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Photo by Reed Hutchinson
UCLA Photographic Services
Alumni leader Eleanor Brewer
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not the retiring kind
Late-in-life Bruin takes the lead
BY CYNTHIA LEE
UCLA Today Staff
Early retirement in 2001 from a demanding job as vice president
of research and development for a health-care system has liberated
Eleanor Brewer.
It’s brought her time to dive among the sunken wrecks of
Japanese warships in a lagoon off Truk in Micronesia. It freed her
to travel to India, where she spent a couple of weeks in a Buddhist
monastery. Even the ghosts of 9/11 haven’t prevented her from
taking long-anticipated trips to Nepal, Thailand and Burma.
What retirement hasn’t changed in Eleanor Brewer’s
life is her singular drive to use her management skills to help
people, whether they are the poor living next to a dump in Guaymas,
Mexico, or UCLA students in need of financial support.
“My mother told me I was very lucky to be born into a middle-class
family with a hardworking father who didn’t drink all the
time and a mother who was always at home when I got back from school,”
Brewer said. “She always said I had to give back.”
As the 2004-06 president of the UCLA Alumni Association, Brewer
is giving back in a major way for her good fortune at becoming a
late-in-life Bruin. She bubbles with uninhibited enthusiasm for
meeting amazing alumni, for sharing with faculty news of their latest
publications, for talking with Alumni Scholars about their string
of beyond-belief accomplishments.
“And the staff at UCLA are so very, very supportive and
excited about what’s going on on campus. How can you not get
charged up?” Brewer explained.
Brewer is the first Alumni Association president who does not
have an undergraduate degree from UCLA. She earned a B.A. degree
from Viterbo University in La Crosse, Wis., and a master’s
of education degree from Loyola University. But it was on-the-job
experience earned in the “School of Hard Knocks,” she
said, that helped her successfully manage such complex projects
as overseeing the construction of a $9-million corporate headquarters
or the turnaround of a failing HMO.
Her skills, although proven, were sometimes challenged by colleagues
who wondered why she was picked to lead certain projects. “People
weren’t being rude, but I always felt like I had to apologize
for myself,” she said.
So as vice president of research and development for the St. Joseph
Health System of Orange, Calif., she joined the Anderson School’s
Executive M.B.A. program. For two years on alternating Fridays and
Saturdays, she soaked up the theory and research behind her hands-on
experience. “Once I had that M.B.A., nobody questioned me
anymore,” she said proudly.
Today, this indefatigable divorced mother with three adult children
and five grandchildren is applying all her skills to integrate UCLA
alumni’s efforts more completely with the university’s
by working closely with such units as Student Affairs, the UCLA
College and the Office of Development.
“We want to be more of a factor in solutions for the university,”
said Brewer. “What haven’t they been able to do that
we, with our volunteer resources, can do for them? By working together,
we can maximize our resources so that the whole becomes bigger than
the parts.”
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