Malini Moraghan grew up in Teaneck, NJ and came to The Cooper Union after attending an event at the Great Hall while she was a senior in high school: “I attended a panel in the Great Hall featuring women engineers who were smart, hilarious and engaging.  I’d never seen women like that before, and it left an impression.”   

She was energized by the rigor at Cooper, the structured thinking, and the importance placed on theory by all three schools. “I think that I had always understood [the role of theory] in science and seeing what that looks like in other disciplines, notably creative disciplines, was really illuminating.” Today she is managing director of an investment firm and notes that the ideas underpinning practice are equally crucial in her field: “I think people forget that markets and capitalism are anchored in theory whether they see it or not and so being able to clarify the tenets that I'm operating from is important.”

Although she was a student regional rep of the Society of Women Engineers as an undergraduate at Cooper, Moraghan says she didn’t fully grasp the importance of the organization until a few years into her professional life. 

“You go to a SWE conference and it's hundreds and hundreds of women engineers, and you get to see all different kinds of people you’ll meet later: the ones who are articulate, the ones who are not. The ones who are awkward; women who are extroverted versus the ones who are introverted.  I think seeing that range of possible ways of being was really powerful.”
She went on to work for financial and consulting firms (JP Morgan and McKinsey) as well as non-profits (AmeriCorps), before founding Torana Group, an investment firm that highlights investing in sustainable food and agriculture systems. According to the University of Chicago’s Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, “Moraghan has spent years balancing margin and mission, working at the intersection of food and agriculture, and impact investments.” 

The group’s flagship fund, the Essential Owners Fund, invests in essential industry companies in essential industries such as food construction, and healthcare and carves out employee-ownership stakes for essential workers. The fund lets investors act on managing the social, economic, and environmental impact of their investments and supports objectives laid out in the United Nations Sustainable Development goals, specifically decent work and economic growth which include ending poverty and hunger, providing education and clean water for all, and other critical aims. By investing to create more employee-owned companies, the fund encourages economic stability for essential workers, reduces operating volatility for companies, and generates meaningful returns for investors.

Her years at Cooper influenced this ethically based approach to finance, giving her what she calls a sense of “civic duty [with] global reference.”  And it was with SWE that she had a chance to hone her leadership skills and understand how school chapters connect at the regional and national levels and how an organization is structured and operated. “Going to those conferences gave us the space to take risks and connected us to a professional community, industry and world beyond Cooper.”