Adrian Adair · Founder · Advocate · Author
Who is
Adrian Adair?
He looked at one of the most common and least understood birth conditions in the world and could not accept that so few people knew its name. That decision became an organization. The organization became a mission.
Adrian Adair
Founder, Heartbeat Forward · Los Angeles, CA
The mission, in brief
The mission, if Adrian has anything to say about it, will not stop until every child with a broken heart has been seen, supported, and given a fighting chance.
The Condition Nobody Talks About
The most common
The most common
birth defect
in the world.
Congenital heart disease is the most common birth defect in the world. Not rare. Not obscure. One in every 100 babies is born with a structural problem in their heart. In the United States alone, that is approximately 40,000 children every single year.
More children are born with congenital heart disease than all childhood cancers combined. And yet most people have never heard of it.
Most people do not know that some of these children will need open-heart surgery before they are old enough to walk. Most people do not know that the scar running down a child's chest is not a flaw. It is proof of survival. This invisibility is not an accident. It is a gap. And gaps, Adrian believes, are there to be filled.
1 in 100
babies born with a structural heart defect every year, worldwide
40,000+
children born with CHD in the United States alone, every single year
#1
most common birth defect on earth — more common than all childhood cancers combined
2025
year Heartbeat Forward was founded — because the gap could not wait any longer
How Heartbeat Forward Began
He could not
He could not
look away.
Heartbeat Forward was founded in 2025, but the conditions that created it had been building for much longer. Adrian was not born into the CHD world. He came to it the way most people come to causes that change their lives. Through proximity to someone else's pain. And the inability to look away from it.
What he found when he looked was a community of families navigating one of the most terrifying journeys a parent can face, often without adequate resources, often without language for what they were going through.
What he found
He found parents who could describe in precise clinical detail the anatomy of their child's defective heart but could not find the words to explain it to a four-year-old. He found children heading into cardiac units who had no idea what to expect on the other side. He found siblings left behind in waiting rooms with no one explaining why their brother or sister kept disappearing into hospitals.
He found families who had survived the surgery and returned home only to discover that the emotional wreckage of the experience had nowhere to go.
And he found, over and over again, a world that had simply not built enough scaffolding around these families to hold them up.
Heartbeat Forward was built to be that scaffolding.
What Heartbeat Forward Does
Three fronts.
Three fronts.
One mission.
I
Awareness
Congenital heart disease cannot receive the research funding, policy attention, or public compassion it deserves if most people do not know it exists. Heartbeat Forward works to change that through education, storytelling, and a body of work built with patience and precision.
II
Direct Support
Heartbeat Forward delivers care packages to children in cardiac units. These are not afterthoughts. They are carefully considered, humanely assembled gifts that arrive in some of the hardest moments of a young life and say, quietly but unmistakably: you are not forgotten.
III
The Long Game
The long-term mission of Heartbeat Forward is to fund heart surgeries for children in need. There are children who will not survive without surgery. There are families who cannot afford that surgery. The distance between those two facts is a gap that Adrian intends to close.
The Writing
A body of work
A body of work
built for families.
One of the things that sets Adrian's advocacy apart is what he has built in writing, and how he has built it. He has created an extensive library of free resources covering nearly every dimension of the CHD experience.
Everything he writes shares the same qualities. It does not condescend. It does not perform. It holds clinical accuracy and emotional truth at once, because the families living this reality need both at once.
He has written age-specific guides for children from infancy through adolescence. He has written The Quiet Majority: Why Congenital Heart Disease Deserves to Be Seen, which makes the case, in the most human terms he knows how to use, that this condition has been invisible long enough.
You can feel, in every paragraph, that the person writing it actually cares what happens to you.
What He Is Building Toward
Adrian thinks
Adrian thinks
in decades,
not quarters.
Everything connects. Nothing is accidental. Every guide, every care package, every word published under his name points toward the same horizon.
The vision he holds for Heartbeat Forward is not a small one. It includes a world where the words "congenital heart disease" carry the same weight of public recognition as "cancer" or "diabetes," and where that recognition translates into the research funding and systemic support that CHD families have always deserved and never quite received.
He is just getting started.
A scholarship program for CHD survivors investing in their futures
A research institution dedicated to CHD outcomes and family support
An annual summit bringing families, clinicians, and policymakers together
Congressional testimony for research funding and systemic change
A documentary or docuseries that carries CHD stories into living rooms nationwide
Funding life-saving heart surgeries for children whose families cannot afford them
A world where no family has to carry this alone
That is who
Adrian Adair is.
That is what he is building.
To learn more about Heartbeat Forward or to support the mission, visit heartbeatforward.org. Every contribution, every conversation, every act of awareness moves this forward.