July 2025
Summer festival booth
Our first summer with a booth on the festival field: a hand-lettered sign, a peg-board game with prizes, and a table that kept drawing kids and families over for a conversation about their hearts.
Highlights
Moments from the work.
A year of HeartWise out in the community, and the day we brought everyone together at Unwin Park.
Across the year
HeartWise in the community
Between the big days, we show up: festival fields, gurdwara halls, a school classroom, a hospital lobby, and the streets of downtown Vancouver in the cold.
November 2025
School visit, Tamanawis Secondary
HeartWise visited Tamanawis Secondary in Surrey to talk with Grade 9 and 12 students about heart health and prevention: how staying active, eating well and managing stress strengthen the heart, and how small daily choices add up over a lifetime. The room was engaged from the first question. Sessions like this are what Book a Workshop offers.
Book a workshop
July 2025 and June 2026
Heart-health tables at the gurdwara
Information tables in gurdwara halls: blood-pressure checks, handouts in Punjabi and English, a donation box, and paper hearts written for someone you love.
December 2025 – January 2026
Winter outreach in Vancouver
Over the holidays the team spent a day downtown sharing hot chocolate and conversation. In the cold weeks that followed they were back with warm socks, because everyone deserves comfort and dignity when the temperature drops. And one hundred handwritten cards went to the VGH & UBC Hospital Foundation for cardiac patients, each written with hope in mind: a small message can mean a lot during recovery.
Youth Heart Health Fair
Pulse & Play 2026
Saturday, August 29, 2026Unwin Park, Surrey12–4 p.m.Free for families
Pulse & Play was one of those days that reminded us why HeartWise exists.
On August 29, we brought our community together at Unwin Park for an afternoon of games, music, activities, and heart health education. Families and young people were able to enjoy themselves while also learning about things we often do not talk about until they become serious, like heart murmurs, warning signs, and the importance of understanding your own heart.
What made the day meaningful was seeing health education become something people actually wanted to engage with. It was not a lecture or a hospital setting. It was kids playing, families spending time together, volunteers starting conversations, and important information being shared in a way that felt comfortable and easy to understand.
HeartWise was created because we know how quickly heart health can go from something you rarely think about to something that changes a family's life. Pulse & Play was our way of creating the kind of awareness we wish more young people and families had earlier.
For us, the event was about more than how many people attended or how many activities we had. If even one young person went home more curious about their heart, one parent felt more confident asking a question, or one family understood why early awareness matters, then the day meant something.
Pulse & Play showed us what HeartWise can be at its best: a community coming together, learning from one another, and making sure young people grow up knowing that their heart health matters too.
