She Shares Her Heart
2014 Heart Ball chair
committed to the battle
against heart disease
Brenda Howard has spent the last 12 months applying business skills to a very personal matter. Formerly in brand marketing, management and product development for a Fortune 500 company, she understands both the creative process and effective leadership. As chair of the 55th Annual Heart Ball, Phoenix, she’s focused on reaching the monetary goal of $1.4 million. She’s almost there and putting all her energy toward reaching it. She’s assembled a dynamic team, articulated her vision and empowered them to fulfill their roles. She’s created appealing, consistent marketing. And she’s made the process fun: Let’s go with red for the color, but kick it up with a little red tartan.
But when it was time to select a theme for the evening, her influences were very personal. Her father, who had heart disease, benefited from research someone else had spearheaded, from someone else who had paid it forward.
Her dad lived with lupus for 35 years and heart disease for 15. He was a fighter. Fifteen years before his death, he had a heart valve transplant. Self-employed, he started to sell off his businesses and was in semi-retirement, when he suffered an aneurism in the heart valve.
“I’ll never forget the day my dad got his transplant. Then 15 years later he was getting ready for another transplant when he had an aneurysm in his heart valve. “ ‘He’s not going to live,’ we were told, but he lived for another six months.”
As Howard sat in children’s mass one day, the message was “Share Your Heart.” Thinking about it, she realized “Share Your Heart” was the perfect theme for the 2014 Heart Ball. “It kind of resonates with my dad too,” Howard says. “Someone shared their heart with my dad, and he taught me to share my heart,” says Howard.
Throughout the year, committee members who have been affected by heart disease, whether a family member or a friend, have told their personal stories in the committee newsletters Howard has sent out, driving home the point that heart disease is a killer.
(right) For the Heart Ball Addressing Luncheon, committee members were greeted by handsome men in red tartan kilts. From the left, Kim Cullum, vice chairman; Kimberly Afkhami, chairman elect; Brenda Howard; Janet Dillon Duval, vice chairman; and Susie Wesley, 2014 Heart Ball sweetheart.
In the survey Howard sent to committee members to learn their “heart” stories, she also asked who their celebrity look-alike was. “Mine is Drew Barrymore,” she says. She invited the actress to come to Phoenix, but Barrymore, pregnant, was not able to make it. About that same time, Howard was looking at an issue of In Style magazine and learned that Barrymore had been taking and collecting images of hearts over the course of the last 10 years. “Find It in Everything” was Barrymore’s message in the book she published in January 2014.
Though the actress could not come to the Valley, her publisher called Howard and donated 100 of Barrymore’s books, one for each committee member. Howard sent the book along with her first newsletter in a bright red envelope.
Everything sent to committee members and invited guests has arrived in a big red envelope or a bright red box. (There’s that marketing mentality surfacing.) The 2014 Heart Ball invitations are big, 10-inches by 8-inches. They were packaged in a black peau de soie envelope and mailed in a bright scarlet envelope.
No matter how she swaddles it, Howard’s vision and passion for raising money for heart-disease research and education won’t go away until the nation’s No. 1 killer of both men and women in the United States – and the No. 1 cause of disability – has been brought under control.
“Nobody is safe,” Howard says. “I have a vision, and it’s not about me. It’s about everybody who might have a heart attack. You don’t know who you are helping. I am so thankful to the generosity of strangers who helped my dad. I have to be the generosity of strangers to someone else.”
