Local event links mental health awareness with emergency care to empower families

Rochester, N.Y. (WHAM) — The Rochester African American Firearms Association (RAAFA) hosted a “Stop The Bleed” course in partnership with the Monroe County Family Coalition.

Rochelle Fields of Rochester brought her daughter to Loretta Johnson Middle School on Friday evening, where dozens discussed mental health and emergency preparedness.

“I think having kids in school, and the violence in the schools, the gun violence,” said Fields, of why she attended the class. “I have kids currently in high school and thinking, maybe they need to learn, you know, how to deal with this as well.”

Recent stories in the news, such as the mass shooting during a barbecue in Rochester’s Maplewood Park, or the 2015 mass shooting outside the Boys and Girls Club of Rochester on Genesee Street, emphasized the importance of learning the life-saving skills taught in the class.

BACKGROUND: Police plead for the public’s help in solving the Maplewood Park mass shooting | Five years later, ceremony honors victims of Boys & Girls Club mass shooting

Paul Ardell, President of RAAFA, demonstrated how to use a tourniquet and distributed 100 of them free of charge.

“A tourniquet is an apparatus that goes around a limb,” explained Ardell. “What it does is it basically cinches down the blood vessels and prevents the flow of blood to the wound site and stops the person from bleeding out.”

Ardell demonstrated other ways to curb bleeding, using hands to apply direct pressure to a wound and packing wounds to control bleeding.

Though Ardell also focuses on firearms training and pistol permit courses through his other venture, RAAFA Tactical, he said the skill isn’t just important for gun owners.

“This skill isn’t necessarily for just people who have experienced violence in some way, but this training can be used for all of us,” said Ardell. “We believe that you are your own first responder, and you’re responsible for your own personal health and safety.”

The event was a partnership with the Monroe County Family Coalition (MCFC), a 501 (c)(3) community service organization — Ardell said the purpose of this was to bridge the gap between mental health awareness and the emergency care training.

“Not everybody realizes that they’re having PTSD,” said Dina Johnson, CEO of the MCFC. “They might not realize that they’re in fight or flight mode. They may not realize they’re they have anger, they have fear.”

Indeed, many in the crowd, during a discussion portion of the class, acknowledged there are often barriers that prevent people from seeking help, such as a stigma surrounding simply talking about struggles with mental health.

“What people get wrong is that they don’t know that it’s okay to say, ‘I can get help, right?” said Johnson. “For generations in the Black and brown community, we’ve been told not to really focus on that, right? We’re fine. We’ll get through it. We work through it. But now, we’re like, ‘no, it’s okay, right?’

City Council Vice President LaShay Harris, who is also a paramedic, helped put together the event.

“Every other day in this country or every other month there’s a school shooting or there’s an attack on a church or a business,” said Harris. “If you don’t know the simple life-saving measure, such as stopping the bleed or tourniquet, I mean, that’s a difference between life and death for you, for someone else that you might love, or someone you don’t know. We need to learn those measures. Right here in this neighborhood, in my district, we have gun violence every day.”

According to the American College of Surgeons, the organization behind the Stop the Bleed program, bleeding is the No. 1 cause of preventable death after injury.

Ardell said he has also incorporated the training into his pistol permit classes at RAAFA Tactical. Monroe County Clerk Jamie Romeo estimated that her office has accepted about 3,000 applications for pistol permits in 2025, so far.

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