Bell County heart campaign puts women’s cardiovascular risk in the spotlight
Camryn Bintz, chief financial officer of KPA Engineers, will lead the American Heart Association’s Heart of Bell County campaign as volunteer chair, with a stated focus on women’s heart health awareness and access to lifesaving resources across the region. The effort is centered in Temple, Texas, and will build toward the Bell County Heart Ball on April 16, 2027, at Temple College.
The campaign’s premise is simple and clinically important: many women still do not hear enough about their own cardiovascular risk until disease is already advanced. In that gap, prevention weakens, symptoms get missed, and opportunities for early intervention disappear.
Bintz framed her involvement around personal experience. Heart disease killed more women each year than all forms of cancer combined, she said, and her family history reinforced the point. Her grandmother died at 54 after cancer treatment strained her heart, and her great-grandmother also died young from heart-related issues. Those losses give the campaign a bedside urgency that goes beyond fundraising language.
Why women’s heart health awareness still lags
Heart disease remains a problem of recognition as much as biology. The vascular risk profile for women changes across life stages, and pregnancy and menopause can alter cardiovascular risk in ways many patients only learn after a problem emerges. In practical terms, that means a woman may enter middle age without ever being told that blood pressure, cholesterol, weight, glucose, smoking, family history, and prior pregnancy complications all shape long-term heart risk.
Bintz said her goal is to make sure women in Bell County have information they can use before a crisis occurs. That framing matters because prevention depends on awareness long before emergency response becomes necessary. When a patient understands that chest pressure, shortness of breath, arm discomfort, fatigue, or indigestion can signal cardiac disease, the threshold for seeking care changes. So does the chance that treatment begins before myocardial damage accumulates.
The campaign also links education to health equity. Access to knowledge is not distributed evenly, and neither is access to screening, emergency resources, or structured bystander response. For a community campaign to have measurable value, it must reach beyond a gala and into schools, workplaces, and public spaces where people actually live their lives.
AEDs, CPR kits and the mechanics of survival
If successful, the Bell County campaign aims to raise $175,000 to support lifesaving initiatives including automated external defibrillators, CPR training kits, and other resources. The clinical logic behind those purchases is direct. Sudden cardiac arrest is unforgiving, and the first minutes determine whether circulation can be restored before irreversible brain injury or death occurs.
An automated external defibrillator is not a symbolic investment. It is a device that can deliver a shock when a shockable rhythm is present, and it can be the difference between a witnessed collapse becoming a survivable event or a fatal one. CPR training kits serve a different but equally necessary function: they translate emergency response from abstract instruction into repetition, muscle memory, and community readiness.
The campaign’s examples are concrete. A contribution may become an AED in a college building or a CPR training kit in a local classroom. Those are not promotional abstractions; they are the infrastructure of emergency survival in settings where seconds matter and professional responders may still be on the way.
One AED in the right place can change a family’s future.
A community fundraiser built around clinical prevention
The 2027 Bell County Heart Ball will feature survivor stories, volunteer recognition, dinner, entertainment, and an auction. While the event has the familiar structure of a fundraising evening, its stated purpose is unusually specific: support the American Heart Association’s work in discovery, advocacy, access, and knowledge.
Bintz said she wants the event to be both impactful and engaging, with broader community participation fueling sponsorships and attendance. Her professional background as CFO of a Temple-based engineering firm founded in 1983 adds another layer of credibility to the leadership role. She described employee health as a priority at KPA Engineers and said the mission aligns with the way the company thinks about care for its workforce and the wider community.
That intersection between business leadership and public health matters because cardiovascular prevention depends on institutions as much as individuals. Employers can normalize screening, support healthy behavior, and reinforce emergency preparedness. Local organizations can also help distribute knowledge about women’s heart disease in settings where medical messaging may otherwise be sparse.
Local leadership, broader cardiovascular stakes
Lyndie Miller, corporate development director for the American Heart Association in Bell County and Waco, said Bintz brings vision and energy as a respected business leader. Her selection reflects a familiar truth in community health work: successful outreach often depends on people who can bridge clinical priorities and local trust.
Bintz joined the cause this year after learning more about the gaps in women’s heart health education, then quickly stepped into leadership. That speed suggests a gap large enough to mobilize someone new to the mission. It also points to a broader challenge across cardiovascular care, where awareness campaigns still have to compete with misinformation, distraction, and the persistent habit of treating heart disease as primarily a male problem.
The Bell County campaign does not claim to solve that problem on its own. It does, however, tie awareness to specific interventions: education for women, access to AEDs, CPR training, and resources that can be deployed where cardiac emergencies occur. The clinical stakes are plain. Early recognition, faster defibrillation, and better bystander response save lives, while missed warning signs and delayed action do the opposite.
For more information about supporting or attending the Bell County Heart Ball, the association directs interested participants to its event page or to Lyndie Miller by email. The larger question for the community is whether this year’s campaign can convert goodwill into tools that actually reach classrooms, college buildings, workplaces, and families before the next emergency arrives.