A Splendid Second Act

Chiyo Moriuchi, MBA ’86, MPH ’15

The Great Recession propelled Chiyo Moriuchi toward a second career in public health. She had already spent decades working in business, finance, and real estate investment, including a nineyear stint in Tokyo with LaSalle Investment Management. When the financial crisis prompted the firm to offer buyouts, Moriuchi took one. “I thought, ‘Maybe it’s time for me to do something else,’” she says.

While pondering her next move, she served on the boards of several Quaker organizations (Moriuchi herself is a Quaker). “While I was on the board of Medford Leas, a Quaker continuing care retirement community, I became much more aware of the issues” with an aging population, she recalls. Then Moriuchi came across a 2012 New York Times profile of Dean Linda P. Fried, MD, MPH, in which Fried discussed how she helped start a volunteer tutoring program to help both senior citizens and children flourish. “I thought, ‘That is the stuff we need to be thinking about and talking about,’” Moriuchi recalls.

Soon, she was enrolled in Columbia Mailman School’s Accelerated MPH program. She studied her town, Newtown, Pennsylvania, and found that it had many assets for older people but that elders were separated from the wider community. It also had bumpy, nard-to-navigate sidewalks.

After getting her degree, Moriuchi worked as a program manager in the Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center. But she had made connections that led to her becoming, in 2019, the CEO of Friends Village, an independent living and personal care community for older adults in Newtown. The role has allowed her to put her knowledge about healthy aging into practice. For instance, while at Columbia Mailman School, she learned about Senior Planet, a digital and in-person learning community for older adults. So Moriuchi signed up Friends Village, and now she offers free Senior Planet digital literacy classes quarterly to both Friends Village residents and other senior citizens in the area—making the retirement home a hub for senior learning. “I want Friends Village to be part of the wider community, not separated from it,” she says. “Residents can continue to be contributing members, benefiting themselves and the community, and countering society’s ageist attitudes.”