communities. So thank you to Human Partnership. Check them out at humanpartnershipalliance.org. And of course, you can check us out on our website. See all our shows, etc. at healthchannerpodcast.com.
So today we've got a great show. I'm going to turn it over to to Clarence here. And the reason why is Clarence always is our community expert. He really brings that bend to all our shows. And this is really a, what we're gonna be talking about today is a really interesting community initiative. So Clarence.
Take it away. All right. Thanks, Stan. And welcome, Tony and Connor. I was excited to have the opportunity to talk with you. As Stan said, we were going to talk about the Bubbles Fund, but I wanted to change that a little bit to talk about the Bubbles Fund and community engagement. Because many of the things that you're doing in terms of community is in alignment with what we do as human.
We engage the community, we do research with the community, and we identify community engagement as important, which you also do, obviously. I just want to thank you for being here. But let's talk about the why. We're going to talk about Bubba's Fund. But we wanna talk about Bubba's Fund, and then I want you to talk about why community engagement with this project.
I think I'll go ahead and start. I'm Tony Ayala, I'm one of the co-founders of Bubba's Fund. And I think the big thing when it comes to all things good, if you're out there and you have an opportunity to make a net positive, then do it. And if everyone does that, we're gonna find goodness happening all over.
I like to say when we when we talk a little bit more about Bubba's Fund, this is the last thing I want to be doing. If I could go back in time and flip a switch and say, let's not do this. I would love to do that to have some more time with Charlie, who's Bubba. Charlie Lonnie Weber passed away unexpectedly at three months old and I am a dear friend of the family. Connor is uncle to Charlie.
And his passing a year after, six months after, has resulted in an enormous amount of community efforts. Connor, would you like to kind of elaborate on that?
Just maybe a little bit of backstory, kind of how we got here. So my sister, Moran Lawning, and brother-in-law, Alex Weber, had a healthy child.
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Chapter 3: What role do community partnerships play in Bubba's Fund?
And one day, my sister went to go pick him up at child care. And the doors were wide open and EMS were vehicles were outside. And she walks in and, and finds that her son is, is that they're working to revive him as, as he lays on, on, on the floor. And they were scrambling to, to put an AED on him to try to resuscitate him. And we got to this point then was realizing that the,
the importance of access and use of an AED is really, really time sensitive. And the ability to be able to have one within arm's reach with someone that is trained and to be able to apply it in a timely manner can often be the difference between life and death. Come to find out that...
every minute that goes by without the use of an AED during a sudden cardiac arrest, you have about a 10% less likelihood of survival. And so when we decided that we wanted to do something in memory of Charlie, we realized that we wanted to do something that would make a measurable and sustainable impact.
The aha moment was when we found out that all child care facilities have to have licensed child care professionals. And those child care professionals have to be not just CPR trained, but also AED trained. And so we have in the state of Wisconsin, tens of thousands and across the country, possibly millions of people that are trained in CPR and AED use.
But the vast, vast majority don't have access to one. So that was the gap that we felt like as community organizers and people that can dump gasoline on a fire and get things going, we realized that that was kind of our calling to dump that fuel on that fire and bridge that gap in between those who are trained and certified to use an AED
bridge that gap so that they actually have one sitting on a shelf or on a wall within reach in the time of need. And so we've used our abilities to access the community. Our partnerships have been key to our success. We are not health professionals. We didn't even know what AED stood for before this, but we were able to find the right people, the right groups,
and bring them together to create a real, measurable, sustainable change, which was our goal. And in the last six months, we have become the first city in the US to have an AED in every licensed childcare facility in the city of La Crosse.
Yeah, congratulations with that. Tony, yeah, I'm going to ask you this question, Tony. Kyle talked about engaging people. There are going to be people that are going to be listening to our program that are going to want to know, how do you engage?
I mean, when the community identifies an issue as important, what are some of the steps that you took to engage the community in terms of the vision and the process of this work?
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Chapter 4: How does access to AEDs impact child care facilities?
If there's a way to create a legacy for Charlie, let's do it. And if you guys as a family wanna make this happen, let's go. We're gonna push as hard as we can. And if we ever go too far, tell us to stop. Because I think the goal is to be present in the Midwest, present nationally, really show that you can do a lot more.
And the thing is, we're a donor advised fund through the La Crosse Area Community Foundation. We are not a nonprofit entity ourselves. We have to work with other partner nonprofits to get stuff done. And that's really cool because these partner nonprofits have been doing this for years.
And once you find the right one that knows what they're doing and they just need a little like cash flow or the support or the energy or the youthful marketing or branding or advertising, we come in and we're like a shot in the vein for them. And they are like, yes, let's go. We're going to do good things together. And our intention is to be an initiative based organization. organization.
So we started off with the AED goal of getting the city squared away on AEDs and their state licensed child care centers. Our next initiative is working with children, youth access to sports in the community. And so like they're two very different experiences, but our umbrella is essentially we want to improve the lives of children.
And so when you think about starting something like Bubba's Fund, I just cannot, like if you have a tragedy or you have something happen or you have an idea, You just got to think big. There's no reason not to. Shoot for the moon, among the stars, whatever the saying is, you got to shoot big.
I thought it was a good idea early on to get the city mayor of La Crosse, to get him to proclaim a day in memory of Charlie. And it worked. We pushed the mayor. We provided some information. We had an opportunity to have a conversation over the phone with his team.
And then all of a sudden, we're sitting on the steps of City Hall on August 27th on our launch event date, where we were having 350 people show up at a theater where we were essentially introducing the idea of Bubba's Fund through documentary community support partnerships.
And on the steps of City Hall, our mayor, Shonda Washington Spivey, read a proclamation that essentially said, today we're declaring August 27, 2025. for Charlie, for Children Day. And we were all taken back. It was a beautiful opportunity to shine a light on what we're doing. And at this moment in time, we have nothing. We have a logo. We have a couple of t-shirts. We have an idea.
We've raised enough money to essentially get us to this point. And that was the day that we were launching. And after we got our pledges from that event, we ended up with $60,000 in the bank as a starting point. And so I think the biggest thing that I can tell people who are interested in doing good, remember, net positive. You can do net positive, you're helping out the community.
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Chapter 5: What strategies are used to engage the community in this initiative?
And then dream big, because that's one end of the spectrum and the other end, and anywhere in between is successful.
So I wanna dig a little bit deeper with you, okay?
Hit me, yeah, let's go Clarence.
Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. We've had a recent conversation where we talked about community engagement, but I want you to talk about how do you find the right ones?
So this is something that I've only become aware of as of recently. The one thing that I keep going back too, is that especially in our community, our community is 50-ish thousand people population. We're not a huge million, 2 million population with huge skyscrapers. We're a small community. And I think we've kind of realized that we can be big fish in a little sea sort of deal.
And the people that you meet you're one degree away from everybody. And if you find the right person and they connect you with that one degree person, all of a sudden doors open up. And that's how we met our partner, Sherry Olson. And she was a retired physician. She was working at a facility as a doctor in her role. She collapsed and had a sudden cardiac arrest moment.
the team at her facility ran in with the crash car with the expectation of saving the patient's life and realized that Sherry, the physician was on the ground. And in that moment, they saved her life. And she's been saved multiple times from, uh,
from an ad use from the external uh defibrillation and or internal defibrillation now and she was connected with us through a friend's mother who said you need to meet sherry she's the perfect person for you if you're working with the aeds in the area and it just works out we've been presenting i've had the opportunity to be in front of the kiwanis club of lacrosse the uh the uh
a couple other service-focused community organizations. And I give a presentation and I explain what we're talking about today. And every person that I interact with, I think in my head, it's like, you're the person that's going to make this bigger. You're the person that's going to tell one other person and make this story more impactful. And so I think you just got to know
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Chapter 6: What is the significance of training in CPR and AED use?
I was like, I know. How do we do that? It's a it's one of those one way emails. And the team at Lamar Advertising said it'll be twelve hundred dollars. And I said, done. We're going to spend twelve hundred dollars. They got back to me two days later. So you know what? You're a good community effort initiative. $150 to be on the billboard for a week long. And I was like, absolutely.
And if you don't ask, you can't find out. Yeah, yeah.
So I've got a couple of questions. You know, before I retired, I was the head of the cardiovascular unit at the Department of Health here in the state of Minnesota. And I remember distinctly, just to give you an idea, I remember distinctly that the staff, get a load of this one, The staff at the Minnesota Department of Health were not trained in CPR and they didn't even know how to use an AED.
Okay. Some of them didn't even know what it was. Okay. So we did some training. So the question I have for you is, do you combine the, on one side, making sure that there is an AED in a facility, in a childcare center? And at the same time, does it go along with training?
Yeah, I can jump in with this one. So first, the great thing is, like I said previously, that all the staff at these licensed childcare facilities have to already be trained. Yeah, that's good. So that's step one. Yeah. Step two is that Sherry Olson and Seven Rivers Cape
Um, that she's the physician that was saved by an AD who started an organization that's given away hundreds and done thousands and thousands of hours of trainings. Um, she's committed her and her staff resources to, to do free additional trainings at the childcare facility so that they are ready to go in an emergency. Uh, everyone knows where it is.
They, they know the specifics of the AD that we're providing them and how to use it. Um, So there's that. And then Tony's done a great job of using another partnership with the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse in allowing us the opportunity to work with a program that will provide us with master's degree students that will help so that they can track the
where the AEDs are, the serial numbers, whether or not the batteries and pads need to be replaced, checking in with the facilities in a scheduled manner to make sure that everything is in place and then there's no issues with it, making sure that they're testing it to make sure that it's working and functioning. So, yeah, we didn't just stop with, oh, okay, well, here's these things.
We've done our part.
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Chapter 7: How does Bubba's Fund plan to expand its initiatives beyond AEDs?
Good luck. You know, go for it. Yeah, right. And then on top of it, we're also we're setting aside money that will help subsidize some of the replacement costs because it can get it can get costly to replace batteries and pads. And they do have a shelf life. I'll go a step further.
One of the one of the things that we've done with with our other partner, with State Senator Brad Paff, he's our state senator that represents lacrosse here.
we are in the middle of getting Bubba's Law passed at the state level, which would create a million-dollar fund through the Department of Children and Families that would provide two-thirds of the cost of an AED to any child care facility in the state. If they can come up with the other third, the state would fund two-thirds of that, including replacement parts. So we're thinking long-term.
We want to create a... a situation where you know, 10, 15 years from now, everyone knows when they're driving down the road, that any childcare facility that they go past has an AED in it. And if there's a bus stop out in front of it, that bus driver knows that if someone has a sudden cardiac arrest within the bus, the closest is to run into a childcare center.
So we're looking at this from a very holistic perspective and a very long-term and sustainable perspective. And at its core, a community effort, whether that's at a town level, city level, state level, and we hope someday on the national level.
So are there complementary programs like this that you know of or you work with around the United States? Or are you truly unique?
We don't know of any major initiative. And we've gone through and looked at everything. There's been a few state initiatives where they've tried to pull this off to get them in all areas. facilities. Those have failed in the past. And so we just saw it as an opportunity that we need to go a little bit bigger. We need to reach out to the American Heart Association.
We need to have local partners and national partners that can, you know, as Clarence was asking about earlier, to create that movement, that team finding the right partners. And we're still in the middle of figuring that out. You know, it's a big undertaking when we're
Uh, when we're talking with, uh, you know, the, uh, organization right down the street and then an hour later, we're on the phone with, with someone, uh, with the American heart association at the national level and filling in those gaps and figuring out what role our partners play and how we can, how we can grow this sustainably and responsibly is a huge undertaking.
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Chapter 8: What are the future goals for Bubba's Fund and its impact on children?
How much, you know, just the originally just buying, buying it for, you know, there's also the batteries and pad replaces, stuff like that. But what does one AED cost? I don't, I have no, I don't know.
This is funny. This is like you ask the president how much does a rack of bananas or a carton of ice cost. You physicians. Connor, I think, has a better understanding of the amounts.
Yeah, so obviously there's a range. So typically between $700 and $2,000, which is a pretty large range. The ones that we've chosen to go with, at least currently in, in La Crosse for our, for the childcare facilities that we're providing to it's $1,200. And we, we chose a very specific model that has, and we could show it to you.
It, it, it's a very specific model that as a, it has a button for an adult and a button for a child and it uses the exact same.
That was my next one. Yeah.
Great. Yeah. And then so they're all different in that sense. They all have different battery life, shelf life for pads. But we thought it was a great opportunity to go with a model, a model that with one click of a button can change between adult or child and not have to fumble around with pads depending on, you know, depending on who they're treating.
Right. I have a question. I want to ask, because you're all very – you're going to go on – Did that cut you off? Okay. So I'm going to ask two questions. One is, have you decided, I know that you're trying to do this and expand this. Have you, uh, come up with a tip for communities on how to maybe approach this, uh, issue, this issue?
Yeah. So, uh, so we're very closely affiliated with UW lacrosse's athletics department and, uh, Coach Moran Lonning, Charlie's mother is the head coach of the women's basketball team there. So we have a really tight knit network and family and community there already for the team.
And those women that play on the team, they're four years in, they graduate, they move on, but they're alumni and they're connected. Charlie passed away two weeks before practice started. And that whole summer, all the girls on the team knew Charlie intimately. They babysat for him. When I turned 40 years old, my wife,
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