IN THIS ISSUE:
Acts of Altruism | Alumni Interview | Class Profiles

FEATURE STORY (continued) — November/December 2004


Acts of Altruism ...

By Amy F. Reiter

For children with familial dysautonomia and their loved ones, Ken Slaw '79 LAS, EDM '83, PHD '87 ED, might well be Superman.

By day, he directs membership for the American Academy of Pediatrics, a nonprofit organization of more than 60,000 pediatricians.

By night, lunchtime, weekend and any other spare moment, Slaw is a volunteering dynamo, a crusader in the fight against FD, a debilitating and eventually fatal genetic disease. He's also a parent who wants his son and other sick children to live as happy, healthy and long a life as possible and is willing to dedicate his time and money to make that happen.

He's not the first Illini to give of himself, and he won't be the last. From local charity to international aid and from saving homes to saving lives, Illinois alumni are finding their own way to help others.

Ken and Andrew Slaw

Carolyn Dunaway Baxley, am '75 LAS, protects historic buildings from wrecking balls and helps motivate children toward science. David McCarty'59 ACES, MD '64 (UIC), took in more than 100 foster children over 20 years and still found time to treat crippled children in the Rockford area. Celia Mathews Elliott '74 teaches scientists in the former Soviet Union how to make the transition to working in the world scientific community. And Gustavo Medina'02 ENG, MS '04 ENG, only just finished with his electrical and computer engineering education, has already spent years tutoring immigrants and migrant workers, helping them adjust to their new life and language.

"You go through various life experiences, and you have choices," Slaw said of his own entry into public service. "I've always been very much a glass-is-half-full person."

He easily could have viewed that glass as drained dry. When Slaw and his wife, Ann, learned that their then-4-year-old son, Andrew, had FD and would most likely die within a few years' time, they were devastated. However, they were by no means resigned. "No matter what the trauma, there is opportunity if you can sort of get yourself above the gloom and look for it," Slaw said.

"The pathway to volunteering was to have the experience of what this is happen to us," he said. "I think people volunteer primarily because they feel some sense of a personal connection to a mission, to an organization."

Slaw found opportunities to make a difference in three organizations: FD Hope, a foundation the Slaws founded, where he uses his skills and contacts to raise awareness and help fund innovative research; the Make-A-Wish Foundation, where he is the volunteer vice chairman for the Illinois chapter's board of directors; and the American Association of Medical Society Executives, where he is an unpaid leader and organizer.

Slaw got an early taste of volunteerism as an undergrad at the University of Illinois, helping his fraternity, Sigma Alpha Mu, raise money for various causes. Then, as a graduate student in educational psychology, he became involved with advancing medical knowledge and patient care. When Slaw began his job at the AAP, he learned even more about how to effect change in the medical field.

The experiences proved pivotal in advancing FD Hope's cause and its results.

In the four years since founding the organization, which just last year raised more than $150,000, Slaw has already seen drastic breakthroughs in research. The gene for a FD-free body and its mutation were discovered, as well as the cause of the mutation. The first two treatments for the disease are now being tested.

One new treatment that came directly as a result of FD Hope funding is the reason Andrew lives today. It helped him go from "desperate straits" after six months in the pediatric intensive care unit to literally jumping on his bed, packed with energy.

Prior to that, Andrew's illness had already brought the Make-A-Wish Foundation into Slaw's life. When the group granted Andrew's wish of a trip to Disney World, the family experienced its first real vacation since his birth. It was such a joyous time that Slaw decided he wanted to help the organization that had brought such happiness into his family's struggle.

"Just tell me what I can do to help," he told them.

Now Slaw helps connect sick children with doctors around the country for Make-A-Wish. Along with the work from his two other unpaid positions, volunteering creates "another 30 to 40 hours [of work] a week," he said, in addition to the full-time job that keeps his family fed.

But for Slaw, there's no question the effort is worth it.

While Slaw's inspiration to volunteer came from his own home, Carolyn Baxley found hers by looking out her window. A longtime Urbana resident, Baxley saw historic homes falling into disrepair and wanted to do something to preserve her neighborhood. She joined local zoning boards and bought properties, turning old houses into historic landmarks—in fact, at one time she owned four of the five historic landmarks in Urbana.

That community interest extends across neighborhoods. Baxley owns Cinema Gallery, which showcases the work of regional artists, and volunteers for the Urbana Sweetcorn Festival. She is also on the Urbana Plan Commission, a citizens' group which helps the city oversee zoning changes, like making a residential building commercial. "It's a very necessary part of government," she said. "It protects historic neighborhoods and also provides for growth."

Fourteen years ago Baxley embarked on her most challenging act of structural and community rehabilitation: She helped found the Orpheum Children's Science Museum in downtown Champaign.

"I got involved with the Orpheum project because it was a preservation project," Baxley said. But as a parent, she also felt "we didn't have nearly enough children's activities in the community."

With a science museum, "the child is both entertained and educated at the same time," Baxley said. "Museums in general are just really good for the cultural health of a community."

Getting that place together became a hands-on project that consumed Baxley's time. "I did a little bit of everything," she said. "I was there every minute that I wasn't somewhere else." As a volunteer, her days were filled with demolition, cleaning, restoration and then all of the administrative details that made up building a museum from scratch.

Baxley's years of construction and creation also created strong friendships. "When you have a group of people like that, you feed on each other's enthusiasm because you know you're doing something good  and it's fun," she said. "It's sooo much fun to take a building like that and completely revitalize it."

Seeing the end result of Baxley's work and that of so many others was even more fun: "I think that we can take credit for having motivated a lot of little ones," she said.

From left, Steven, Alex and David McCarty

As a doctor, David McCarty saw many little ones who needed more than motivation. They needed a safe and stable, if temporary, home. McCarty was already a father of five and a volunteer at the Illinois Crippled Children's Clinic when he and his wife, Christine, decided to take in a foster child.

"As an orthopedic surgeon, I see a lot of unfortunate situations with children who come from not-good circumstances," he said. "We thought we should do something."

Helping their first foster child through a traumatic time proved re-warding, and the family began taking in foster children regularly. Most stayed only briefly before returning to their home or finding another permanent one, but some stayed for years.

"We didn't know if we'd take more than one, but it just kept going on," McCarty said. "It's not like it's a revolving door, but we always had children."

Over more than 20 years, more than 100 children have become part of the McCarty family. Pictures of those children still line the walls of their home and spark smiles and stories. "You have to provide  and you want to provide  a pleasant and nurturing environment for the children," McCarty said. "They're looking for someone who's going to love and hold them and take care of them."

Two of the children who entered the McCarty family never left. The McCartys saw the situation the kids might return to and adopted them. Though McCarty is now taking his first break from foster parenting, he doesn't show signs of relaxing his community efforts: He provides free physical exams to kids starting local sports programs.

McCarty sees the act of volunteering as anything but voluntary in order to live a fulfilling life. "This is part of our responsibility to the community to do these things because that's what we're here for," he said. "We need to do everything that we can to improve society ¸ so that young people get a chance to succeed."

In Celia Elliott's case, a need for improvement found her. Since the breakup of the U.S.S.R., "science has just been brought to its knees in Russia," she said. "The individual scientists were just completely unprepared to compete [for funding]."

Elliott, who works in the UI physics department as a director of external affairs and special projects, works with those scientists, teaching them how to write proposals and reports for the world scientific community. It is a skill critical to getting both funded and published.

Since 1995, Elliott has made 26 trips to the former Soviet Union, most of them taken from her vacation days and paid for out of her own pocketbook. (Recently the U of I has helped fund some of her trips.)

Her Eastern European odyssey began in California in 1993, when she drove famed scientist Edward Teller, the "father of the hydrogen bomb," home from a conference. He talked with her of his concerns about what could happen if these brilliant Russian scientists had no financial resources to continue their work or even to live on, especially with the sensitive information they possessed.

Teller said people needed to help them, "to really make them a part of the international community," Elliott said. He felt it was "our duty as Americans to make that happen, to reach out.

"His words really made an impression on me," Elliott said.

Elliott

Flash forward two years to another conference, this one in Italy, where she was working as an editor for the conference's publication and sharing a hotel with Russian scientists. One day the scientists asked her to look over their conference papers, which needed to be submitted in English. They were a mess of grammar and syntax, Elliott said, so in the evenings, she helped revamp them.

Shortly afterward, Elliott received an invitation to a scientific conference in Russia. She was sure it was a mistake. "I'm just this ol' farmer's daughter from Tolono, Illinois!" she thought. Perhaps so, but Elliott had the English and technical writing skills they wanted.

"They needed somebody that could take bad English and make it into good English," she said. "I began to see that there was a huge need for training."

Though she has no science degree, Elliott has enthusiasm for the cause. For the last decade she's lectured former-Eastern bloc scientists on writing grant proposals and publishing papers, taught Internet usage and created a Web site to help them find resources.

The scientists have already seen results from her efforts, including a $300 bonus won by a Russian group for writing the best annual report submitted to a funding foundation. That bonus equaled about four months' salary for one of them.

Elliott's also made good on Teller's hope to get the scientists involved in the world community by connecting them to American collaborators, including a few at the U of I. She called one collaboration with a UI astrophysics professor "remarkably productive," saying that in addition to the research accomplished, "it got [the Russian scientists] interested in astrophysics ¸ about what they could do with their knowledge in a civilian environment."

The work has also changed Elliott's own life for the better. "I've probably spent $30,000 of my own money, and it's been worth every penny," she said. "This has got to be some of the most rewarding work I've ever done."

For Gustavo Medina, the rewards included finding a career path from a field he hadn't realized existed. In high school, he joined a computer club led by a dynamic adviser, who wrote to companies asking for outdated computers, then set club members on the task of making those computers useful in a school environment.

"We took apart the computers and just put together better computers," Medina said. Then the group used them to set up small labs in local schools that needed them. "It made me feel pretty good," he said of the result.

When his high school career counselor heard about the experience and suggested Medina check out engineering, a whole new world opened up. "I'm like, 'What's an engineer?'" Medina joked.

At Illinois, he got to find out. "I took the first class, and I really liked it," he said.

Despite the course load, Medina continued volunteering during college. He joined the UI chapter of the National Society of Hispanic Profes-sional Engineers, whose goals included community service, leadership and academic achievement. In his last two years of college, he helped lead the organization's service efforts, volunteering and recruiting others to help tutor migrants and recent immigrant children and adults every Saturday morning.

"You really get to see how they improve," Medina said of working with the children in particular over the years. "What really helped them was getting the one-on-one attention."

During UI spring breaks, the chapter went to underprivileged high schools in the Chicago area to talk about the college experience and its importance. Then, during the high school students' spring break, the organization would bring them to Urbana. "We have workshops about college life, applying to the University, stuff like that," Medina said.

For some students, the experience is the extra push they need. "It seems like every year someone ends up in Champaign," he said.

As Medina prepares to move to Austin, Texas, to begin a job in the semiconductor division of Motorola, he already knows volunteering will also be a part of his future. "Even-tually, I'd like to start my own company and try to help ¸ the underdeveloped countries," he said, "help them set up some more [information technology] infrastructure, just help them get the technology."

Community outreach and service is Medina's way of giving back for what he feels are the many opportunities he's been given in his life, including fellowship assistance from UI faculty. "They always supported me," he said of his professors. "It's thanks to them that I was able to stay in Champaign and do my graduate studies."

Medina hopes his work will inspire the people he works with to volunteer their own skills.

"It makes you feel good about yourself that you're helping other people," he said.

Superman would agree with that.

Top photo courtesy of Ken Slaw.
Middle photo courtesy of David McCarty.
Bottom photo courtesy of Celia Elliott.