The American Heart Association (AHA) is a nonprofit voluntary health organization founded in 1924 by six cardiologists. Originally a small professional society, it has grown into the nation's oldest and largest voluntary organization dedicated to fighting heart disease and stroke, with over 3,300 employees and more than 35 million volunteers and supporters across the United States.
The AHA operates across several interconnected areas: funding cardiovascular and cerebrovascular research, delivering public-health and quality-of-care programs, running CPR training at scale, and conducting policy advocacy. It is the largest non-governmental funder of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular research next to the federal government, having invested more than $6 billion in research to date. Since its founding, deaths from cardiovascular diseases in the United States have been cut in half.
The organization's programmatic reach is substantial. Its CPR training programs reach approximately 22 million people annually, spanning both the general public and healthcare professionals. Quality-of-care initiatives focused on hypertension and high blood pressure benefit more than 19 million patients. These programs sit alongside active grantmaking, health education campaigns, and clinical quality-improvement work.
Technical and professional roles at the AHA span a wide range of disciplines, including cardiovascular and cerebrovascular research, public and population health, clinical quality improvement, health education, advocacy, and organizational operations supporting a mission-driven institution of significant national scale.
