President's Biography
President’s Biography
Jim Luce began his career as an Assistant Eurobond Portfolio Manager with Daiwa Bank on Wall Street upon his return from studying and working in Tokyo in 1983 at the age of 23. His reporting to Daiwa’s head office in Osaka was in Japanese.
He left Wall Street following an appearance on the Donahue Show discussing religious addiction and the need for an “anonymous” organization to help those recovering from religious addiction, including followers of the TV evangelists such as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Jimmy Swaggart. Luce co-founded Fundamentalists Anonymous, and with the help of the Henry Luce Foundation, raised $1.1 million from 1985-89 helping build support groups across the U.S. for recovering fundamentalists. He also testified in Congress against the TV evangelists.
Luce returned to Wall Street working with Merrill Lynch in the World Financial Center, leaving just before 9/11. He then served as right-hand man to the founder of a Lazard Frères spin-off in Rockefeller Center, handled all arrangements with his counterpart in Paris.
In 1995 Luce traveled to Indonesia where he met the ten-month old infant who would become his son Mathew, living in squalid conditions in a traditional warehouse-like orphanage. Because of his revulsion at the condition of orphans in the developing world, Luce was influenced by his child psychologist mother to conceptualize an alternative, which he completed by 1999. His mother died shortly thereafter and Luce used proceeds from her estate to found Orphans International Worldwide (oiww.org). He has since raised over $1.5 million for orphaned children in Asia, Africa and the Americas.
For his work with orphans, Luce was awarded the Certificate of Congressional Recognition in 2004. He writes for the New York Times and the Huffington Post. He holds a B.A. in East Asian Studies from the College of Wooster and studied at both Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan, and Centro de Estudiar Colombino-Americano, Bogotá, Colombia. He was an American Field Service (AFS) exchange student to Germany in high school and lived in Paris as a child. Jim typifies the spirit of Waseda University as reflected in its motto “gensei wo wasurenu” (現生を忘れぬ) or ‘Not Forgetting the Real World.’
He is the son of Frances Dudley Alleman-Luce, child psychologist, and Stanford Leonard Luce, French professor, both of Boston. He comes from a distinguished family that includes Lieutenant Nathanial Warren of the Mayflower, Governor Thomas Dudley, Third Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and co-founder of Harvard University, and Rear Admiral Stephen Bleecker Luce, founder of the United States Naval College at Annapolis.
Jim Luce is frequently asked about his genetic ties to the “Time-Life” Luce’s. it exists, but is as far removed as it can be. Jim is a direct descendant of the first son of Henry Luce of England, who arrived on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts in the late 1600’s, eleven generations prior. Henry “Hank” Luce III and his father Henry “Harry” Luce, in contrast, were direct descendant’s of the original Henry Luce’s tenth son.
