East Meets West exec courts success by changing tactics when necessary.
In 2003, East Meets West was a small grassroots nonprofit dedicated to improving medical care in Vietnam. Today, East Meets West has grown into a $13-million-per-year operation with a staff of 130 and has partnered on projects addressing education, healthcare, and sanitation problems in eight countries throughout Africa and Asia.
Most of that growth can be attributed to East Meets West president John Anner, 53. For 10 years, he’s helmed East Meets West with the philosophy that every voice—from donors to staff to, most importantly, the people the organization is striving to help—needs to be heard.
“I’m proud of having built a strong organization with great staff,” said Anner. “We’ve done some great things in the developing world. The value we espouse is a sense of generosity. We focus on helping other people to grow. We’re more partner-oriented. It works better with the way the modern world is going, even in the for-profit world. Google is not organized like a dictatorship.”
Anner lives in Albany with his wife, Devora, a psychotherapist in the Berkeley schools, and twin 15-year-old daughters. His oldest daughter, 20, is currently attending college in Boston. Anner, who looks extremely fit, begins every morning with a vigorous bicycle ride (half an hour before work on weekdays, and up to eight hours on weekends with the Berkeley Bicycle Club), and closes the day with a round of studying—he’s taking night classes to get a Ph.D. in public policy and administration at Walden University. “I’ve been an executive at nonprofits for the past 25 years,” he said. “I’m in my mid-50s now, so who’s taking on the work for me? I would like to do more thinking and lecturing and less day-to-day management.”
An avid fan of motorcycles, Anner raced for many years as an amateur with the American Federation of Motorcyclists. “When I wasn’t at work or taking care of the family, all I did was ride, race, wrench, and dream about motorcycles,” said Anner. He gave up racing, however, after a 2006 crash left him with a broken arm, leg, and four cracked ribs. (He proudly lists his motorcycle injuries, going all the way back to 1975, on his website.) “There’s nothing like racing a motorcycle,” joked Anner. “But after those broken bones, my wife refuses to let me race anymore.”
Luckily, he has other passions. From early on, Anner was fascinated with the idea of going overseas, but he wanted to do more than just see it. He wanted to be immersed in it.
“It was mostly a desire to get as far away from Connecticut as possible,” said Anner, who grew up in that state. After graduating from Tufts University with a B.A. in political science in 1982, Anner found the perfect opportunity to fully experience life overseas: He joined the Peace Corps for a two-year stint in rural Mauritania. It was the first time that he had ever been away from the East Coast, and it was just about as far away from—and as different from—Connecticut as you could get.
Anner trained for only two weeks in Mauritania’s capital city to get the barest grasp of the local language before traveling to an outlying village on the banks of the Senegal River. The village schoolteacher spoke a little French, but otherwise Anner had to rely on his limited Pulaar. He was the first American to visit the village, making him something of a curiosity.
“It was a very intense cross-cultural experience,” said Anner. “I had a constant stream of curious visitors coming by to say hello. Sometimes it seemed like my primary mission there was to entertain the children, who were just fascinated by everything I did. Like, ‘Come watch; he’s brushing his teeth!’ ”
But a bigger issue was that Anner had been trained as a vegetable farmer, and he fully expected that he’d spend most of his days for the next two years helping the locals cultivate carrots and cabbage. Despite his good intentions, the locals thought Anner’s insistence on vegetable gardening was strange and silly; this particular village mostly subsisted on grains like millet and sorghum, meaning that they had little use for his vegetable expertise. They were more interested in learning how to grow rice, something more in tune with their traditional diet.
For Anner, the revelation was to be an important one that would guide his thinking from then on out. Sometimes, you arrive on the scene thinking you know the right answer. But you need to be able to willing to learn and understand the reality of the situation.
“In searching for examples to illustrate concepts in development, I always think back to my Peace Corps experience,” he wrote in Tufts Magazine. “It provides such a rich mine of boneheaded mistakes to draw on.”
Putting aside what he thought he knew, Anner worked with the villagers to install a diesel pump to irrigate crop fields and helped establish local rice cultivation.
After returning to the States, he earned his masters in international development from UC Davis in 1989, before beginning work as publications director for the Center for Third World Organizing in Oakland, known as CTWO (pronounced “C-2”), a racial-justice organization. In 1997, he founded the Independent Press Association, a membership association of ethnic and social justice publications, and served as its executive director for the next six years. But he never forgot the lesson he learned in Mauritania, which was the importance of putting aside pre-conceived notions and listening to the people.
In 2003, he answered an ad to take over as president of the East Meets West Foundation.
“I was involved in nonprofits, but they were all domestically oriented,” said Anner. “I was really interested in getting back in the developing world. That’s where my passion is, but there are not many jobs in the East Bay in international development.”
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Anner’s success at East Meets West is due partly to his tireless efforts in recruiting partners. His workdays are spent in meetings in Oakland and San Francisco, and he travels overseas to meet with potential partners at least once a month. In March, he’d just returned from a breakneck trip to Dubai for talks with funding partners Dubai Cares and Pepsi-Co, and then to Hong Kong for follow-up meetings. But it’s also due to that experience as a young Peace Corps volunteer in that remote African village: You need to listen as much as you talk.
To that end, Anner moved to Vietnam with his wife and daughters so that he could get a firsthand vision of how East Meets West operated on the ground. For two years, the family lived in Hanoi while Anner tromped out to remote countryside outposts, motorbiking over bumpy roads outside Da Nang or Ho Chi Minh City, talking to East Meets West ground staff and recipients.
Anner learned that some of the organization’s most popular programs—things that had looked great on paper in an office in Oakland—weren’t actually doing much good. For example, one East Meets West program was dedicated to buying pigs for local farmers.
“Donors loved it,” said Anner, “It was something so tangible. If you buy a pig for a farmer, he gets meat, gets piglets; it sounds like a great thing. When I looked into it, it turned out to be a way to give people money, but it was very time consuming. And then there’s an epidemic of blue ear disease, and half the pigs die. Round and round. Wouldn’t it be easier to give them the money? Once you spend three days in the field talking to people, you start to get a better sense of what’s working.”
“It’s always a balancing act between what the people providing the money want, what the staff wants, and what the villagers want,” said Anner.
In other cases, Anner’s firsthand experiences helped him to develop new programs. His first daughter, Eva, was born three months premature, weighing only 900 grams, and her early struggles inspired Anner to develop East Meets West’s neonatal equipment and hospital training program.
“Premature babies have to go to the neonatal intensive care ward, full of super-duper high-tech equipment,” Anner said, remembering how he and his wife felt helpless at not being able to hold their newborn daughter. “Families would visit the ward and look at their sleeping baby in an incubator.”
That changed when a midwife told them about something called “kangaroo care,” which involves a parent or caregiver keeping the baby warm by continuously holding it against their skin. At that time, such a thing had never been done in the University of California San Francisco Intensive Care Nursery where Eva was convalescing.
“We spent three months in the hospital with Eva, taking turns just holding her. I was in for the morning shift; my wife came for the later shift,” said Anner. “It helped her to do well physically and built an incredibly strong bond. It gave me a real appreciation for what it’s like to be a parent and worried that your child might not make it.”
Today, medical science recognizes that human contact is vital for helping a newborn to thrive; the UCSF nursery has since adopted skin-to-skin holding as part of its care for newborns.
When Eva was born, most doctors still thought it best to isolate babies in a sterile environment, away from possible germs. That attitude still persists in many foreign hospitals; in Benin this year, Anner visited a hospital where the ward was designed to keep parents out, something Anner hopes to change. And when he realized that there wasn’t a single hospital in Vietnam equipped to deal with premature or sick newborns, he helped pioneer East Meets West’s New Breath of Life program. The program partners with local organizations and the U.S. Agency for International Development to provide low-cost neonatal equipment to hospitals.
Today, East Meets West’s Breath of Life programs treat more than 50,000 infants every year in impoverished hospitals in Asia and West Africa. The group’s sustainable water projects now provide clean water for 400,000 people in Vietnam and Cambodia alone. And East Meet’s West’s multiyear scholarships give 11,000 children in Vietnam and India the chance to complete high school and get out of poverty.
And it all originally came from wanting to get out of Connecticut.
“I’m not a good tourist,” said Anner. “The idea of just going around a town and looking at monuments didn’t interest me. I like to be deeply engaged.”
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Mike Rosen-Molina is an East Bay writer and frequent contributor to The Monthly.
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Margaretta K. Mitchell is a nationally known artist and professional photographer, author, and educator based in the San Francisco Bay Area. MargarettaMitchell.com.
