For most people, having their picture taken with Tom Cruise is mission impossible. For Scott it was easy enough to arrange. Harrison Ford or any other leader of The Rebel Alliance? No problem. Posing for such photographs was all part of a day’s work for the President of 20th Century Fox International.
If Scott ever had a pained look on his face, it was the consequence of pinching himself so much. Somehow, he had been born in Edinburgh, grown up in Adelaide, left school with nothing, been given a first job in a federal government scheme as the projector operator at a drive-in movie theatre, and made his way up through the film industry, from Australia to America, to the very top in Hollywood.
Scott could look out to sea from the deck of his 36-foot yacht, admire the views from his mansion in the exclusive Hollywood Hills neighbourhood, mix with film star friends, and never struggle in finding romance or whatever his heart’s desire. Until the day he was offered a new senior role at Sony Pictures. Scott had been 10 years at Fox and judged that it was time for a change, time to make a fresh start.
But first, a holiday, somewhere far away from the Hollywood bubble, somewhere as he put it, to ‘cleanse the soul’, somewhere like Cambodia in Southeast Asia. In Scott’s mind that cleansing would mean doing something on holiday for people a thousand times less fortunate than those he would leave behind in California. He didn’t know what. It didn’t take long to find what he was looking for.
On the road out of the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, is an infamous site covering 100 acres, known locally as Smokey Mountain, home to more than 1,500 children, nearly half of whom abandoned by parents and families. The proper name of the vast landfill site is Steung Meanchey. For years it had been the city’s dump, acre-upon-acre of untreated, putrid, belching rubbish that smoked day and night because of the heat and build-up of methane. The children there spent their days sifting, searching with bare hands for anything recyclable to sell. Steung Meanchey, the place where they lived, ate, slept and breathed in toxic fumes.
On his first visit, what surprised Scott as he stood on one stinking peak, was that the children paid no attention to him. They did not beg for money. Only one approached him. “Can you get me into school?” Scott couldn’t even tell if it was a girl or boy asking the question, the child was so filthy, covered in smelly rags and scarves.
The same day Scott made it his mission to find the child’s mother in the dump, to arrange and pay for food, water and rented accommodation for the family which, he discovered, included a very sick younger sister. He sorted out medical care and registration at a school for the children.
He returned to Steung Meanchey the next day and found two more children who wanted to go to school. In that moment Scott realised he could do more, so much more, for dozens of children for relatively small amounts of money. On his return home it didn’t take him long to reach the conclusion that the sights, sounds, smells and selfishness of his LA corporate life had become more toxic to him than anything he had come across on Smokey Mountain.
A year later Scott had sold everything he owned in Los Angeles and moved to Phnom Penh, determined to use his money and business skills to start a school for the children of Steung Meanchey. Though humbled at first by his cluelessness about Cambodian customs, culture and the Khmer language, he persevered and got the school going. As often as he possibly could, he ventured into Steung Meanchey in search of children to help. Word spread. Demand increased. More children came forward. Scott calculated. His money could educate 86 children for as long as they needed school, but what about the 87th?
He founded the Cambodian Children’s Fund (CCF) in 2004 to solve the problem. The man who made his fortune in the storytelling business understood that the stories of the children, of the teachers and volunteers that had rallied to his cause, would resonate with funders, partners, and one or two friends in front of and behind the camera around the world.
And he was right. In its first 20 years of operation, with its supporter base broadening each year, CCF was able to lift more than 4,000 children and their families out of poverty. Today, across its schools and educational programmes, 1,800 pupils and students are enrolled. The aims go beyond an uninterrupted rubbish-dump-free education. Scott’s colleagues strive to nurture in each young person, a belief in their own leadership potential, a sense of responsibility to their community and country. CCF also estimates that at least 12,000 people in the local community are accessing and benefitting from their services.
Scott Neeson isn’t a philanthropist because he changed his life to give away all of his money. He is one because he encountered a problem that was poisoning the lives of thousands of children; because he found one solution for it, the school, and then another bigger one, the Cambodian Children’s Fund; because he made the solutions sustainable, less dependent on him over time; and, not least, because his commitment never wavered. He never regarded what he was doing as mission impossible, and still doesn’t.