Fit for Funds: New grant application assistance program is now being offered for fitness equipment

Fitness equipment manufacturer SportsArt Fitness recently announced the start of its new grant application assistance program for all departments looking to obtain funding for fitness equipment.

According to Amber Maechler, Director of Marketing for SportsArt, the process is simple. “SportsArt is funding a specialist from firegrantshelp.com to help departments find the right grant for them,” she explains. “To start the process, go to the link (www.firegrantshelp.com/fitness-equipment-direct-assistance-request-...) and fill out a form online. A grant specialist then contacts you and asks you what your department needs in the way of fitness equipment. After obtaining that information, the specialist contacts SportsArt to see what kind of package we can build for the department. Then the specialist researches all the grants available to see which one would be the best fit for the requesting department.”

It’s important to note that the specialist does not write the grant application for the department, and cannot do so according to federal law, unless paid by the department. “But the specialist will help them build their best application possible, helping them put together all the necessary materials,” Maechler notes.

SportsArt has been in the fitness business for decades, at first as an original equipment manufacturer for other major fitness brands. In 1996 it became the only company that manufactures all of its own parts.

But what’s most impressive is that SportsArt is currently the only treadmill manufacturer to include updated Firefighter Wellness/Fitness Initiative (WFI) protocols in their commercial treadmill programming package. “We’ve always been involved in selling equipment to fire departments and other municipalities, but it was only recently that we started working with the WFI protocols,” Maechler says. “With the help of a handful of fire departments from around the country, we learned about the WFI testing protocols and thought it would be great to work them into our system. We have other training programs/systems already built into our machines, such as the YMCA program and a military training program, but nothing specifically geared toward the fire service. So we took the WFI protocol information back to the factory and implemented it into the standard chip already in our equipment.”

Using the system is easy. To operate, users step up onto the treadmill where they’ll see a fit test button on the display. Select the fit test button, then select the WFI option. Finally, enter your age and weight when prompted. “That information will help the system calculate your heart rate,” Maechler explains. “You wear a heart rate strap around your chest, which wirelessly enters your heart rate, and the treadmill responds based on your heart rate until the test is over.”

The entire grant application process—from the time you apply for assistance to the time you are notified that your grant application has been accepted or denied—takes 9–12 months on average. So far, the response to the program has been very positive. “We’ve seen a large response, and we haven’t even been officially promoting the program,” Maechler says. “We’ve been getting 2–3 e-mails a day, which is great. We want people to take advantage of the program before the time is up for large federal grants.”

SportsArt is also working on other ways to assist fire departments. “Right now, we’re working on putting different fitness packages together for fire departments so they can more easily select which equipment to purchase,” Maechler says. “Some departments are smaller, some are larger, so their needs vary.”

For more information on firegrantshelp.com, visit their Web site. For more information on SportsArt, visit www.sportsartamerica.com or visit their booth at FDIC this coming April.
For more information on the WFI, visit www.iaff.org/hs/Well/index.htm.

Copyright © Elsevier Inc., a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
SUBSCRIBE to FIRERESCUE