By Mark Campbell

It’s an encounter that haunts Luke Disney (BA’92) to this day. It was 2005, and he was in a remote Malawian village with representatives from the World Food Program and courier company TNT Express.

The organizations had been having problems finding truck drivers for their Moving the World initiative, intended to alleviate hunger in Africa. They decided to investigate the situation, taking Disney, the communications manager for Moving the World, along.

Discovering the problem

Entering a hut in the village, Disney saw a man on the ground in considerable pain. “His wife was kneeling beside him, trying to ease his visible discomfort.” It was, he notes, the first time he had met anyone with full-blown AIDS. “I feared he didn’t have long to live.”

Exiting the hut, Disney noticed something else unsettling: an absence of young men and women in the village. Like other rural African communities he had visited on this trip, it had been decimated by the spread of AIDS.

“I remember wondering how in God’s name the disease ever got to places like this, given that they were so remote. I asked the village Chief Headman what he did for a living. He told me he’d been a long-distance truck driver.”

Disney and his colleagues discovered the rates of HIV were twice as high among truck drivers in Africa as they were in the general population. More troubling, the drivers were spreading the virus to remote communities via transportation corridors.

A tradition of taking action

Deciding something needed to be done, TNT and the World Food Program launched a project to deliver information about HIV and general health-care services to truck drivers, sex workers and roadside communities. They used converted commercial shipping containers as clinics. And they asked Disney to get the initiative off the ground.

It was well beyond anything Disney had done before, but he decided to take it on, inspired in part by a philosophy that had been ingrained in him since his childhood. That philosophy was decidedly Dalhousie in spirit, as it was nurtured by several generations of university alumni and professors, starting with his grandfather, Eric Mercer (BSc’37).

“He used to tell me ‘Leave the place better than you found it,’” says Disney of the mathematics professor. “That was one of his mantras, and it gradually sunk in such that being helpful became the thing for me to do.”

Scaling success

Over the past eight years, Disney has followed that advice to the letter as executive director of the North Star Alliance, the health-care initiative launched by TNT and the World Food Program. Under his direction the Alliance has grown from a single clinic to a computer-linked network of 34 clinics spanning 13 countries and serving 280,000 patients a year.

It’s an impressive achievement and Disney is grateful to be part of it. “I was in the right place at the right time,” he says. “Just to be given the opportunity to think of how to scale something like this and actually do it was an honour and it appealed to the core of who I am.”

Disney’s core is Dalhousie through and through. His mother, Margaret (BA’66, Bed’67), her father, Eric Mercer, and her grandfather Charles Henry Mercer, a professor of modern languages, all share a connection to the university, as does his father, Thomas (BA’66 (History), DDS’73, MSc’78 (Oral Surgery)).

An international perspective

He recalls how his grandparents hosted international students in their home and how his mother carried on that tradition.

“I got to meet people from places like China and India through my grandfather, and from Spain through my mom. She encouraged me from an early age to think globally by learning French and Spanish and to do a student exchange in France when I was 15.”

These encounters and experiences fueled an interest in international politics which Disney pursued as a Political Science major at Dalhousie. “I’d been around it growing up. It provided a wonderful environment for taking my first steps toward independence and discovering who I am as a person.”

That discovery led Disney to Europe to sharpen his fluency in Spanish. At the time, unification was sweeping the continent and Disney, caught up in the excitement, decided to stay. After earning a Master of Science degree in national and European politics at the University of Edinburgh, he eventually settled in the Netherlands, starting a family and workinga series of teaching, public relations and magazine editing jobs before joining Moving the World.

“I worked there through the Indian Ocean tsunami and during the emergency response to Sudanese refugees in Chad. It gave me a deep understanding of humanitarian logistics and how organizations like the UN worked. That led me to North Star.”

Guiding North Star

Initially the Alliance’s focus was to stop the spread of HIV. Disney says they quickly realized they needed a broad health-care scope to build relationships and trust. “We knew that stigmatization was a major issue so we created a comfortable non-stigmatizing environment to let people know we were there for them, whatever they needed.”

Funding for the Alliance comes from a mix of corporate, government and global health donors. Their work has been recognized by the World Economic Forum, the Clinton Global Initiative and UNAIDS, among other organizations. It has also been supported by an impressive array of celebrities and politicians including President Bill Clinton, Her Royal Highness Princess Haya of Jordan, former UNAIDS Executive Director Dr. Peter Piot and cricket star Mpumelelo Mbangwa.

Grassroots heroes

As instructive and thrilling as it can be to tap into such an influential network, Disney says the supporters who have made the biggest impression on him over the years are the ones you will never see on TV. There’s the team member who used his own savings to replace $1,000 in payroll cash stolen from him—North Star reimbursed him when it found out—or the woman who rallied her neighbours to walk 10 kilometres to petition the government to provide more medicine to their local North Star clinic.

“So many people have selflessly invested in improving the lives of the most disadvantaged every day without promise of reward or recognition. They deeply inspire me and keep me doing what I’m doing.”

Disney says the Alliance is looking to grow by 30 per cent over the coming year and is in discussions about licensing its patient management system to other organizations. A new office will open in West Africa making possible an expansion into that region, and there will be four high school clinics opening in Togo.

The Dalhousie spirit lives on

When the day comes to hand over the reins of the Alliance, Disney says he could return to Nova Scotia, but he hasn’t given much thought to what comes next. For now, he’s content to do the work he does. He also hopes he can pass on to his children the same advice and encouragement to make a difference that he’s received from his Dalhousie family.

“If I can instill in them what I got from my grandfather—that calling to leave the place a little better than you found it—I’ll be able to sit on my porch in my retirement with a smile on my face.”