Idea Makers

Shannon Brown
Terry Lundgren
Dr. Luanne Freer

Cause for Excitement

Thanks to advocates like Shannon Brown, the March of Dimes
is meeting its mission

Shannon Brown was prepared to hear the worst. On October 11, 2002, his wife, Beryl, went into labor 12 weeks early. She was 38 years old and slightly built — just 110 pounds at 5 feet, 8 inches tall — factors that did not bode well for her or the child she was about to deliver.

Brown paced back and forth in a waiting area at the Sheldon B. Korones Newborn Center at the Regional Medical Center at Memphis, better known as The MED. He felt relatively calm; his work for FedEx Express, where he is now a senior vice president and chief human resources officer, had trained him to be cool under pressure. Plus, Brown knew his wife and his child were in good hands: Dr. Korones himself was consulting on the delivery, and the Newborn Center was renowned for its success in treating premature babies.

Still, Brown had doubts. "A million things race through your mind," he says. "Will my wife be OK? Are there any issues with the baby's brain development? Will she have problems with her ability to see or walk?"

Korones entered the waiting room and astounded Brown with the news. "He told me, 'It's a girl, and she and your wife are doing fine,'" Brown recalls. Baby Cailin weighed almost two and a half pounds, but Korones assured Brown that everything would turn out well.

"A two-and-a-half-pound baby is very small," Brown says. "I could hold her in the palm of my hand. But the doctor told me, 'We will have her up and running in no time. Put some weight on her, and she's going to develop completely normally.'"

Brown, now 52, credits Korones and his team for the exemplary care that his wife and daughter received. And he notes that his family benefited in a tangible way from the great strides in newborn health care supported by the March for Babies, which is part of the March of Dimes. Brown had been donating to the charity even before his company became formally affiliated with the March of Dimes in 2001. But after Cailin's birth, he dedicated more time and effort. Today, he sits on the March of Dimes' national board of directors.

Over the past eight years, FedEx has donated more than $9 million to the March of Dimes and its mission to improve the health of babies. Over the years, these funds have supported research, education, advocacy, and community-based grants to help more women have healthy pregnancies and healthy babies. The ultimate goal, of course, is to save lives — and national statistics show that between 1995 and 2005, the infant mortality rate in the United States declined more than 9 percent.

It's little wonder, then, that Brown is so dedicated to the cause. Today, he and Beryl are the proud parents of a 6-year-old dynamo. "Cailin is one of the happiest children you'd ever want to meet," he says. "She's into skiing and tennis, and she loves to swim. She speaks Spanish and a little Chinese. Seeing her six years ago, and seeing what she's doing now, it's mind-boggling. If it hadn't been for Dr. Korones and his team, and the March of Dimes and their funding, things could have gone the other way for my daughter. I consider it a miracle that everything worked out just fine."

— Joe Bargmann

Continental is the official airline of the March of Dimes 2009 National Ambassador Program and a national sponsor of March for Babies.

Dream Weavers

Macy's is helping to improve women's lives in Rwanda through trade, not aid, says CEO Terry Lundgren

In the deepening recession, shops are cutting wholesale suppliers left and right, particularly smaller players, to get inventories in line with shriveling consumer demand. But there's one relatively new brand sold only at Macy's that's not about to disappear from the shelves or Macys.com. It's the Path to Peace Collection, a line of richly dyed sisal baskets and bowls — about 25 styles all together — handwoven by women who survived the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. "I'm committed to it," states Terry Lundgren, chairman, CEO, and president of Macy's Inc. "It's a small vendor for us, but a big deal for them."

The story began when Lundgren got a call from Willa Shalit, whose company, Fair Winds Trading, exports products from third-world countries to promote socially conscious entrepreneurship and cause-related merchandising. "I thought she wanted a donation," he recalls. After all, Macy's, a $25 billion retail giant, has a huge program for philanthropy.

With some trepidation, Lundgren took the call because he knows Shalit's father, Gene Shalit, the mustachioed film and theater critic who interviewed him on The Today Show when Lundgren was CEO of Neiman Marcus. "She told me she wanted the women of Rwanda to have jobs. 'I want these women to feel empowered,' she said. What Willa brought to light was that the genocide left behind women. I didn't comprehend the impact it had on the country. Imagine, this genocide happened in our lifetime. It's staggering."

Even after hearing Shalit discuss the genocide, in which as many as 1 million people, mostly men and boys of the Tutsi tribe, were murdered, and her plan to help women in Rwanda earn money by getting Macy's to buy the baskets they create, Lundgren remained skeptical. He's accustomed to working on far larger product partnerships, with the likes of Donald Trump and Martha Stewart, and focusing on the major issues affecting Macy's and its shareholders - not getting directly involved in the kind of untested business venture that Shalit was proposing.

"When I met with Willa, she reached into her canvas bag and pulled out these baskets. I was immediately impressed by the design and quality," Lundgren says, as he shows off a basket given to him by a Rwandan weaver when he visited the country. The basket's black-and-white pattern symbolizes the need to lead a balanced life. He received a note with the basket that read, "Thank you for all you have done for the women of Africa. With love and gratitude." Other baskets in the collection have different patterns, and each basket comes with a picture of the weaver.

"They take a lot of pride in making these baskets," says Lundgren, who was ultimately won over by Shalit's concept and set in motion what he considers a new business model that makes money for Macy's. "It's trade, not aid," he says.

Macy's supplies the materials for the baskets and supports a training center in Rwanda where women, both Hutu and Tutsi, learn to weave the baskets. They live temporarily at the training center and return to their homes to do the weaving.

The Macy's program started with 25 women in a village about 20 minutes outside Kagali, the capital of Rwanda. In the first year, Macys.com sold $50,000 worth of baskets. "Once we could tell the story, it became an easy sell," Lundgren says. In 2008, Macy's sold $1.5 million worth of the baskets, online and in four flagship stores. With the volume growing, the collaboration employs about 2,000 weavers, who earn a living wage and are able to afford necessities.

"They had this skill that was never exported before," Lundgren says. "There's a very deep, long history of basket making in Rwanda. The baskets were always done for personal use, not for selling. Or they were used as barter."

"Frankly, this is more powerful than any check I've ever written as a donation," Lundgren adds. "It's a fantastic feeling when you change the way a person lives."

— David Moin

Sky High

Dr. Luanne Freer finds gratification treating patients at the top of the world

At the foot of Mount Everest's Khumbu Glacier in Nepal, 17,600 feet above sea level, the Everest base camp is where climbers prepare to make their bid for the world's highest summit. Treating injured climbers at the top of the world presents challenges that would be inconceivable elsewhere. But each March, before the six- to eight-week Everest climbing season begins, a team of volunteer doctors treks to the base camp, acclimatizing over many weeks, to set up the world's highest ER.

Emergency physician Luanne Freer founded the Everest Base Camp Medical Clinic (everester.org) in 2003. She works out of a small white Quonset hut-shaped tent on the glacier. Medicines sometimes freeze, fragile equipment often fails, and human bodies react unpredictably at such extremes of temperature and altitude.

The clinic has been a lifesaver for climbers who brave Everest, but Freer's main intent was to help the Sherpa people of the Himalayas, who often serve as guides for climbers and trekkers. In 1999, after Freer gave a talk on her specialty, wilderness medicine, to a group of physicians in Whistler, British Columbia, an audience member invited her to join a volunteer team of doctors headed to a Nepal village. Over five days, Freer and the group treated 600 people. "It was my first exposure to the tremendous needs of a third-world country," she says.

The experience showed Freer what a valuable contribution she could make. She next volunteered to spend three and a half months in a Sherpa village at 14,000 feet, providing health care for both villagers and trekkers. She says she developed a deep connection with the Sherpa people. "Some of them didn't even own a pair of shoes, yet they were much happier than my neighbors in the U.S. who have three cars in their garages."

On this trip, Freer visited the base camp and became determined to start a clinic, with doctors who could provide the specialized care the climbing community required. She came up with a plan to use any proceeds from caring for climbers to pay for free health care for the Sherpa people.

Getting started was "pretty exasperating," Freer says. "I basically begged for donations, not of cash, but of equipment." But once climbers saw her heart was in it for the right reasons, she adds, "they started to rally around and help me."

The base camp clinic treats an average of 50 patients per week during climbing season. Then, Freer returns to her regular job as a medical director of clinics in Yellowstone Park and Midway Island. Freer acknowledges that her volunteer work has sometimes made it difficult to have a personal life, but as she puts it, "You just figure out what's important to you."

— Anita Bartholomew