A Comment from Bob Anderson

I began working to create the Iowa Peace Institute in the Summer of 1986 working closely with State Senator Jean Lloyd Jones and former Governor Robert Ray and the Stanley Foundation. We hosted a group of Soviets from the Mississippi Peace Cruise that included the Cosmonaut Georgi Grechko, and famous Soviet Actress Natalya Gundareva. One of them was a collective farm manager from Ukraine, outside of Cherkassy. Later we worked with him to establish what must have been one of the first exchanges of rural youth. We arranged for a group of youth from his collective farm to come to Iowa and for a group of Iowa rural youths to travel to Ukraine to spend time on his collective farm. I believe that would have been in 1989. Vladimir and Irina Bassis, two Ukrainian English teachers, assisted with the project on both sides.

We ultimately established IPI in Grinnell, IA, and were there when the Soviet-American Peace walk was completed across Iowa.

Later Vladimir and I worked together to create the Iowa-Cherkassy Agriculture and Culture Center, Newton's Sister City relationship with Smela, Ukraine and Oskaloosa's relationship with Shpola. Marshalltown also has a Sister City relationship with (I believe) Zvenyhoroda. Ultimately Iowa created a Sister State relationship with Cherkassy.

I traveled with Dan Clark from the Stanley Foundation to Ukraine and Russia in 1990 and attended a peace conference that was held in Moscow and Sochi. That is when I also traveled to Pytigorsk (also a Sister City to Dubuque) and purchased the oil paintings at what was described by the Jewish owner as one of the first privately owned art galleries in the country.

I created the International Center for Community Journalism in 1993 and focused on federal grants to bring journalists from the former Soviet Union to the United States so they could learn about our free press and what used to be a good journalism business plan. We brought groups of journalists from Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Mongolia and other parts of the world under United States Information Agency and later State Department grants. Vladimir Bassis came to work for me under an H-1 B VIsa as we started that program. It was expanded and re-named IRIS in 1996. We sold our property in 2002 and moved to Ames because Vladimir and Irina were working on graduate degrees there. Vladimir and Irina Bassis are now U.S. citizens. He works for the Iowa Department of Education and Irina is the Communication specialist for Mary Greeley Hospital in Ames.