Iris Fund reports successful run on Fairfield County’s Giving Day

RIDGEFIELD — Last week, the Iris Fund participated in the region’s largest online day of philanthropy, Fairfield County’s Community Foundation’s Giving Day. In their second year participating, having won Rookie of the Year last year, they won the Women and Girls Power Hour with a cash prize of $750 to help with critical research, having the greatest number of donations.

The Iris Fund was established in 2017 and is named after Iris Crystal Aleman, who was born and died due to complications of preterm birth. Since then, her mother Brittney Crystal and other family and friends have come together to raise almost $300,000 from close to 500 donors. The fund exclusively supports the research being conducted Mechanical Engineer and OBGYN, Doctors Myers and Vink at Columbia’s Preterm Birth Prevention Center. Myers and Vink are determining what triggers full-term labor to eventually prevent preterm birth.

The Irish Fund believes “all women deserve to know how their bodies work during labor and we're so inspired that those same answers will save and improve outcomes for our most vulnerable babies.”

Crystal went on to speak about the challenges they arose out of in the past year. “We’ve had some good momentum going, but with the pandemic, understandably we were pretty quiet for awhile but luckily the research itself continued on. We’re pretty amped up that we’re moving out of this slow phase. Our next big event is participating in the Ridgefield Half-Marathon and we actually have a New York City Marathon team this year too should we be able to run.”

She then touched upon the important Ridgefield has had on her organization. “The support of the town has just been really what’s kept us going. It’s a really hard thing to walk on main street when you know so many people and it can feel overwhelming in the early days. Since the beginning, the amount of people that I knew or didn’t know and the amount of support that we’ve got from our local vendors. I mean anything you can imagine. They just show up and help every year and that’s how we got our big bounce.

Crystal is extremely appreciative of the help she’s received, “We’re a tiny organization of four volunteers and we were able to garner more donations. We were in the top 28 for the most people to give out of 394 organizations and that was in large part due to the fact that Craig’s Jewelry Store and the Broom Room and 109 Cheese and Wine and Chez Lenard donated and supported our social media efforts. We would’ve never got that without them.”

She then said, “I definitely want to send a big love letter out to this town and everybody in it.”