Throughout her nearly 30-year career with the United Nations, McDade helped launch groundbreaking environmental sustainability projects in China, mobilized hurricane relief support in Cuba, supported prison reforms in Uruguay and supervised microcredit, bilingual education and rural development projects in Guatemala.

She has experienced the world in an extraordinary way – at its inspiring heights and to its heartbreaking depths. She moved to a new country every three or four years, with nine international relocations during her career.

“The issue is, there’s never enough you can do,” says McDade, who studied economics and international development at the University of Guelph in the mid-80s. “Many of these issues we are addressing are long-term structural issues that will be with us for generations. So, the sense that you could never do enough, never fix it all, is one thing that a lot of aid workers get fatigued from, especially front-line humanitarian workers.”

Reflecting on her life as a top United Nations Development Program (UNDP) official, she says, “I was never bored, ever.”

UNDP works to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure peace and prosperity. It currently provides funding to projects in some 170 countries.

Early in her career, McDade administered development assistance and projects, including disbursing UN funds. As a specialist in energy and environment, she helped decide which projects to support.

She negotiated projects with government counterparts, visited projects to monitor their progress and ensured reports were provided to donors.

As the assistant resident representative in China, she oversaw UN-funded projects to establish renewable energy technology in the country. She also helped introduce China’s hydrogen fuel cell buses, which now run in various cities, and the country’s program to reduce the use of ozone-depleting substances.

“It was very normal to meet with presidents, to be around the UN secretary general, very normal to fly around the world.”

“For me, it was very normal to meet with presidents, to be around the UN secretary general, very normal to fly around the world on planes, to make speeches and be on the TV and radio.”

When McDade was at U of G, economics and international development programs had opposing world views, she says.

“International development was the Birkenstock-OPIRG-Ralph-Nader-hippie-left crowd, with a very black and white view of the world: peasant good, World Bank bad,” she says. “In economics, everybody was going to go to business school or law school, and had an equally simplistic view of the world: poor people are poor because they don’t work.”

That friction was just the right kind of undergraduate experience for a young woman who grew up in an underdeveloped region of Canada and was eager to break out of the cycle of poverty and truly make a difference in the lives of the poor around the world. At the University, she discovered her great love: the economics of the developing world.

“I learned that there’s a reason why poverty reproduces itself, a reason why international assistance doesn’t always work,” says McDade. “And it’s because of the false idea that the right answers are in the north and the poorer people are in the south, and if they only had the right answers, they wouldn’t be poor. That is how the whole foreign aid mechanism is set up, which is really not how the world is.”

McDade grew up in a small working-class community outside Saint John, N.B. Her parents came from poor families, but benefited from upward mobility that is possible in Canada, she says.

At age 16, she was accepted at the Lester B. Pearson United World College in Victoria, B.C., on a scholarship. Her parents, who had never travelled, saw the opportunity as her way to get more job prospects.

“They raised me to think that anything I wanted to do, I should give it a try,” McDade says. “‘You can do anything,’ they said.”

Pearson College sparked her interest in international languages, travel and development.

McDade was fluent in English and French at the time, but her Uruguayan roommate insisted that McDade would have to learn Spanish if she wanted to truly experience the world.

“With zero Spanish, I decided at the ripe old age of 16 to study Spanish,” McDade says. “I informed my parents that I would be going to Spain for the summer because I needed to immerse myself in Spanish. At the age of 17, they let me go to Spain by myself. I am still grateful for the trust they had in me.”

McDade ultimately became the UN representative in Cuba and Uruguay between 2006 and 2013.

McDade served as assistant secretary general for the final two years of her career spent with the UNDP. Earlier, she worked on capacity building, following the UNDP principle that if the institutions of the state don’t work, the economy won’t work.

“A country needs a functioning legal system, a functioning social welfare system, functioning land registries and people who can get identity cards,” she says. “Many people all over the world are poor because they don’t have a legal identity that allows them to open a bank account or register for services. They don’t exist in the social registry because they don’t have a birth certificate. And most of those people are women.”

Following a four-year assignment as the UN representative in Cuba from 2006 to 2010, McDade took on a similar role in Uruguay, focusing on human rights and prison reform.

“My parents raised me to think that anything I wanted to do, I should give it a try.” ~ Alumna Susan McDade

“The prison system in the country is antiquated, with mixed populations in the same prisons, minors processed as adults and small children in prisons with their mothers. In such a system, the youth offenders grew up broken, often turned into criminals for life. It was really bad.”

The UN helped the government modernize the prisons, beginning with a digital case management system. “If your file is forgotten, and it’s just some guy with a pencil, you could spend the rest of your life in an Uruguayan prison.”

McDade recently took early retirement to spend more time with her children, moving back to the small community in New Brunswick where she grew up. She says her mother is happy to have her home.

Her UN work helped improve lives for countless people around the world, but it also took a personal toll. She had to leave great friends behind with each move, and she witnessed extreme poverty and hardship from one assignment to the next.

“After I had kids, I could no longer work directly with populations, because every dying kid was my own.”

She says there is much that the international agency is unable to accomplish, given underfunding and a massive mandate. Even as multilateralism is increasingly challenged, says McDade, the UN is still an important organization.

In one crucial area, she felt she was unable to do all she’d hoped to do.

“I worked for years and years on climate change, so to see the world running to the edge of the cliff right now is very demoralizing.”

Still, she adds, “I hope my children get from me the belief that people are good and that everything is possible. Change is possible, success is possible, solutions are possible, and people are fundamentally good.”

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“When I was about 11 years old, our teacher asked us to draw a picture of our future,” says Henry, who completed an M.Sc. in international rural planning and development at U of G in 1998.

“I drew a picture of myself on the edge of the Nile River, in an adobe hut with a cat and a dog, helping people. I knew from the time I was young that I wanted to travel the world.”

Her career as a senior humanitarian affairs officer with the United Nations took her around the world, including to Sudan in 2015. To take the edge off her extremely demanding work there, she took up sailing lessons on the Nile.

Henry was eight years old when her mother, a single parent, packed up Sheilagh and her sister and moved to a village in England. From there, they travelled throughout Europe and into the Soviet Union.

Henry went on to work in many troubled countries, including Ethiopia, Angola, Indonesia and Afghanistan.

In the immediate aftermath of a disaster situation – tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes – numerous international agencies and NGOs descend to administer aid, she says. Henry typically worked in coordination roles.

“When there’s a disaster, we’re the ones that make sure there’s coverage for all of those affected,” she says. “We do needs assessment, information analysis and mapping, and then provide that information to all of the actors out there, so that they know what areas and which beneficiaries are being covered and which ones are not.”

Like her mother, Henry is a courageous world traveller. After her seven-year posting in Afghanistan, and accompanied by her then husband, she drove 11,000 kilometres from Afghanistan to Cork, Ireland, in a 1969 VW Bug. The trip took four months.

Humanitarian aid workers are generally type A personalities possessing a sense of invincibility, she says. For her, a devastating attack in Sudan in 2016 changed that.

“I was coming home from the office. We were not far from a refugee camp. Two South Sudanese refugees on a motorcycle were coming behind me. I had a backpack on, strapped to both shoulders.”

The motorcycle passenger grabbed the backpack, pulling Henry to the ground and dragging her along the gravel road. She reached for the man’s shoulder and tried to pull herself up.

“I knew from the time I was young that I wanted to travel the world.”

“In a few seconds, everything changed for me. He was off balance and being pulled off the motorcycle. He bit down on my thumb and let go of the backpack.”

Her thumb and tendons were torn off, and she suffered badly damaged muscle and bone. But the ordeal didn’t end there. Once off the motorcycle, the man began to beat her.

Extensive reconstructive surgery reattached the thumb, but it no longer functions properly. She needed months of therapy to heal from post-traumatic stress disorder. She hasn’t been overseas since.

Asked what drove her to do the work she did, Henry sounds more like a realist than an idealist.

“I honestly believe that there is nothing that any human does in the world that isn’t selfish,” she says. “Even if you think you are doing a selfless act, you do it because you feel good about it.”

Henry believes it is crucial to question one’s place and work in the world. Are you doing what you need to be doing? Finding herself questioning and envisioning again, she is planning another epic road trip.

“I want to drive from Alaska to Argentina in a classic VW Kombi van. That will prepare me to go back overseas. I’m getting ready to dive back in.”

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“Refugees are people living in forced displacement and they often have no legal documentation, which is the only way they can get access to many services,” says the U of G grad. “To have legal status, they must have documentation.”

When people are forced to flee their homes to escape war, persecution or violence, registration and documentation is a vital first step in ensuring their protection against forced return, arbitrary arrest and detention. Without documentation, he says, persons are at risk of being stateless, since they are unable to provide evidence of their legal identity and often cannot access basic social services and education. The UNHCR program helps keep families together and reunites children with their families.

“I help to ensure that people have access to an identity, so that children can get birth certificates and people have legal documentation and rights,” he says. “The job is very much science-based, involving statistics, population profiles and demographic data.”

Huard studied physical sciences at U of G from 1988 to 1991, graduating with a B.Sc. He went on to earn a graduate diploma in international public health management at the University of Paris XI and also studied law at the University of Ottawa. Many of the skills he acquired at U of G are directly applicable to his work.

He has been stationed in refugee zones throughout the world, including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Uganda, Eastern Europe and most recently Brazil. Now posted to Panama in the UNHCR Regional Bureau for the Americas and Caribbean, Huard is a registration and identity management officer for the Americas.

“My law studies helped me understand the legal side of immigration, refugee status and rights, but when it comes to actually putting things into practice, you need that scientific methodology of mathematics and statistics,” he says. “All of this, I learned in courses at U of G.”

UNHCR uses processes including biometrics to enrol “persons of concern” – refugees, internally displaced persons, asylum seekers or those who are stateless. The enrolment process involves recording physical characteristics and as much biographical information and family data as possible. The UNHCR global database comprises several million refugees.

According to helprefugees.org, more than 70 million people are currently displaced in the world, a record high. One in every 113 people around the world is an asylum seeker, internally displaced or a refugee. Currently, 55 percent of refugees come from Syria, South Sudan and Afghanistan. In the Americas alone, some five million Venezuelans have sought refuge outside their country of origin, including in Canada.

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“My first UN mission in Haiti in 1995 was a life within a life,” he says. “There was such intensity. It had just been liberated from a dictatorship, and the UN moved in. Imagine a country that had hired 2,000 police officers at one time, all about 20 years old. We were there to train, coach, and mentor them. Every day was amazing.”

Since boyhood, Remillard wanted to be a police officer. In 1983, he moved from his hometown Quebec City to Toronto to join the Ontario Provincial Police. He spent 31 years with the OPP, retiring in 2014. Soon after, he became a justice studies professor at University of Guelph-Humber. He is a 2007 graduate of U of G’s justice studies program.

He participated in UN peacekeeping missions in Sudan, Haiti, and East Timor, all as a Canadian police officer. Remillard says the Royal Canadian Mounted Police began taking part in UN peacekeeping missions in 1989, when 100 officers were sent to Namibia to monitor elections. The popular program was extended to other police forces.

“Probably the greatest highlight of my life was being the very first OPP officer to touch down on foreign soil on a UN mission, because I made sure I was the first one to get off the plane. That first mission in Haiti was six months long.”

The Haiti mission thrust him into an extraordinary situation. For the first time in many years, citizens of the country had hope and a measure of safety.

“People were able to come out of their homes without getting shot in broad daylight,” he says.

He and other Canadian police officers were responsible for creating a unique detective squad to investigate political homicides that happened during a 1991 coup d’état that ousted democratically elected president Jean- Bertrand Aristide.

“I was the very first OPP officer to touch down on foreign soil on a UN mission” ~ John Remillard

“Imagine taking 2,000 brand new 20-year-olds who have no experience and being told to take the best men and train them to be detectives.”

Remillard says Haitians had nothing and yet they were able to experience great joy.

“I was in the absolutely worst, poorest neighbourhood in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, which is Cité Soleil. You would not believe how these people lived. But they were very happy people.”

Witnessing that happiness made him appreciate his own life much more. To this day, he says, if he finds himself complaining about relatively minor things, he immediately pictures the women of Cité Soleil, water barrels on their heads, walking a kilometre to get barely drinkable water.

“The honeymoon phase ended in Haiti and the people started saying, ‘We’re done being happy. Where’s the money, the opportunities, the lack of corruption?’ I don’t believe I made an impact to the society. But on a personal level – everyone I’ve been in touch with, worked with, became friends with and helped – I feel I made a positive impact on them.”

He uses his vast personal experiences in peacekeeping as a teaching aid in his Guelph-Humber courses.

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“I’ve been drawing and painting since I can remember,” says Dydo, an animator with Mr. X in Toronto. He has also worked on The Silence, Shazam! and Resident Evil: The Final Chapter. He’s been in the business since 2005.

“Growing up, I was always encouraged to keep doing art,” he said. “I didn’t pay attention to the harsh realities of ending up a starving artist. Instead, I happily stayed on a path that led me to fine arts and animation.”

A lifelong fan of movies, Dydo says his high school art teacher, also a U of G grad, recommended that he enrol in the University’s fine arts program. Dydo studied drawing, painting, sculpture and art history.

“I did get a glimpse of what life would be like as a starving artist,” he says. “Fortunately, computer animation became more prominent. It was an exciting, somewhat new field.”

He took further training at St. Clair College in southwestern Ontario, where he immersed himself in traditional hand-drawn animation and computer animation.

“I had the advantage of having fine arts training from U of G, so I could focus more on the art of animation itself. That fine arts foundation was a boon for my work and helped set me apart from the pack, even to this day.”

Successful animation has a magic to it, he says. Manipulating pixels can elicit an emotional response in the viewer.

“This type of work allows you to create life where there wasn’t life previously. It basically allows one to play God with low stakes.”

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Growing up in Newmarket, Ont., he aspired to be a professional athlete and excelled at football. Then he took the thrill factor up a few notches and got into motocross racing, something he was also good at.

But no matter what he threw himself into, Dankowych said, drawing was the one constant. Like other U of G grads who went on to become animators, he always had a thing for putting pencil to paper.

“Drawing and trying to tell stories through those drawings was something that started pretty early for me,” says Dankowych, who graduated with a BA in 2008. “There is a briefcase stuffed full of those ‘storybooks’ at my parents’ house.”

The childhood drawings were accompanied by text. Before he could read or write, he dictated the story to his mother. When paper was in short supply, he would make a drawing on his last remaining sheet of paper, erase it and draw the next one in a sequence. In this way, he may have inadvertently planted the seed of animation in his young mind.

His father was a computer programmer, so there was always access to computers at home. At a young age, Dankowych started using one as a drawing tool to make crude animations using simple paint programs.

At U of G, he had access to even more powerful computing tools. His animated experiments on them helped him gain the confidence and proficiency needed to get into a visual effects school. “The University helped me see that a career in animation was possible.”

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Montgomery is a freelancer in the television and film world. He owns Toronto-based Merc Media. After moving to Guelph from London, Ont., to attend university, he soon became a fixture in the local filmmaking community. He graduated in 2006 with a BA in psychology. “I stuck around because I loved the city and it had a growing underground of indie filmmakers at the time, which I fell into,” he says. “It was easy to learn through trial by fire on fun film sets with other DIY guerrilla filmmakers.”

A kind of defeatist attitude was prevalent in mainstream film culture when he was struggling to decide what he wanted to become.

“I was fascinated with film from an early age, always seeking out behind-the-scenes videos and books on my favourite films so I could dissect how they were made,” says Montgomery. “But I was always told that breaking into film involved going to an expensive film school for years, working my way slowly up a long ladder that started with getting coffee for directors, and that it was near impossible to be successful at.”

Hanging out in Guelph’s indie film community showed him that a film career was achievable through hard, fun work.

“I started out by assisting on low or no-budget film sets and 24-hour film challenges, hanging out at Ed Video to take courses and networking with others. I funded my own short horror movie so I could try my hand at directing, shooting and editing. Editing was the thing I liked the most.”

His first feature film editing gig was for the horror flick 2014 The Drownsman. He had a knack for editing scary scenes. The more he worked, the more he learned. U of G taught Montgomery how to seek out information using the resources and people at hand, how to ask the right people the right questions, and where to get the best advice and guidance when he needed it. Those lessons served him well when he took the leap into film and television.

“It’s an industry where you have to be very active in your growth and progress, which is what my time at U of G helped to develop.”

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