By: Shane Bagot, Follow South Jersey Community Journalist
SOUTH JERSEY – Moorestown resident Cole Ransom, 17, is a volunteer junior firefighter at the Cinnaminson Fire Department who has seen a lot while working within the community, including drug overdoses and cardiac arrest calls that lead to be fatal. Ransom and his friends saw the issues going on and wanted to address them, so they came together to start a non-profit organization: the Emergency Ready Project.
Emergency Ready Project provides CPR and first aid training alongside first aid equipment for the South Jersey area. Eventually, they want to expand to eastern Pennsylvania and northern Delaware. The organization has been running its operation for two months. They are eyeing to start fundraising in August to raise money to donate equipment and host CPR classes.
Ransom or another CPR company plans to teach the CPR classes. Participants would be allowed to earn a CPR first aid and AED license certification. The classes would last four hours and teach CPR, rescue breathing, stopping bleeding, using an automated external defibrillator, and other first aid tactics. They would all be free of charge.
In addition to the training, they want to provide funding for resources like epinephrine and Narcan. These are often omitted from EMS stocks due to the high price that these medications typically command. Ransom had an instance where they did not have epinephrine injectors to help reverse an allergic reaction and had to wait for advanced life support paramedics to arrive.
While the Emergency Ready Project is ultimately to help the community as a whole, Ransom made it a priority to focus these services on underserved and lower-income populations.
“Areas that are more financially struggling don’t have equal access to training like this,” Ransom said. “We’re doing that by offering the training free of charge. I realized that there are folks in every community that would benefit from this. But what we’re aiming to do initially is to try to help out disadvantaged communities so that they can have a fair shot with emergencies too.”
While they have not been able to get any fundraiser up and running due to not having designation from the federal government as a 501 C3 non-profit, they have been busy getting other aspects of the organization going. They have been working to get committees up and running like marketing communication, supplies, and soon training. Digital reach is also important as a website is now up, a logo, and social media accounts in the next few weeks. Soon, the website will be updated to allow for donations.
Financial support is essential to the goal of the organization, but their parents have been helping in ways that have been pushing the members even more.
“They’ve been really helpful in actually doing the paperwork to set the organization up,” Ransom said. “Encouraging me to keep going because it can be discouraging. Sometimes it’s a slow process and they’ve been helpful.”
The support extends to other organizations that are eager to join in and help with the cause.
“People are generally pretty excited about helping in the community,” Ransom said. “I anticipate that we’ll have a pretty good time. A lot of people have expressed interest in helping.”
The organization stresses the importance of its services. Mentioning that these emergencies happen a lot more often than people may think with overworked areas like Camden not having enough ambulances available. It runs a major risk of the people not being able to be treated quickly enough.
The whole idea is to get the community more into it. These CPR classes generally cost from $90 to $110 just to get a certification, so offering it for free opens up the doors for not just people to be saved but for possible job opportunities as well. Ransom and the Emergency Ready Project organization want to be able to make an impact in the South Jersey area, and this is their contribution to do that.
To check out more information on the organization and upcoming events, check out their website by clicking here.
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