MCNW Director Profiled

Photo by Andy Batt

This past October, Portland Monthly Magazine featured Mercy Corps Northwest’s Executive Director, John Haines.  The article, written by Ted Katauskas, is excerpted here. “
” Go ahead. Ask John Haines about his wheelchair.

He’s happy to satisfy the curiosity of strangers. But once he’s told you his story, don’t try to rationalize his quadriplegia by suggesting there’s some larger purpose to the freak accident that nearly killed this accomplished explorer/financier a decade ago in the Czech Republic. (Claim to fame: he and a friend were among the first Westerners to paddle the length of Africa’s Niger River in 1991.)

“People talk about serendipity, that there’s a reason for why things happen,” grouses the typically circumspect Haines, executive director of Mercy Corps Northwest, the overshadowed regional arm of the renowned international relief agency. “Yeah, I’ll tell you why this happened. I just had to get a cup of coffee, and I had to get off a damned moving train. I made a stupid decision.”

That routine explanation is deeply ingrained. But so, too, is the movement, the risky calculations, the need for coffee.

Follow Haines out the door of his longtime office in the Kerns neighborhood, and you’d witness the instincts of a practiced kayaker take over. He dashes across NE 21st Avenue, where midmorning traffic on nearby Sandy Boulevard roars by (when Haines is rolling, he telegraphs right-of-way), then shortcuts across a nearby parking lot to the Urban Grind, where the barista, seeing him coming, pulls his card from the regulars file. Yes, he’ll tell you about a fateful morning in the Czech Republic, an impulsive decision, but that is just one moment in a tangled narrative that stretches two generations back. It begins in the banks his family founded in his beloved Wyoming. It encompasses youthful escapades surreptitiously cycling across Tibet and dodging hippos in Timbuktu. It leaps to funding Portland’s first green buildings. And it lands, for this moment, at his latest passion—microenterprise—and the opportunity he sees to lift the poorest of the poor out of the Great Recession.

Read the entire article from Portland Monthly Magazine’s October 2010 issue.