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Founded 2019, North Liberty – present
Zac Mago died of sudden cardiac arrest with a heart condition no one had detected, and the foundation his family built exists to detect it in other people's children. The foundation — founded by Teresa Mago in memory of her son Zac (2000–2018, as his screening flyers carry his years), a nonprofit based in North Liberty and exempt from July 2019 — provides preventive heart screenings for ages 10 to 25, checking, in its own summary, "the electrical and structural health of the heart," on the principle its materials state flatly: prevention is the only cure for sudden cardiac arrest. A screening, on the foundation's published protocol, runs: online registration, health questionnaire and consent, height and weight, blood-pressure reading, an ECG tracing the heart's electrical activity and rhythm, and a limited echocardiogram picturing the heart's structure and function — the pair of tests that can catch the conditions its list names, among them long QT syndrome, Wolff-Parkinson-White, left ventricular hypertrophy, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and bicuspid aortic valve. The foundation's price is $25, with the cost covered by the foundation where a family cannot pay.
The program's reach is the advancement's measure. Screenings run monthly — on the first Saturday of each month at the Walkerton Youth Building on the WNIT community listing — and by 2026 the foundation's calendar covered a multi-county region: Porter County Health Department sessions approved monthly on the Porter County commissioners' agendas of October 2025 and October 2026, Tipton and Noble county health-department partnerships, a LaPorte wellness practice hosting seven screening dates in 2026, an April 2026 screening at Central Noble Jr/Sr High School in Albion with free sports physicals beside it, and a closing October 2026 series across Valparaiso, Lakeville, LaPorte and Plymouth under the tagline "Play Smart. Screen Your Heart." The foundation recommends rescreening at a minimum every two years through the risk years, preferring yearly. Its own site carries the outcome that justifies the program in one sentence — a screened young athlete, named Mason in its telling, "is alive because my parents started the Zac Mago Foundation" — printed here at the foundation's own strength, as its testimony, not as a clinical finding. No carrier reached publishes a screened-total, a detection count or a peer-reviewed evaluation of the program; those figures stand as a named gap whose settler is the foundation's own reporting.