Whanganui’s David Downs to return home for charity speaking event at Whanganui Collegiate School

David Downs, CEO of NZ Story. Photo / Dean Purcell

Whanganui-born ex-comedian, actor and businessman David Downs will return home on Wednesday night to give a talk about his cancer survival story at Whanganui Collegiate School.

The event is being held as a fundraiser for Life Education Trust Whanganui Rangitīkei & Ruapehu, and classroom educator Mark Keelty said the first steps of a plan to hold the event started around two years ago.

Downs was a speaker at a Life Education trustees conference, and the local trustees present found out he was a Whanganui old boy.

“They approached him and said ‘Look, it’s a fantastic talk that you do, it’s an amazing story that you pass on about yourself and your life, is there any chance that you might be able to come speak as a fundraising opportunity’,” Keelty said.

Downs said yes, which set the plan for the event in motion.

Keelty said it had taken this long to happen due to Covid, but it was finally happening this Wednesday night.

The show, named Reflections of a Genetically Modified Optimist, utilises Downs’ past experiences in comedy and writing for television to tell the story of his cancer survival and what he learned from it.

“It’s taking an entirely different perspective on cancer and how it can affect you and ways you can get around it, and the positive frame of mind that you can get yourself in if you’re able to,” he said.

Downs grew up in the city and was taught at St. Augustine’s College.

After working in comedy and television and working at Microsoft for 13 years, he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma, a type of blood cancer, in 2017 and underwent 12 rounds of unsuccessful chemotherapy.

He documented his experiences with the illness with a blog named A Mild Touch of Cancer, which gained more than 100,000 followers and was eventually turned into a book of the same name.

Through the blog, he learned about a clinical trial for chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy in the United States after he’d exhausted his treatment options in New Zealand.

CAR T-cell therapy involves genetically modifying a patient’s immune or T-cells to recognise and destroy the cancer in the bloodstream.

His type of cancer was likely to respond well to the treatment, so he was accepted to the trial, and the treatment was successful in curing him of the cancer.

Now Downs is the CEO of New Zealand Story, a group with the purpose of expanding the country’s reputation and value internationally through storytelling.

Keelty was excited about the event as he was not in attendance when the other three trustees saw Downs talk, so had not been able to see it until now.

The event is happening at Whanganui Collegiate Schools Prince Edward Auditorium at 7pm on Wednesday.

From memory, he said they had sold around 300 tickets for the 400-seat building, and tickets would be available on the night if people wanted to come along.

He hoped people would leave the event with a sense of optimism after hearing Downs’ life story.

“Even in the darkest days there is hope, and not everything is a forgone conclusion.

“Hopefully, it might help somebody else along the way if they have to go down the same path that he found himself on, and it will also be helping to fundraise for a fantastic cause.”

He said going to the event would allow people to help the trust keep Harold trekking around the region.

The trust’s mobile classroom doesn’t only visit schools in Whanganui, but all across the Ruapehu and Rangitīkei regions, going from Waverly to Waiouru and everywhere in between.

“It’s one of the classes that covers a massive area, so it’s not cheap to keep it running,” he said.

Keelty said they visited around 5000 children in both 2022 and 2021.