I am both thrilled and privileged to have been asked to serve as the new Managing Director at ITEC.  I would like to emphasise the word serve as through service I believe we can all, as individuals and as a collective, make a significant contribution to our society.  
Having lived and breathed development work for the past 15 years, of which much of this time was spent in Johannesburg, I am pleased to have the opportunity to make a contribution in the Eastern Cape - my home province.    For those of you who don’t know me I have been fortunate to have worked extensively in the NGO sector and more recently in a Donor Funding organization with much of my work being in the children’s sector, sustainable development, youth development and reintegration programmes for military veterans.  I completed my Master’s Degree in Public & Development Management in 2007 through WITS and my research focused on development funding. 
As a country we face numerous developmental challenges – a key way to address these challenges is through partnerships between government, NGO’s and communities.  As an organization with a long and proud history ITEC has an important role to play in building a brighter South Africa.
It is my dream for ITEC to make a unique contribution to the development landscape in the Eastern Cape by actively working to create child-friendly communities.   We will do this by building on our past successes and strengths in the education sector and by drawing on best practice gleaned from our community development work. 
In order to ensure that our work has a significant impact we plan to work in a focused and sustained manner in targeted, high-need communities.   Children, and youth, will be the ultimate beneficiaries of our programmatic work with much of our work focusing on families, teachers and community support structures.   We will build responses to address barriers to education and development for pre-school and school-going children, while encouraging out-of- school children & youth to become positive role- models and leaders in their communities.      
I look forward to my journey with ITEC and close with some inspirational words from the great Nelson Mandela who hails from our beautiful province:  “Education is the great engine of personal development. It is through education that the daughter of a peasant can become a doctor, that a son of a mineworker can become the head of the mine, that a child of farm workers can become the president of a great nation. It is what we make out of what we have, not what we are given, that separates one person from another.”

Michele Kay
Managing Director, ITEC
May 2010