Corrects the location of a celebration of her service.
JOYCE — Trolling for money. Angling for dollars. Trying to hook a donor.
Although Deborah Moriarty didn’t harvest sea life, she employed a fisherwoman’s wiles to land funds for the Feiro Marine Life Center.
After retiring as the director last year, she served for a year as development director of the center on Port Angeles City Pier.
On June 30, she retired from that position, and she’ll receive a celebration of her service from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. today at the Metta Room, 132 E. Front St.
Her legacy: growing the center from high school science teacher Art Feiro’s dream in 1981 to a $240,000 annual operation that hosts 22,000 visitors.
Especially gratifying to her is its educational component: From teaching 400 Port Angeles students a year about the marine environment at their front door, it now educates 3,200 pupils who visit from Sequim to Ocean Shores.
Moriarty was working for the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary and volunteering at Feiro in 2007 when the aquarium was still a joint project of the city and Peninsula College.
Then entered the recession like a ravenous shark devouring financial resources.
“I loved the Feiro; I always had,” she said, adding that she’d taken every marine science course she could cram into her academic schedule.
“I was a diver; that was my world.”
Mother of four children now all grown and scattered from Seattle to Australia, she’d started a nonprofit community preschool in Joyce, plus an education foundation, so Feiro managers turned to her.
“Could I think of a way to keep it going?” she remembered them asking.
In a word, yes.
In too many words to count, Moriarty started a not-for-profit shelter for the center, established regular hours, established programs and marshaled scores of volunteers.
She also attracted financing, hundreds of thousands of dollars of grants that met many foundations’ three “hot targets”: environmentalism, children and an underserved community.
Her efforts made the center too successful to fit into its current quarters.
A dream that it would move into a proposed conference complex at First and Oak Streets never materialized, so Feiro backers presently are readying a feasibility study of what they can do at City Pier.
That effort was why Moriarty stepped aside so Melissa Williams, former vice president for learning at Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium, could take the reins in 2014.
“I felt we needed someone with the experience of building an aquarium,” Moriarty said, uttering the A-word that Feiro managers seldom speak.
“We never used that word, and I’m still not used to it, but we truly are an aquarium where we have 50 to 70 specimens of sea life.”
She’ll stay in the thick of planning and fundraising. Although retired, on Thursday, she was pouring tea at her home near Joyce for people planning Feiro’s annual Fish on the Fence fundraiser in February.
Working to raise money as a volunteer could prove easier than as a development director, she said.
Moriarty, 53, is self-effacing about her accomplishments.
“I’m a Canadian with English roots, so we don’t talk about ourselves,” she said, not entirely in jest.
Williams had no such hesitation, however.
“Under Moriarty’s leadership, Feiro won two awards for its programs, including the Puget Sound Champion award and the Coastal America Partnership award,” Williams said in a statement announcing tonight’s celebration.
Furthermore, Moriarty forged partnerships among Feiro and agencies that include the city, Olympic National Park, NOAA’s Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary, the North Olympic Salmon Coalition, Peninsula College, the Port of Port Angeles and others, Williams said.
Betsy Wharton, who has served on Feiro’s board of directors since its beginning, said, “She is the type of person who could write a 30-page grant application and still be delighted when a child wandered into her office with a question.”
The next steps will be to determine how large an expanded facility should be. Feiro now covers 3,500 square feet. Alternatives include plans for 10,500 square feet and 16,000 square feet, Williams said.
It would be slightly to the west and south of its present location.
Costs would total $6 million or $12 million, depending on which design is chosen, Williams said.
Moriarty will join in the planning, fundraising “and building an organization to have even more of an impact in our community,” she said.
“You have 300,000 people getting off the ferry and driving through Port Angeles. Let’s give them more reason to stop.”
Still, the scale of the center’s smallness provides something she wouldn’t want to lose
“There’s something about the marine life center. It’s a place where people are volunteering [some since the 1980s] because they love something.
“We also have a lot of people who are new to the community. It’s a place where they can build their own community.
“Some of them go out kayaking; they meet at the center. They’re collecting specimens. They’re checking up on the lion nudibranchs [mollusks that shed their shells]. They’re getting food for the critters.”
Asked to describe what she’s done — and has yet to do — Moriarty is succinct:
“It’s been a true delight.”
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Reporter James Casey can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5074, or at jcasey@peninsuladailynews.com.
