Your donation at work

You — donors, volunteers and partners — power the pulse of Heart & Stroke. 

Building on more than 70 years of progress to advance heart and brain health, your support propels life-saving medical breakthroughs and improvements in diagnosis, treatment and care. Together, you drive change that builds health equity and healthier communities. And you deliver hope to the estimated six million people in Canada living with heart disease and stroke.   

In fiscal 2025, thanks to your support, Heart & Stroke invested $28 million in research, and $39.1 million in advocacy and health promotion. 

• See detailed Heart & Stroke financial results.

Here’s what your commitment made possible in 2025.

Funding the next breakthroughs

Your donations supported critical heart disease and stroke research by 1,059 of Canada’s top researchers and trainees. A few highlights:  

• Dr. Rohan D’Souza is leading a new research network seeking to monitor and prevent cardiovascular events in pregnant women and new mothers. 
• Dr. Nishita Singh is improving stroke prevention while addressing global disparities to get treatment to the people who need it most.   
• Dr. Emilio Alarcón is developing breakthrough therapies to repair damaged hearts so more people can get their lives back after a heart attack.  
• Dr. Ariane Marelli is mapping congenital heart disease to predict and prevent complications — and ensure healthier futures for those born with heart defects. 
• Dr. Amy Yu is shining a light on sex and gender differences in stroke care to improve women’s outcomes.

Also in 2025, Heart & Stroke invested in early heart and brain researchers through these key programs aimed at bolstering the strength and diversity of Canada’s future research cohort:  

• Fourteen young scholars earned Heart & Stroke Doctoral and Post-Doctoral Awards for Women’s Heart and/or Brain Health. This program provides stipend funding that enables these researchers to dedicate time to their research and engage with mentors throughout their training. 
• Four early career researchers earned awards through the second year of the Personnel Awards for Indigenous Scholars program, co-funded with Brain Canada. 
• Fourteen graduate students earned awards under the Personnel Awards for Black Scholars program, a partnership with Brain Canada, to pursue post-graduate studies in heart or brain health.

Dr. Alarcón is developing breakthrough therapies to repair damaged hearts. 

Sharing knowledge that saves lives

Your donations enabled Heart & Stroke to provide health professionals and people across Canada with evidence-based knowledge and tools to improve health outcomes and save lives, including these key advances: 

• Empowering Canadians to take charge of their heart and brain health through the launch of the Heart & Stroke Risk Screen tool, designed to help both women and men assess their personal risk factors and take action to manage them. An awareness campaign specifically for women resulted in 62,000 people completing the assessment, 93% of them women. 
• Helping people recognize stroke, by securing government funding and in‑kind support to publicize the FAST signs of stroke. Now in its 11th year, the initiative secured over $1.5 million to share the FAST campaign nationwide, generating more than 300 million impressions. An additional 35 million impressions came through in‑kind support, helping more Canadians spot stroke signs and act fast. 
• Updating Canadian Stroke Best Practice Recommendations, a crucial tool for the medical community to improve patient care based on the latest evidence. New releases include a revised module on vascular cognitive impairment, based on the latest science.  
• Improving survival rates from out-of-hospital cardiac arrest: In 2025, more than 130 schools across Canada used Heart & Stroke’s award-winning gamified resuscitation program, CardiacCrash^TM, to introduce emergency CPR and first aid skills for cardiac arrest. In total, more than 26,000 people have experienced the program. Plus, Heart & Stroke’s regular resuscitation training issued 485,000 certifications — a 3% increase from 2024.  
• Amplifying heart failure awareness and education: During Heart Failure Awareness Week, we partnered with the HeartLife Foundation to co-host English and French webinars on awareness, diagnosis challenges, and collaborative, patient-centered management strategies, for 1,329 registrants. 
• Strengthening collaboration on congenital heart disease (CHD) by bringing together key partners in national meetings to advance Canada’s CHD action plan. Forty leaders — including clinicians, researchers, policymakers and people with lived experience — developed clear recommendations across six priority areas and assigned action leads to drive progress. In addition, a Heart & Stroke report on CHD, issued in February 2025, generated more than 300 news stories.

Aleasha's daughter, Nora, had a heart transplant at five months. 

Building healthier communities

Up to eight in 10 cases of premature stroke and heart disease can be prevented through lifestyle and behaviours (such as eating a healthy diet, staying active and being smoke-free). So, reducing risk factors is crucial to promoting lifelong health. Here are some of the successes your support made possible in 2025. 

• Protecting youth from vaping: Heart & Stroke continued advocating for stronger laws to limit vape flavours that attract young people. In October 2024, we met with the federal Minister of Mental Health and Addictions to urge the government to finalize national flavour regulations. Provinces are also taking action to help reduce youth access to products that can lead to nicotine addiction. 
• Making healthy meals available for kids through bilateral agreements signed by all provinces and territories with the federal government for the $1.5 billion National School Food Program. It’s a critical win in Heart & Stroke’s comprehensive nutrition policy platform and will eventually provide healthy meals to an estimated 400,000 children annually. 
• Helping families make healthier choices with front-of-pack nutrition labels that began showing up in supermarkets, identifying packaged foods high in salt, sugar or saturated fat. The program will be fully implemented in 2026, culminating extensive Heart & Stroke advocacy efforts.   
• Driving progress in tobacco control: Heart & Stroke helped achieve major wins in 2025 — advocating for reinvestment of a historic tobacco settlement into prevention, research, and tobacco-related disease programs, advancing federal regulations that hold the tobacco industry accountable, and strengthening provincial protections. We also expanded access to quitting support, securing federal funding to deliver free cessation tools and community-based programs for smokers in rural and remote communities. 
• Improving health systems to address heart failure: Through continuous Heart & Stroke advocacy across the country, most provinces now have action plans in place to help more people with heart failure get the care they need.  
• Driving impact in schools: More than 967,000 school kids across Canada participated in Heart & Stroke Jump Rope for Heart in 2025 — an 18% increase over the previous year. And more than 130 schools used our award-winning gamified resuscitation program, CardiacCrash, to introduce emergency CPR and first aid skills for cardiac arrest.

Enhancing recovery

Heart & Stroke partners with people with lived experience and organizations to advance research to help close gaps in recovery. We also work to deliver resources and make meaningful connections to enhance the lives of people and families living with heart disease or stroke. You supported this important progress in 2025: 

• Driving research to improve recovery and rehabilitation: Heart & Stroke plays a key role in national research initiatives — including the Heart Function Alliance, congenital heart disease team grants, new cardiac arrest team grants, and the third Research Network of Excellence on Women’s Heart and/or Brain Health — which are helping to close gaps in rehabilitation and recovery for people living with heart disease and stroke. 
• Establishing partnerships with people with lived experience: Heart & Stroke often hears from people who are eager to share their health journey and support our mission. In 2025, we matched these partners with about 200 volunteer opportunities. 
• Expanding peer-to-peer support and patient resources: We continue to offer vital peer‑to‑peer support through our online communities — Community of Survivors and the Care Supporters Community — along with reliable patient information on our website and in our Community Connects newsletter. As of 2025, our Community of Survivors has 3,417 active participants, and our Care Supporters group, 1,300 members.

Health equity: Closing the gaps

Your commitment in 2025 advanced these initiatives aimed at improving the heart and brain health of Indigenous and Black people in Canada — populations that experience unique challenges in accessing care, and some of whom may face higher risks for heart disease and stroke.  

• Recommitting to Indigenous health: Heart & Stroke, in consultation with key Indigenous leaders and partners, renewed its Indigenous health strategy for another 10 years, to include expanded support for Indigenous researchers and Indigenous-led research. Plus, two new partnerships will strengthen the Indigenous research community and support Indigenous-led work toward more resilient and equitable public health systems.  
• Building strategic partnerships to improve prevention: Heart & Stroke worked with the Black Leads Table of Community Health Centres in Ontario on priority work, including FAST signs of stroke and women’s risk factors.  
• Supporting health through culturally relevant resources: In partnership with Type Diabeat-it, we adapted recipes for Black communities to support diabetes management. We also created a video series with the Canadian Women’s Foundation to help Black women manage risk factors. 

Dr. Bastiany shares her story as Canada's first Black woman interventional cardiologist.

Related information

• See our most recent financial statements. 
• Learn more about how Heart & Stroke invests your donations. 
• Learn more about Heart & Stroke research.