Stylist fashions Dimes benefit
Allie Moore, owner of allieM Salon in Little Rock and hairdresser to a number of Little Rock’s luminaries, has two daughters that she can now describe as happy and healthy. But that wasn’t always the case.
Both girls — Eislin, 5, and Harper, 15 months — began their lives in a neonatal intensive care unit. Eislin was born prematurely at 34 weeks after an emergency Caesarean section. Harper was a full-term baby at 38-plus weeks, but had even more problems than her older sister. She developed pneumonia immediately and was stricken with persistent pulmonary hypertension of the newborn. Moore remembers being in “a scary place that I never want another mother to ever have to experience.”
In order to fulfill that wish, she began volunteering with the March of Dimes just over a year ago, and today she is chairman of its Signature Chef Auction-Central Arkansas taking place at 6 p.m. Oct. 24 at the Statehouse Convention Center.
The event is sponsored by the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. Tickets, $150 each or $1,500 for tables of 10, are available at marchofdimes. com/arkansas.
During the evening, guests will bid on silent and live auction items while sampling the culinary creations of a number of Little Rock restaurants — Acadia, Loblolly Creamery, Sweet Love, Maddie’s Place, Forty Two, So Restaurant, The Pantry — along with a variety of wines. The night’s honoree is Dr. Richard “Whit” Hall of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, a specialist in perinatal and neonatal medicine.
The evening will also include a Fund the Mission component that will allow for direct donations, and these, along with other proceeds, help the March of Dimes pay for research grants, community services, education and advocacy to help prevent birth defects, premature births and infant mortality.
Among the services offered by the agency is a collaboration between it and UAMS, a 7-year-old Neonatal Intensive Care Unit Family Support Program that’s housed at the hospital, paid for by both, and a help to Moore when she had Eislin.
Harper was at UAMS in July last year. After getting her home, Moore met Janalyn Williams, March of Dimes state director, who introduced Moore to Natalie Hedrick, the agency’s division director, through a mutual friend.
“And we just talked about volunteering,” Moore says. Talk became action. “I thought [I] would volunteer in a different area [but] Natalie had a whole different plan for me.”
That’s how Moore, who has been styling hair for nearly a decade, turned to styling the Signature Chef Auction.
“Jumping in and chairing an event of this magnitude is … an honor for sure,” Moore says. “And … I think we’ve been very successful. It just fell in place.”
Volunteering with the March of Dimes has been as much education as service for Moore. She was surprised at how much research the March of Dimes paid for. She also didn’t know the rates of infant prematurity: Arkansas, at 13.1 percent (or about one in seven babies), according to the most up-to-date March of Dimes statistics, has a higher rate than the national average of 9 percent.
“As I joined as a volunteer, those [percentages] were shocking to me,” Moore says. “That’s our fight — that’s our campaign. We want to lower those rates. For sure, we want healthier babies.”
New to the event this year will be six additional chefs, bringing the total of featured chefs to 16, and “some really neat live auction items, some that we’ve not had in the past,” Moore says.
“We are almost out of tables this year, which is I think a great sign — but we can always add more … .”
Hedrick says this is the 37th year for a fundraiser whose format has morphed. There used to be “what we called a rubber chicken dinner,” she says. “But this is our eighth year to do it this way … to make it a culinary experience and invite the chefs, and it’s mutually beneficial.”
All March of Dimes chapters contribute money to the national office to help researchers try to determine the sources of birth defects, miscarriages and infant mortality, Hedrick says. However, Arkansas is looking at some grant applications that have come in for local research initiatives, “which would be amazing.”
As the March of Dimes was originally established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to combat polio, part of the initiative for the Signature Chef Auction is to get as many polio survivors as possible together to honor them, Hedrick says, adding that several survivors have been invited.
Meanwhile, Moore credits her family for their support of her work with the organization. She also lauds Hall, the night’s honoree, whom she says has “done some amazing things. And he’s very passionate about what March of Dimes is doing. It’s an honor to have him honored this year.”
This year, the fundraising goal for the Signature Chef Auction is $150,000.
“We want to set the bar high,” Moore says. “This is [the March of Dimes’] 75th birthday. … That’s pretty awesome.”