Written by Nick Michael
Mark Moore, co-founder and CEO of Mana, crossed paths with Stephanie Grudenfelder, vice president of the American Peanut Council, at a Washington, D.C. world hunger summit.
“It’s just weird,” Moore said. “We were sitting in a meeting in D.C., and she said, ‘Where’d you go to school?’ I said, ‘Oh, small college in Arkansas.’ She said, ‘Oh, so did I.'”
That small college in Arkansas is Harding University.
“The Harding connection made it fun,” Grudenfelder said. “You’ll have the conversation a million times after you graduate.”
Moore (’90) and Grudenfelder (’85) are members of a confluence of Harding graduates that have cropped up around a common cause: eradicating world malnutrition via a non-profit organization called Mana.
Specializing in the production and delivery of a peanut-based Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food [RUTF] to malnourished children, Mana is the brainchild of former SA president Moore and Harding alum and Mana CFO Brett Raymond. Samuel Clark (’91), a representative for the global food science corporation J. Leek Associates, Inc., provides quality assurance for production hygiene.
According to Clark, current students will soon graduate into “a great network of relationships that their time at Harding can build,” much like the one he has accessed.
Senior Vice President of Wal-mart Sam’s Club Brett Biggs (’90) reemphasized his company’s corporate capacity for international economic development in 2006 and currently chairs the Mana board.
“It is definitely not a surprise to find Harding alumni actively searching for this kind of work,” Biggs said. “Mana is a big, bold idea. Mark is a visionary person, and I just hope to be able to play some role in helping that vision come to reality.”
Traditional milk-based RUTFs curdle within roughly 12 hours in tropical climates without refrigeration. Studies also show that mothers often further endanger their malnourished children by miscalculating the mixing proportions or reconstituting the powder with contaminated water. Mana’s peanut butter-based RUTF delivers a shelf-stable, premeasured, hermetically-sealed blend of protein, fat and nutrients.
“Therapeutic milk, as developed by the Bono-ites of the world, was a great silver bullet,” Moore said. “It literally saved people’s lives and it is the perfect solution designed specifically by smart people to save kids’ lives. Just, no gun to fire it.”
Mana’s longer shelf-life empowers medical clinics to equip mothers of all but the most severely malnourished children with Mana packets, three per day, to be delivered at home. Consequently, clinics have more beds available for critically ill patients.
Children aged 5 or younger are especially devastated by chronic hunger because their bodies are growing brains, which require high-fat diets for proper growth. Without that fatty fuel, children’s bodies mine their own tissues for the necessary nutrients.
“So we used to lose half of these kids who were severely malnourished,” Moore said. “They would just die. It was this hopeless, terrible thing to see these kids dying. Now, with this stuff, we’re losing maybe 5 percent of them.”
Not only is Mana rewriting the death rates for malnourished children, it is doing so by developing communities by localizing production centers. Moore aims to plant one Mana factory in each of ten African countries, supplying jobs for both factory workers and local peanut farmers. An American facility will produce Mana for “surge needs” during natural disasters.
Moore foresees more big contracts like Unicef and the U.S. Army in Afghanistan, but he wants to kickoff Mana’s awareness campaign at his alma mater.
A coalition of Harding clubs and associations — the Roosevelt Institute, Dietetics Club, Honors College, Multicultural Student Action Committee [MSAC], Student Association and a Harding chapter of the Kibo Group — are paving Moore’s way. Sarabeth Myers, president of the Dietetics Club, helped spearhead Harding’s push for publicity after hearing about Mana in a nutrition education class.
“After class that day I remember being so excited that I literally could not stop talking about Mana for the rest of the day,” Myers said. “We were truly inspired by Mana’s goals and were excited to help out in any way possible.”
Mana’s campus awareness launch will begin with Moore’s presentation in chapel Wednesday, March 17. An optional campus-wide fast will begin after dinner Wednesday night and will be broken Thursday evening with a traditional African meal.
“By having a campus-wide fast we hope to not only bring awareness of the severe hunger in the world to Harding’s student body, but to impact each student personally,” Myers said.
Moore views the awareness generated on Harding’s campus as social capital for a movement.
“Probably the most used stat for malnutrition is that ‘A child dies every six seconds from issues that stem from malnutrition.'” Moore said. “It’s more than AIDS. It’s more than malaria. It’s more than AIDS and malaria combined. I would doubt on the Harding campus that the issue of malnutrition is branded as that deadly of a killer.”
Until that movement starts, Moore is campaigning for the plight of malnourished children worldwide to be illuminated.
“To come back to Harding and to have it be the place where we launch our public awareness campaign is kind of, I think, poignant,” Moore said. ” … Our goal would be to get Harding students to rally around it and to raise some money to help us.”
