4/8/2011

From Boston Business Journal by Mary Moore

Date: Friday, April 8, 2011, 6:00am EDT

Healthy babies are Ed Doherty’s passion.

He is the Massachusetts state director for the March of Dimes March of Dimes Latest from The Business Journals Around TownEmma Woods subdivision may be a hopeful signAnthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield gives 0,000 to March of Dimes Follow this company .  In that role, preventing birth defects, premature births and infant mortality is what he does day to day. With the help of 12 staffers and 150 volunteers, Doherty has been instrumental in strengthening the leadership of the organization in the Boston area, forging new partnerships and raising visibility.

To that end, Doherty is preparing for the annual March for Babies in Boston May 7, the organization’s biggest fundraiser of the year, when more than 6,000 people are expected to walk three miles starting and ending at the Hatch Shell. March of Dimes in Massachusetts raises about $2 million a year, which goes toward research.

But healthy pregnancies and healthy births are more than a job for Doherty.  His 27-year-old son was born with spina bifida, a developmental disorder of the neural tube. He has undergone about 37 surgeries, and now in a wheelchair, he works part time for a software company and lives at home.

Each time his son went in for surgery, Doherty said, he wondered if he would ever see his child again.

“We expected a normal bouncing baby, and it didn’t happen that way,” he said, adding that every day, families go through similar trauma. “When bad things happen to a baby, it isn’t fair.”

Doherty grew up in Braintree and spent the first 30 years of his career in the restaurant business, mainly out of state. He was executive director of marketing for JTM Food Group   JTM Food Group Latest from The Business Journals JTM kicking salt out of its school productsFaith, family bind JTM Food GroupFamily, faith bind JTM Follow this company and president and director of operations for Reading Restaurants/K Investments Ltd., both in Ohio.

He served as chairman of the board for the March of Dimes in Cincinnati and was a member of the organization’s state board in Ohio. When the state director position for the March of Dimes in Massachusetts came open, Doherty said, he was drawn to the idea of moving home.

And of course, the March of Dimes mission hit him on a personal level. Doherty remembers July 1984, when he first came home from the hospital after his son was born, and there was a stack of mail waiting. The first letter he opened was a solicitation from the March of Dimes.

He did not want to hear another thing about birth defects, and Doherty started to write a note, asking the March of Dimes to stop contacting him. But then he remembered that when he was 7 years old, he collected door-to-door for the March of Dimes.

“The money I raised when I was 7 might have helped my son,” Doherty said. He began volunteering with the March of Dimes, figuring that if he spared one family from the pain he endured, he would have done his part.

Today, Doherty is proud of how far the March of Dimes has come in pursuing its mission. Soon after he started as state director in Massachusetts, Doherty said, he took a tour of Floating Hospital for Children and learned that doctors nowadays rarely see cases of spina bifida.

“It gives me goose bumps,” he said. “In 1984, we set out to save one family — and now thousands of children are spared.”