Board

Board Chairperson

Rethabile Mashale-Sonibare  is Director of Thope Foundation (www.thopefoundation.org), a non-profit organisation providing primary school support programmes to young girls in Khayelitsha. She is co-founder and lead consultant of a management and leadership development consultancy working in South Africa and West Africa. Rethabile holds a Master’s degree in Social Policy and Management, with a focus on monitoring and evaluation in the non-profit sector, from the University of Cape Town. As a PhD candidate at the University of Stellenbosch, her research focus is on the management tasks performed by volunteers on management committees of non-profit organisations. She has worked with transnational organisations, some of which include Comic Relief/UK Sport International, Futures Group SHIPP Project; the John Hopkins Health Education South Africa funded projects like Health Promoters Project, Brother for Life, Intersexions and the evaluation on behaviour change communication strategies in the prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS.  Combined with her experience spanning over a decade in the non-profit sector, she serves on the boards of several non-profit organisations in various roles.

Secretary

Sandra  is a Learning Support Teacher in Metro South Education District in Cape Town. She works at St James Primary School and Bay Primary School and is passionate about supporting young children to achieve their potential.

 

Mrs Pam Picken holds a B.A. Degree, a Graduate Certificate in Education and an H.E.D Post-Graduate Pre-Primary. She has worked passionately in the field of early childhood development for 36 years – as a teacher; as a consultant to Rainbow Chicken Farms Corporate Social Investment; for 13 years as Director of TREE, one of the longest serving and largest of the ECD Resource and Training Organisations in South Africa; in ECD consultancy and research. Pam has completed the NeuroLeadership Institute Executive Coaching course and continues her work for young children through Leadership in Development – supporting, mentoring and coaching leaders in the ECD, children’s & development sector to maximise their potential.

Mantoa Motinyane-Masoko is currently a senior lecturer and Head of African Languages and Literatures in the School of Languages and Literatures at the University of Cape Town. She has authored, edited and translated Sesotho and isiXhosa school text-books and has published journal articles in the area of second language acquisition and child language development and multilingualism in the workplace. She is currently working on developing linguistic milestones for Sesotho and isiXhosa speaking children. Dr  Motinyane-Masoko is the Chairperson of the African Languages Association of Southern Africa.

Mignon Hardie is the executive director of the FunDza Literacy Trust, a nonprofit organisation dedicated to growing a culture of reading and writing among South African teens and young adults, and she is a director of Cover2Cover Books, an independent publisher. She is passionate about social development and is keen for her work to contribute towards building a more equitable, healthy society. She has a BA (English and Economics) from UCT and an MBA (cum laude) from the University of Stellenbosch Business School.