Higher profile: Abigail E. Disney was in Australia recently to help raise philanthropic awareness.
SHANNON MORRIS
In the modern lexicon, her surname is an adjective. Its meaning is universally understood. Innocence. Escape. As a child growing up in 1960s North Hollywood, with the star of her great-uncle Walt burning at its brightest, the name meant something else to Abigail E. Disney. Expectation.
“My family did not put pressure on us to achieve but there was pressure not to embarrass anyone,” says Disney, the renowned social activist filmmaker, humanitarian and philanthropist, who spent four days in Melbourne and Sydney last week as the 2011 international guest for the Australian Women Donors Network. “All the pressure on me has come from inside myself. I’ve always been a very driven person.”
After high school, that drive took her to New York’s prestigious Columbia University, where she worked towards her PhD in English literature, writing a dissertation on war novels. Her passion for giving started soon after. Anonymously.
“I was pretty conflicted about my name and where I came from. I didn’t want to be really public,” says Disney, 51. “It was after motherhood that I started realising that there’s the money you have and then there’s the money you influence, and if you don’t go public about what you’re doing there’s so much money that you’re choosing not to have an influence on. I made a decision after I had the kids to really step out.”
The recent association with the Australian Women Donors Network – addressing two gala dinners and a leading a philanthropy masterclass – fits well with Disney’s own work, supporting philanthropic projects that invest in women and girls.
Strengthen women, she says, and you strengthen the world. “At a micro level you have families, then at the macro level you have schools, churches, block associations – all these aggregations of people. Generally, at the front of those are women. When they are given the tools that they need, both personally as well as publicly, they can pull communities up with them. It’s not just a sentimental or soft-headed thing to say. It’s genuinely true.”
Before the death of her father and her mother’s debilitating Alzheimer’s disease, Disney says her parents gave her grounded, simple values that have shaped who she is today. “They were not society-page people. I am so pleased that I never wasted any of my time on that nonsense. Everyone cares what people think to some degree but I don’t care enough to, obviously lose 35 pounds, or shop that long … that was what my parents gave me, and that was a gift.”
Her four children, aged 20, 19, 15 and 12, haven’t formally followed in her philanthropic footsteps just yet. If they do, she is adamant that it must be their decision.
“If your children are raised with the values of justice and generosity, they will eventually put two and two together and understand that they have an obligation, as people of great privilege, to participate in whatever way makes sense to them. I have a very particular way of doing things, and it’s not for everybody.”
For Disney, that way is a relationships-based approach – with hands-on involvement in the lives of the people she chooses to support. “I haven’t been punished for relying on my judgment of people but if you have strong relationships around your philanthropy, the lines can get blurry,” she says. “That is a hard thing.”
Even as a self-described “pathologically extroverted person”, Disney says the name also slowed her path into filmmaking. “It’s so much bigger than me, the name. Who can possibly stand up to that giant … thing?”
When she heard the story of Liberian peace activist and 2011 Nobel Peace Prize winner Leymah Gbowee in 2006, Disney was determined enough to find out. The result, Pray the Devil Back to Hell, was shortlisted for an Academy Award in 2008 and, suddenly, the same things she had spent her early adulthood running away from were like a song calling her home.
“There were ways to tell a story – you can write about it and talk about it – but a film really had a special capacity. That’s where my heritage comes into it because I have a very deep understanding of what happens in that very dark room when you do lose a sense of your boundaries. That was the power of what Walt did. He found a way to weave a story that caused that to happen to almost anyone, at any time, anywhere,” she says. “I remember the first time we ran it in front of a really big audience and the film ended and there was this incredible response and I thought … ‘oh my God, it’s a Disney film’. It’s uplifting. So what I have now put into words for myself is that I don’t want to make a film unless it leaves you in a better place than you were when you started.”
Having spent 25 years in funding movements and activism around poverty and women’s-rights issues, Disney says she finds powerful comfort in knowing that she is part of “this enormous wave of people who, together, want to push back in the right direction”.
Philanthropy is a hard sell but Disney uses her own recent documentary success – the October 2011 release of Women, War & Peace, which features narrators such as Matt Damon, Geena Davis and Tilda Swinton to highlight stories of women in conflict zones from Bosnia to Afghanistan and Colombia to Liberia – as proof that dreams can come true.
“We raised $5 million at the end of 2008. It couldn’t have been a worse time to try something ambitious and still we were able to accomplish it. Everything I’ve done that was a mistake I did out of timidity. It’s never been the right choice. Everything I’ve ever done that sounded crazy at the moment I started it has turned out to be the right thing to do. No matter how much pessimism there may be in the air, there is still enough of a reason to take risks and be bold and brave.”
» www.womendonors.org.au