ROGERS - Every death from heat illness is avoidable.
“It’s 100 percent preventable,” says Heather Foitek of Rogers. “For people to be dying from that is inexcusable. It’s all prevented through education.”
This is what motivates Foitek, a senior category adviser with Del Monte Foods, to volunteer with the Kendrick Fincher Hydration Foundation - the knowledge that the potential exists to eliminate deaths from heat illness. The foundation is named after the late Kendrick Fincher, who died in August 1995 at age 13, 18 days after experiencing heat stroke during an Elmwood(Rogers) Junior High School football practice.
Foitek got involved with the foundation more than four years ago. She had recently moved to Northwest Arkansas, and was looking for a way to get involved with the community.
Her company at the time, Gatorade, was connected to the foundation’s annual run, and Foitek volunteered with that. Afterward, she decided she wanted to help it launch a gala.
Its first year, the gala drew about 150 people. This year’s gala, which is named A Cool Summer Prom Night, is expected to draw 500 people.
The gala is Aug. 10 at theFayetteville Town Center. Tickets are $100, $1,000 for a table of eight, or $500 for a VIP ticket, which includes a half-hour session before the gala with the evening’s speaker, former National Football League Most Valuable Player LaDainian Tomlinson.
The gala features dinner, beverages, and a whole lot of time for dancing. Appropriately, there will be a prom court, and the way one is crowned king or queen is through fundraising.
“Come dressed as any decade you’d like in prom attire,” Foitek says. “[The music is] dance, progressive through the decades, from the ’60s and ’70sto the present.”
All funds raised at the prom night support the foundation’s mission of promoting proper hydration and reducing the number of injuries and fatalities caused by heat illness. The foundation puts a heavy emphasis on education, teaching children of all ages about the importance of hydration and how to recognize the danger signs of dehydration.
The foundation is currently developing a hydration curriculum that can connect to statewide curriculums, and can be taught in students’ physical education classes. So far, Foitek says, the foundation’s curriculum has been rolled out to three test schools, and it has “worked out well.”
“Most people don’t realize how important hydration is,” Foitek says. “Prehydration is the most important [component]. If you show up to the practice or game field dehydrated, you’re never going to catch up. You’re going to be in trouble.”
The foundation works with students of all ages, from kindergarten through high school. It has distributed thousands of water bottles over the years, with a cartoon bee on it and the reminder “Bee hydrated.”
Much of the foundation’s work has taken place in Northwest Arkansas, but it will be expanding this year, Foitek says, opening an office in central Arkansas. Down the road, she adds, the foundation would like to take its mission to a national level.
What the foundation wouldreally like, though, is for its work to be entirely unnecessary.
“I choose to volunteer with this organization because it is a cause that’s 100 percent preventable,” Foitek says. “All it takes is education. Education is easy to come by, as long as we can reach the audience.”
For more information about the Kendrick Fincher Hydration Foundation, call (479) 986-9960 or visit kendrickfincher. org.
Northwest Profile, Pages 31 on 07/21/2013