Young Alumni Spotlight
This page is used to highlight accomplishments of some of our outstanding Rochester young alumni. If you would like to nominate yourself or a friend please contact Lisa Szczerba Eardman '00 at leardman@alumni.rochester.edu. Please include your contact information, the name of the alumnus you would like to spotlight, and a paragraph describing his or her accomplishments.
Check out our current spotlight profile, Awista Ayub '01.
Joseph W. Lanning '00
At his desk in the University of Rochester Admissions Office, Joseph W. Lanning is a long way from Africa. But his heart is always with the continent that inspired him. The 27-year-old UR anthropology graduate, now assistant director of admissions, turned inspiration into action. He was still an undergraduate in 1999 when he founded the World Education Fund, a nonprofit foundation.
Since then the fund has sponsored 30 one-year scholarships for African children ages 14 to 20. All are AIDS orphans and many are girls — who by their gender and the constraints of their culture are often shut out of secondary school. The inspiration for the fund came in the fall of 1998, when Lanning spent a semester in Kenya to research gender disparities in high schools. For the ex-athlete from Fairport High School, the trip was a months-long epiphanic moment, full of insight and change. He lived with rural families and for a time taught in a cash-strapped school, where boys outnumbered girls 20 to one. The world map on one wall was three decades old, but economic desperation was matched by a desperation to learn.
"I came back from that experience really wanting to do something — something meaningful and sustainable," said Lanning. He enlisted a lawyer friend to do the paperwork for a small foundation, knowing how far an American dollar can go in rural Africa.
Today, the average scholarship is $600. That modest sum buys a year of tuition at a private secondary school, with money left over for room and board, books, fees and uniforms. In its six years, the foundation has taken in $15,000, most of it in small donations. "It doesn't take much money to do a great deal of good," said Lanning. The foundation, at first called the World Education Fund for Women, supported one African student the first year.
Six years later, "we have not spent a single penny for overhead," said Lanning, who takes offense that many large-scale foundations drain too much money into administration. "He started modestly, just to make a difference," said Ayala Emmett, a UR associate professor of anthropology whose "jaw dropped" in 1999 when Lanning, a student of hers, shared his plans.
"I was struck by the way Joe took anthropology a step further," she said, and adopted what Margaret Meade called "public anthropology" — the act of going beyond scholarship to embrace civic action.
There is no big staff at the World Education Fund. Lanning works out of the campus apartment he shares with his wife, Alexis Spilman Lanning, a UR doctoral student in optics.
"My (fund) office is my filing cabinet at home and my personal computer," he said. The fund's board, including brother Benjamin Lanning of Victor, Ontario County, meets in the living room or a local bookstore.
"Joe is a visionary and very passionate about that vision," said the Rev. Brian Cool, director of UR's Catholic Newman Community, who has known Lanning for 12 years. "He's dedicated to a cause that's so admirable."
Lanning prefers a modest touch. "I'm a guy who had an idea," he said, "and found a lot of people who support making it real."
After graduating in 2000, Lanning joined the Peace Corps and served in Malawi, a landlocked nation in southern Africa, where the median age is 16 and 14 percent of adults are infected with HIV.
He had just met the woman he would marry, and she kept the fund going during his two years of service, most of it as an AIDS counselor in Gowa, a village without running water or electricity.
"You realize life (in Africa) is much richer than you see on TV," where images of starving infants and warriors and wildlife predominate, said Lanning. "But there are smiling teenagers and productive cities."
In the last two years, the fund has branched out, sponsoring cultural exchange trips for UR students to Malawi in the summer. They pay their own way.
"It was like a mini-Peace Corps," said Molly Menge, 24, of Rochester, who went last summer, 10 days after graduating from UR with a degree in brain and cognitive sciences. A trip that transcends casual travel "breaks down stereotypes and breaks down cultural barriers," she said. "It makes you think about what you're valuing."
"It was a life-changing experience," said UR junior Arnab Datta, 20, who went on the same trip and came back inspired again to teach. One night in Gowa, he co-taught an extra-session mathematics course on vectors to eager African high-schoolers — by candlelight.
UR graduate student Jose Perillan went to Malawi with the Lanning group last summer — "a transformative experience," he said — and plans to go again this year. "Wherever I go (in a career), I would like to help Joe make this a larger program," he said.
Lanning has large plans, expanding from the base of the World Education Fund. Included: Overseas student programs, funded by the travelers that take in countries and cultures beyond Africa. And summer programs in Malawi and Kenya focusing on basic health education and vocational training.
"For a tsunami, everyone mobilizes," said Emmett of the typical way charity unfolds: grand and impermanent.
"But the kind of day-to-day tasks of making the world better are much more difficult," she said of Lanning's low-key brand of goodness. "It's heroic."
What you can do:
Mail donations to the World Education Fund, P.O. Box 276450, Rochester, NY 14627.
Written by Corydon Ireland. Reprinted with permission from 2/14/05 edition of the Democrat and Chronicle.