Jill Teeters ’92 was expecting to give birth to her baby sometime around New Year’s Eve. Instead, he came into the world on Columbus Day—11 weeks premature. Her early labor, for which doctors had no medical explanation, happened fast. “I went from not feeling so well one day to being admitted to the hospital,” Teeters recalls. “Within 24 hours, my water broke, and Aidan was delivered by emergency C-section.”

 

Teeters was one of nearly half a million mothers in the United States to have a premature baby that year. Since that day, she and her husband knew they wanted to help other parents avoid the traumatic experience of having a preterm baby.

“We felt very strongly even before leaving the [neonatal intensive care unit] that it was important to give back,” says Teeters. And working with the March of Dimes— an organization that helps families have healthy, full-term pregnancies—was their way to get involved. When Aidan was just a few months old, his family walked in their first March for Babies, raising $800. Today Aidan is the 2014 National Ambassador for the March of Dimes, traveling the country with his family to raise awareness for the nonprofit. And Teeters draws on her education in speech communication to get the organization’s message out.

 

Not surprisingly, many Ithaca College alumni are using what they learned while they were at IC to help others in their own communities—preventing premature births, supporting victims of the Boston Marathon bombings, and aiding nonprofits that help those in need.

 

Ithacans get top marks for giving of both their time and money. Households in Ithaca’s 14850 zip code donated an average of $2,782 in 2012, according to the Chronicle for Philanthropy. That’s $218 more than the national average and $516 more than the average New York State resident—enough to rank Ithaca in the top 2 percent of areas assessed. And last year, Peace Corps records show that it was the top city in producing volunteers—11.7 for every 100,000 residents.

 

Community service as a whole is on an upswing nationwide with 64.5 million Americans (a little more than a quarter of the population) serving 7.9 billion hours in 2012, according to the government’s Corporation for National and Community Service.

Click on the links below to find out how fellow IC alumni are giving back to their communities.