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He runs a major insurance company with assets of $13.7 billion, oversees an operation with some 1,000 employees at 36 sites, and has met movers and shakers ranging from the heads of Fortune 500 companies to cardinals and archbishops of the Church to the Empress Michiko of Japan.
Yet the genial and engaging Tom Moran—the chairman, president and CEO of Mutual of America—speaks just as proudly of a simple cardboard armband that helps identify children at risk of starvation in Africa as he does about his business success in New York.
The armband, designed by the Dublin-based relief and development agency Concern Worldwide and others, uses a color-coded measuring system to determine the degree of malnutrition in a young child when wrapped around the upper arm.
“We asked, ‘Why are we waiting until a famine hits?’…With this, a couple of thousand volunteers in Ethiopia, say, can go from village to village and record the numbers. If it’s green the child is well nourished; when it gets to the red zone you already may be too late,” said Moran, who is the chairman of Concern Worldwide’s U.S. operation.
“The key is that once it gets to the yellow, you can see that it’s in an area where it’s going in the wrong direction and we know we can start reporting a hunger issue—whether it’s from a bad crop or the rainy season not lasting long enough,” Moran said.
When that happens, Concern Worldwide gives vouchers that a mother can take to a local distributor to get a special nutritional preparation for the undernourished child, along with other food for her healthier children.
“Once we started supplying food for all of the children, we started seeing the results that we wanted,” Moran said.
Moran, who’s actively involved in a dizzying array of charitable activities and causes, including many involving the archdiocese, does not simply sit in his midtown Manhattan executive suite and plan fund-raising efforts for Concern Worldwide (although that’s one of his main roles).
He travels to the sites, making one weeklong trip to Africa each year to see what the needs are and how they’re carried out. And, lately, making several trips to Haiti, where he’s enthusiastic about a post-earthquake pre-fab housing program that Concern is sponsoring on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince.
“Each home has its own indoor latrine,” he noted, showing photos of the project to a visitor while he described the latrine system of buckets and drainage designed to keep the soil uncontaminated.
When it was pointed out that the plumbing seemed somewhat primitive, Moran said that it represented a huge improvement from what the people had before. “Throughout most of the world you don’t find plumbing of the type that we’d be accustomed to,” he said.
Moran, who grew up on Staten Island and attended Catholic schools from elementary level through college—St. Joseph Hill Academy, Msgr. Farrell High School and Manhattan College—joined Mutual of America in 1975, became president and chief operating officer in 1992 and CEO in 1994; he took on the chairmanship in 2005 with the retirement of William J. Flynn.
At the company, Moran has carried on the culture of community and humanitarian concern developed by his predecessor. “You must have heard, Mutual of America is known as a soft touch,” he laughed.
Indeed, in his message to shareholders in the company’s 2010 annual report Moran wrote that last year “virtually every Mutual of America employee participated in charitable events and voluntary giving, organizing coworkers to raise funds through bikeathons, marathons, bake sales and toy drives. The company supports their efforts through matching contributions, grants and gifts to hundreds of charitable organizations.”
His own involvement in Concern Worldwide, which was founded in 1968 by an Irish missionary priest, Father Aengus Finucane, C.S.Sp., began about 15 years ago when he was persuaded by a friend to join the U.S. board. Not long after that, the friend died unexpectedly and Moran agreed to take over the chairman’s spot.
“It’s been a good run,” he said.
Since then, Moran’s up-close involvement in the myriad and entrenched problems of the developing world has given him a handle on the range of small-scale and sometimes deceptively simple methods that Concern Worldwide and similar agencies use to address them.
For instance, Moran speaks passionately about the challenges to children in a country like Sierra Leone, where “one out of four children will not live beyond their fifth birthday.”
“One of the things we’re doing is working to change that,” Moran said.
Among the projects is a women’s group where mothers can share their experiences and learn about caring for their children, with an emphasis on health and nutrition. Concern Worldwide also has established a training center that offers certificates to teachers.
“One issue in a lot of countries is that the educators are not trained. Anybody who can read a little or write a little can be a teacher,” he said. For the certificate, teachers get traditional educational credits and also must agree to certain principles, such as “I have no right to rape a child and no right to put a young boy to work on a farm.”
Moran also tells of hiring teams of bicycle riders to get medications and other critical supplies to remote villages in the Congo when the roads became impassible for other vehicles in the rainy season, and of financing a simple but sturdy bridge at a cost of $25,000 so pregnant women expecting a difficult childbirth can get to a doctor on the other side of the river.
Without that passage, he said, the women would likely go into labor without help and die.
“Our focus is on women and children,” Moran said. “Women, because they’re the strength of any civil society, and children because they’re the future of that society.”
Information on Concern Worldwide US: www.concernusa.org.
