A Dream with a Deadline: Heart to Heart's dream is that every child in the world will have access to modern heart care. Teaching our global neighbors how to save their babies is not only a true act of kindness for each child and their family, but also an extraordinary privilege for us.

In the 1940s, American physicians dared to question the prevailing wisdom that it was impossible to operate on a live human heart. Their courage, perseverance, and skill led to miraculous breakthroughs. Between the 1940s and the late 1970s, pediatric cardiac specialists in the United States developed and refined the first successful surgical procedures on the live human heart. Millions of American babies born with a heart defect – the most common birth defect in the world {also known as childhood heart disease} – were no longer destined to suffer and die.

Today in the U.S., over 95% of children born with heart disease are successfully treated and grow up to lead normal lives.

While breakthrough advances were benefiting children in the U.S., Soviet physicians – isolated from major advances in cardiac surgery being made in the West – remained unable to treat Russian children born with heart disease.

In 1989, Heart to Heart, an independent non-profit organization, was founded to teach physicians in St. Petersburg {then Leningrad, USSR} how to perform open heart surgery on children. Heart to Heart's successful efforts in St. Petersburg culminated in a self-sustaining pediatric cardiac program, publicly acknowledged by Russia's Chief of Cardiac Surgery as the country's "best infant open heart surgery program."

The break-up of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War literally opened the door for Heart to Heart to expand our teaching to other regions of Russia. The vastness of Russia encompasses eight geopolitical districts spanning nine time zones, with a total population of 142 million. We have our work cut out for us. The goal of our Into the Heartland Campaign {2002–2022} is to ensure that inhabitants of each district have their own state-of-the-art children's heart center. We launched our fourth site in Fall 2009, and in Spring 2011, we conducted on-the-ground site assessments to identify our fifth site for development.