John Grande thought he was a failure. He hadn’t graduated from high school, he was barely getting by in his business (he regarded himself as too stupid to ever be very successful in life), and he suffered panic attacks on a regular basis. He completed some of Landmark Education’s programs he began to have breakthroughs in his personal life. He got his business stable. He no longer saw himself as stupid.  However, when he completed the Landmark Advanced Course he saw a new possiblity for his life that was bigger than anything he had ever imagined and that was way beyond what he thought he was capable of. He wanted to do something enormous to end suffering in the world. He knew that who he had known himself to be was not sufficient to make the kind of difference he wanted to make.

In the Landmark Self-Expression and Leadership program, John took on an enormous project,  the results of which continue to impact the world today. John knew a doctor that was raising money in the United States for corneal eye transplants. Each year, there were about a million such transplants, about 5% of which were not successful. His doctor friend was raising money for research to decrease the number of failed operations. John saw a much bigger possibility to make a difference in the 10 million corneally blind people outside of this country who were getting little to no medical care at all. 

Grande committed to raising $50,000 to found an eye bank in Bangladesh, which he did within the three months of the program, and the country soon had its first eye bank.

Grande was just getting started. He knew he would have to travel all over the world and he declared his panic attacks to be a thing of the past. He hasn’t had one since. He committed to raising $150,000 to found a larger eye bank in Bombay, India, which he also did within the year. Soon he was involved with the Eye Bank Association of India, which today has over 180 eye banks across the country.

 Over the last three years, John has become chair of the Frederick M. Griffith Foundation, which was formed by Tissue Banks International to facilitate its overseas transplant programs. His wife Traudy has been chair of Operation Eye Rescue, another TBI company that specializes in making corneal transplants available in the developing world. Countless eye banks across the world have come into being and given new hope to the sightless thanks to the work of John and Traudy Grande.

Meanwhile, as they devoted themselves to making this huge difference in the world, they have succeeded in their business beyond anything they thought was possible. They and John Grande Jr. are financial planners managing hundreds of millions of dollars (http://www.raymondjames.com/Grande/). John lectures for John Hopkins Medical University all across the United States. The three partners are co-authors of Money Matters, a financial column that appears regularly in Opthamalogy Times and Dermatology Times. John and Traudy were the first financial planners to receive the Financial Planning Association of New Jersey’s Humanitarian Award in 2004 for all their work in reducing blindness around the world. The three of them have run the American Psychiatric Association’s Member Retirement Program for more than 20 years. The Grandes travel the country lecturing on retirement cash flow planning.