BARBARA ZIEGLER
The Giving Circle’s mission of improving the lives of women and children in Philadelphia is near and dear to Barbara Ziegler’s heart. As a bioengineer, Barbara has dedicated most of her career to helping parents and their infant children by developing and fitting an orthotic device for babies whose heads have become misshapen while sleeping on their backs.
It all began when Barbara and her husband Bill, who were engineering students at Penn and college sweethearts, got married and then moved to the New York area in 1982 to pursue their careers — Bill as a chemical engineer and business consultant and Barbara as a bioengineer, specializing in artificial limbs and bracing.
In 1993, Barbara and Bill moved to St. Louis where Bill began a new job and Barbara found her calling. The previous year, the American Academy of Pediatrics began encouraging parents to follow a new “back to sleep” guideline, which recommended that infants sleep on their back. “While it reduced the risk of SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome),” said Barbara, “it increased the occurrence of the infants’ heads becoming misshapen.”
Barbara developed an expertise in this area working for several companies in St. Louis that had engineered a solution — a custom orthotic device that fits on a child’s head like a helmet. “When a child is between four and seven months old, there is a window when we can intervene and put a helmet on the child’s head for three to six months to promote the reshaping of his or her head.
“The goal is to restore the head shape to the neutral zone so no one knows once the child has hair,” said Barbara, who estimates that she helped about 350 children a year over 24 years. “I truly enjoyed my work, just to make the whole process as easy and guilt-free as possible.”
After Barbara and Bill retired, they moved to Philadelphia in 2017 to be near each of their parents who lived in Chambersburg and Havertown at the time, finding an apartment in the Art Museum area. After meeting Giving Circle member Carol Cunningham, who lived in their building at the time, Barbara joined TTN and the Giving Circle in 2020.
Eager to get an inside look into how the Giving Circle worked, Barbara signed up for the Grants Committee in 2021 and 2022, which she found to be an “amazing process and well organized.” Barbara also spends time volunteering at CHOP (Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia), holding infants in the NICU and handing out books and crafts to children who are patients in the hospital.
Recalling a quote by 18th century British theologian John Wesley, who espoused “doing all the good you can in all the ways you can,” Barbara points out that “as we get older we can’t physically do all the things we want, but the Giving Circle is one way we can have an impact in Philadelphia on women and children. Being a member is an opportunity to learn about the non-profits helping women and children. I like what our goals are and I like how we achieve them.”
contributed by Caroline Lacey