Group

John.pdf

Home >Social Science homework help >Sociology homework help >Group

Scholar of Change – John Anner

Scholar of Change – John Anner Program Transcript

JOHN ANNER: Hi, my name is John Anner. I want to thank you for this opportunity to submit this video to the Walden Scholars of Change Contest. I'm submitting for this contest because I am now enrolled in a PhD program at Walden in Public Policy Administration, with a focus on International Non- governmental Organizations.

INGOs, International Non-governmental Organizations, are non-profits that are set up specifically to address problems in the developing world, in the poorest countries of Asia, Latin America, Africa. And I've been in this field almost my entire career. As an undergraduate at Tufts University in Boston in the late 1970s and early '80s, this is the area that I wanted to study. I focused my attention on agricultural problems in Africa and the Caribbean, and then later joined the Peace Corps, and worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in agriculture in Mauritania, West Africa-- one of the poorest and most isolated, most remote places in the world.

And throughout my entire career, my focus has always been on how to provide solutions to problems that seem so difficult and so large that it's almost impossible to think of how any small organization can solve them. But the truth is that these international non-governmental organizations that I've been part of my career do come up with very creative solutions. But a lot of times, it's very much ad hoc, or making it up as you go along.

So my goal in getting a PhD at Walden is to start to bring some intellectual and academic rigor to this work, or at least the work that I do. I know I'm following in the path of many other people. But I've been a practitioner for almost 30 years.

And now, to be able to bring that experience and connect it with the intellectual work that's been done over the years in the field of international development, for me is very exciting. It's already changing the way that I view my work. For example, we run a program in Southeast Asia called Operation Healthy Heart that figures out how to build the capacity and provide solutions to children who are suffering from congenital heart defects.

Now we've got a whole network of young people around these countries who are involved in this field. What I feel like as part of this program at Walden, I can now bring to them a true understanding about how to build national policy networks that can address these problems not only on palliative basis-- meaning we help an individual child get heart surgery and then the next, and the next, and the next-- but creating national policies and the national capacity to address this permanently in an ongoing way so that we can take care of all the future generations of children who need this kind of surgery.

Scholar of Change – John Anner

So what I see this PhD at Walden offering me, and offering my field, is an opportunity to help build these organizations in such a way that they can start to address these problems with a lot more intellectual capacity, scientific rigor, and an approach that is really focused on solutions and results. So thank you very much. I'm very excited about this opportunity.