Courtesy Justine Smyth

Courtesy Justine Smyth

Justine Smyth (PMD 77, 2002) remembers a time when no one in New Zealand talked about breast cancer. It was 1980, and her mother, just 45 years old, had been diagnosed with the disease. “We weren’t allowed to tell anyone,” Smyth recalls. Her mother underwent a mastectomy and survived, and Smyth kept the family secret for more than a decade.

That’s all changed now—in part thanks to Smyth, who joined the volunteer board of the fledgling Breast Cancer Foundation NZ in the mid-1990s.

When the organization was founded, the pink ribbon was a novel symbol of health care activism, not the internationally recognized icon it is today. Starting a public conversation about women’s health was not easy, certainly, but the foundation believed that education and awareness—among both women and their doctors—was essential to early diagnosis and improved outcomes. Public interest in the illness could also drive funding toward breast cancer research. Breast Cancer Foundation NZ launched a media campaign to spotlight the disease, and Smyth’s mother gave her daughter permission to talk about her experience.

Smyth credits her mother, Anne, with inspiring her work with the foundation. It wasn’t just her diagnosis, though; it also was her parents’ commitment to giving back. Throughout Smyth’s childhood, Anne had volunteered with Plunket, an organization that provides health care resources and support to babies and new parents in New Zealand. Smyth had been a newly minted partner at Deloitte when the opportunity to join Breast Cancer Foundation NZ arose. It would have been easy to turn down; she was busy with her career. But that early exposure to volunteerism had set Smyth on the same path. “That’s just what mum and dad did, and I had the same expectations for myself,” she says.

Smyth continued her work with the foundation when she left the corporate world to run her own businesses, together with her husband, Paul Lockey (MBA 1984), and when she moved into governance. She currently is director of the Auckland International Airport and chair of Spark, New Zealand’s largest telecommunications and digital services company. That practical experience informed her work on the board of Breast Cancer Foundation NZ, of which she became chair in 2009. “Measuring performance in charity is as important as in a commercial enterprise,” she observes. “I’m conscious of how we spend every dollar we raise from the community. It’s about making sure you do the right thing for the people who have given you that support.” Seventy-two percent of the organization’s budget goes directly to programming (the remainder is split between administration and fundraising efforts).

Today, the foundation remains focused on education and awareness—it’s “an old message but it’s still the right message,” Smyth concludes. The organization has also expanded into patient support and research, becoming the biggest nongovernmental funder, and into advocacy. In 2000, it began building what is now the Breast Cancer Foundation National Register, which tracks breast cancer diagnoses, treatment, and outcomes. The confidential database is a resource for clinical researchers and for the foundation itself, which has analyzed the data to identify and address inequalities in patient care. In 1998, the foundation’s advocacy encouraged the New Zealand government to institute free breast cancer screenings for women ages 50 to 64, later extended to 45 to 69. The foundation is currently working to further extend those screenings to women up to the age of 74.

Data shows that access to these free screenings has reduced the breast cancer mortality rate in the country by 34 percent, says Smyth, who was awarded a Companion of the NZ Order of Merit by Queen Elizabeth for services to Women and Governance, in 2020. But Smyth and the foundation are not finished yet. She has set an ambitious goal for New Zealand, one she believes can be achieved through early detection and ever improving breast cancer treatment: zero deaths.

Post a Comment