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CEO of a healthcare nonprofit makes a difference by being different.

From ages 2 to 12, Edward D. Shanshala II, ’94W (MS) was taken every year to the dim, dank basement of a church. He has vivid memories of going there for orthopaedic appointments, to a center for “crippled children” who “walked funny” and received special shoes that made him “stick out like a sore thumb” at school.

Aside from the one fond recollection he has from those visits—the smell of Crayola crayons in old cigar boxes—“there were cold, concrete floors and metal chairs, and I was talked about, not talked with,” he recalls five decades later.

That foundational experience, combined with lessons he learned while earning his master’s degree in secondary science education at the s Warner School of Education and Human Development, shows up in Shanshala’s work as chief executive officer at . in Littleton, New Hampshire. The nonprofit provides affordable, high-quality medical and behavioral services to 10,000 patients in 26 towns. (One in three residents of those towns are patients.)

Building community health through belonging

The common denominator: Making people feel seen.

It starts the second patients walk through the door at one of his health centers. Shanshala tries to “de-escalate” any anxieties or fears by using aesthetically pleasing colors and lighting in the waiting room. “We have to do at least as good as the hotels,” he says.

And it underlies the culture Shanshala has helped make part of the organization’s mission, which is to spend just as much time—if not more—on creating and nurturing a sense of belonging as on profit and loss statements and balance sheets.

“Transactional work is relatively easy in comparison to relational work,” he explains.

How a Warner School education influenced his leadership style

While Shanshala’s early years helped shape his response to tough situations, Warner is where he learned to understand how people with different learning styles and motivational frameworks respond when challenged—a necessary insight when he notices something can be improved or should be changed altogether.

“That’s where I began developing a nuanced line of questioning that helps me figure out how people engage with the world, and that allows me to figure out how to engage with them,” he explains. The skill serves him every day and is less something he does than a part of who he is, as automatic as balancing on a bike, he adds.

Shanshala knows he's an outlier when it comes to the typical Warner graduate, choosing a non-traditional career path. However, the match makes sense given that much in his “circuitous life” has been the result of “curious exploration.” 

On the personal side, he was a classically trained pianist and factory-sponsored Nordic skier with Olympic aspirations who married a woman he met on a Greyhound bus. He earned a degree in chemistry and biotechnology, with a minor in philosophy, as well as a Master of Science in Health Services Administration from Rochester Institute of Technology.

On the professional side, before assuming his current role in 2008, he became a published scientist in pharmacology at the ������Ƶ Medical Center before attending Warner. After graduation, he sidestepped any expected routes into K-12 education to become the Director of Quality Improvement and Education Enhancement at Finger Lakes Visiting Nurse Service and Ontario Yates Hospice, and interim CEO and vice president of operations at Rochester Primary Care Network.

He doesn't connect dots so much as create them.

“I don't constrain well,” Shanshala says. “I joke that I had to become CEO because I don't ask permission.”

Leading with creativity, inclusion, and neurodiversity

This gives him autonomy to create the environment needed for efficiency and effectiveness without alienating those around him. To do so, he purposely assembles a “disproportionate share of neurodivergence” on his leadership team to emphasize the importance of creativity in all its forms. More than 51 percent of the ACHS Board of Directors are ACHS patients themselves.

Shanshala says he’s “amazed” at how fast his leadership team “can consider multiple hypothetical futures and then come to a plan.” For example, on a recent afternoon, four members redesigned an entire population health program (including details for AI integration over the next few years) in less than an hour, then reached consensus with the rest of the team.

“You can get from point A to point B by knocking people down, but Warner gave me the tools to do anything I want in the world— within legal and ethical purview—in a way that doesn’t leave relational damage,” he says.

That toolbox has served Shanshala well as a healthcare turnaround specialist, at a time he describes as demanding a fundamental rethinking of how we approach individual and population health. Increasing access and decreasing disparities means “developing the right interventions, for the right people, at the right time, at the right price,” he says.

"Warner gave me the tools to do anything I want in the world."

His efforts have earned recognition and produced results as varied as the path that led him here.

In 2025 alone, he earned multiple awards for being a National Quality Leader from the Health Resources and Services Administration, an agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. He co-founded a research initiative to identify, pilot, and measure the efficacy and financial sustainability of non-pharmacological interventions that address physical and mental pain. And he delved into patient education projects, co-producing and directing a wellness video series and launching a multi-media studio to produce even more accessible, actionable health information.

In May, Elevance Health (formerly Anthem) recognized Ammonoosuc Community Health Services as being in the top 1 percent of primary care providers nationwide.

For Shanshala, a Warner degree has no expiration date. It continues to help guide his organization into the future. 

"What does a corporate structure look like in an educational framework?" he asks. The question isn't rhetorical. It shapes every decision he makes, from how patients are treated to how his teams are built and led. 

To illustrate the difference between running an organization and truly understanding one, Shanshala turns to the piano: “It's one thing to play a piece, and another to get lost in the moment and feel it.”

It’s an idea that extends to how he shows up—literally. Shanshala no longer dresses up for board meetings, preferring instead to sport a polo shirt, V-neck sweater, khaki pants, and a pair of low-top white Converse.

“I don't do a suit and tie anymore—it's divisive,” he explains. “I’m just a guy who has a job to do.”