Vivodh Anand, a former New Jersey State Civil Rights Commissioner, immigrated to the United States as an undergraduate student in early 1963. The tumultuous Civil Rights movement of his college days was to him an attraction and a cause he eagerly espoused.
The experience of those early years led Anand to commit himself to advocacy for equity and social justice. After his sales and marketing career at AT&T, later Bell Atlantic, he inaugurated CORNSTALK, a consulting initiative named to honor the first peoples of his adopted country. CORNSTALK now into its third decade of operation works with the legal profession on issues of immigration and in the workplace and the classroom CORNSTALK assists in clearing miscommunication and cultural conflict.
With the Gujarati community of Edison Anand worked on a landmark Federal case that in its decision, based on Constitutional rights, favored Edison New Jersey’s Gujarati Hindu community’s annual celebration of Navratri. When the Pluralism Project at Harvard University invited Anand to affiliate with it, he presented the paper Edison’s Navratri: A Report on Religious Conflict for Gujarati Immigrants in the town of Edison, N.J. Other community social justice work n the community led to a gubernatorial appointment the New Jersey State Civil Rights Commission where Anand served for ten years before moving to Manhattan. In 2008 the Human Rights Organization of Madurai Tamil Nadu, asked Anand to serve as its International Liaison and Advisor a function he still continues.
In New Jersey Anand has taught at Rutgers and Montclair State Universities and in New York at Hofstra University in Long Island. He is on the editorial board of the International Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies. He continues to write on issues of equity and social justice and most recently his chapter “The Complexity of Refugee Voice,” appeared in the four volume work Refugees Worldwide, Santa Barbara 2012, Elliott and Segal eds.
Anand’s undergraduate degree is from Bloomfield College, Bloomfield, NJ, his MA and Ph.D. from the School of Education at New York University. It was at NYU that Anand met his spouse Bernadette a fellow doctoral candidate. Both are regularly invited to Nepal and India to consult and implement whole school change.
Working together through International Educational Initiatives (IEI), the Anands lead and facilitate teacher development workshops and seminars on progressive educational pedagogy. IEI provides professional learning services around classroom culture and management, differentiated instruction, school leadership training for principals and vice principals, needs assessment and student engagement, critical and creative questioning and student centered learning.
