We often dedicate Trend’s cover to a person or company that has really made a difference in our community. This issue is no exception. Each year, Mattie Moran mobilizes hundreds of volunteers to connect with thousands of young people and help them understand how doing well in school and making good life choices lead to success in the workplace.
Mattie’s able leadership of the Chamber’s workforce development programs and her many volunteer activities brought her some well-deserved recognition recently (see Page 15), but Mattie makes big things happen without ever seeking the spotlight. She is a soft-spoken person, but when she speaks people listen. She is not adversarial, but she has a way of helping people move past their differences.
When I first began working with Mattie about six years ago, I challenged her to extend the programs she and her committee had already launched for 8th and 9th graders by adding offerings for 10th, 11th, and 12th graders.
Mattie is a one-person department, and yet, she never balked at the challenge. She went to work with her committee members, and today they engage 1,000 volunteers and deliver school-to-work programs to every student in Hamilton County Schools every year from 8th grade through graduation.
That’s an amazing achievement, but what’s even more amazing is that Mattie and her team are just one outstanding example of something that is happening throughout our community all the time.
When I first moved to Chattanooga in the early 1990s, I was immediately invited to support the Boy Scouts Cherokee Area Council as a volunteer. That was the first of many volunteer efforts that have made me feel as if my life has been interwoven with the fabric of this community.
Thanks to that process, I stopped thinking of Chattanooga as another stop on the corporate circuit and began to think of it as home. That realization eventually led me to retire from a 40-year banking career and begin a new career with the Chamber of Commerce. Through those experiences I realized that what makes Chattanooga so special is that it is a community of the willing.
Each year Chamber volunteers dedicate nearly 25,000 hours of time to making our city more economically vibrant, and we’re just one among the many organizations that act as a catalyst for the enthusiastic engagement of thousands of people on every issue related to making our city even better.
That’s why I think it is so important to recognize the quiet contributions of people like Mattie Moran. She is the kind of leader described in the old saying, “But with the best leaders, when the task is accomplished and the work completed, the people all remark, ‘We have done it ourselves.’”
And, of course, “the people” are right because the best leaders don’t compel or induce, they simply help us bring forth the best of what we already are.
