By Bill Graf
There’s one sure-fire way to get Jeanan Yasiri Moe to do something:
Tell her she can’t.
The daughter of a Midwestern mother and Middle Eastern father who raised her in the rural community of Platteville, Wisconsin, Yasiri Moe ’85 was once told that she didn’t “look Wisconsin enough” to make it on local TV news. When she was chosen to fill in as morning anchor at the Madison NBC affiliate, a curmudgeonly colleague — certain that Yasiri Moe had no future in the biz — harrumphed, “Three weeks!”
Yasiri Moe has been proving the skeptics wrong ever since — not for the “told-you-so” satisfaction of it, but because when she sees things that need doing, her instincts as a human ecologist kick into high gear and she finds a way to do them.
“A lesson I’ve learned is don’t pay attention to people who say you don’t have what it takes,” she said.
Yasiri Moe has made a productive and inspiring career out of applying the principles of human ecology — the interdisciplinary discipline that was her graduate school focus and remains her professional passion.
“Human Ecology is all about understanding how we, as humans, interact with everything around us—nature, society, and the places we live,” she said. “It’s like a big puzzle that combines different pieces from various fields to help us see the bigger picture.”
“There is an applied practicality about human ecology that resonates with people,” she added — something she learned early, and has never forgotten.
She was recruited by Madison’s WMTV (NBC15) as a consumer affairs reporter specifically because of her human ecology education (she earned her master’s degree at UW–Madison in what was then called School of Family Resources and Consumer Science). When she was working in the media, the school called on Yasiri Moe to teach a few advocacy courses. She would eventually log 26 years in the classroom as a faculty associate and lecturer. She also founded and served as the first executive director of the UW Center for Nonprofits.
“A center for nonprofits made sense in the School of Human Ecology,” Yasiri Moe said, recalling her pitch to create the center. “So many nonprofits are not the ‘first responders’ at the point of crisis, but the ‘second responders’ with the intelligence and resources to make people, families and communities whole.”
Yasiri Moe moved on from media to health care, creating innovative — and widely replicated — patient advocacy programs for Dean Health System in Madison. Because of her work, greater efforts are now made throughout the health care industry to serve financially vulnerable patients.
“Every time I register as a patient online and they ask if I need help paying for this appointment, I take pride in that because they didn’t do it before we helped encourage them to,” she said.
Since 2015, she has been director of strategic communications and public affairs at the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), which helps UW–Madison scientists patent and commercialize discoveries that have the potential to benefit humanity, with much of the income reinvested in future UW research. The challenge is that many of those discoveries defy easy explanation.
“I’m not a scientist. I don’t know how to explain many of the technologies within our portfolio; I can find people to help with telling those stories,” she said. “But I am a bang-up project leader and I can see which audiences we need to connect with … to partner with WARF to license or to invest in those technologies.”
In addition to her professional responsibilities, Yasiri Moe has served the UW campus and her community in multiple roles — ranging from the School of Human Ecology’s Board of Visitors to UW’s Athletic Board. She is owner and principal of the consulting business Jeanan Yasiri Solutions.
Sometimes during her career, the skepticism that Yasiri Moe has had to overcome was her own. When she was asked to lead the practice management team of Dean, which was the largest physician-owned, for-profit, multi-specialty group medical practice in the U.S., she questioned her qualifications.
“I said, ‘I’m not a clinician. I don’t know anything about this.’” But that was precisely the point. The group’s leadership didn’t want a doctor in the role. It wanted her.
“If you go in with an open mind and a problem-solving mentality, you can do tremendous things,” Yasiri Moe said. “Nobody told me when I was a graduate student that, within a decade, I would be leading nationally recognized advocacy efforts for a major health care organization.”
It’s a lesson that Yasiri Moe imparted to her students. Helping them “feel empowered to go out in the world and do great things as human ecology graduates” was her way of paying it forward, even as an inexperienced, first-time teacher.
“I was not much older than the students when I started teaching,” Yasiri Moe recalled. “I had never been a teaching assistant.”
“The lesson I’ve learned is to keep your eyes open and your mind open. Say ‘yes’ to opportunities and figure out how to do it later.”
Read more about Yasiri Moe and what human ecology means to her in this Q&A interview.