Armed with bucket loads full of passion and a singular vision a team consisting of health care professionals and educational experts from the Department of Educational and Social Policy at the University of Macedonia, Greece started working with the Angels Initiative. A team needs a name, and as the mission of this team was to develop the School based educational elements of the FAST Heroes campaign, they called themselves the Super Grand League (SGL).

The Angels Initiative had been very successful up and until then in helping the medical community improve the care of stroke patients. They do this by helping with the creation of new Stroke Ready hospitals in regions where there is a need. They also help existing Stroke Ready hospitals improve the quality of their care and work closely with ambulance services to improve the diagnosis of stroke and to make sure stroke patients are only delivered to Stroke Ready hospitals. The final frontier for them was to start with a systematic process of educating the general population to be able to identify the most common symptoms of stroke and that they should call an ambulance when these appear. As stroke patients are typically older (average age 70 years) the team set their vision of “Saving the World – One Grandparent at a time”.

To realize this vision, we needed the children to have fun, to be active, and to learn. But we also needed the children to take up the mission of teaching their parents and grandparents what they have learned.

With the 5-week experience developed the SGL team was ready for their first test – exposing the campaign to the children!

In December of 2018 the SGL team invited some families for a series of simulations with the aim of testing the response of the children, and fine tuning the educational elements of the 5-week experience. Below is series of photos showing the first ever FAST Heroes being trained at the simulations. The SGL team learned a lot, the children had lots of fun and most importantly they were very keen to tell their parents everything they have learned. Mission accomplished!

The first school to implement in Thessaloniki, the Anatolia High School in Thessaloniki was an amazing experience as the FAST Heroes was officially given a sendoff to go and Save the world – One Grandparent at a time. Even the resident Child Psychologist was impressed by how well the content was put together and how positively the children reacted to it.

Since then, 383 children and their families, in three cities, Thessaloniki, Alexandroupolis and Athens, trained young children to take up the mission of educating their parents and grandparents as FAST Heroes.

The FAST Heroes project will never forget those first moments when this amazing project took its very first steps in this Grand Mission!

Kindergarten of Anatolia College, January-February 2019