Dr Ivan May, a guiding spirit behind the Mail & Guardian Investing in the Future Awards, died on December 31 2010 after a battle with kidney Âcancer.
He will be honoured with a new award in his name. A long-serving and dedicated member of the Investing in the Future judges’ panel, May provided inspiration and insight over the years into developments in the field of social investment.
Long before good corporate citizenship became a common concept, his mantra was: “Corporate social investment and responsibility are not a nice-to-have, they are a need-to-have.”
Virtually single-handedly, he introduced cause-related marketing to corporate South Africa in the 1990s, in the form of the Nedbank affinity trusts. Over the years the trusts have ploughed hundreds of millions of rands into sport, arts, conservation and heritage.
Twenty years on the South African public believes banks and finance companies are doing a better job than other sectors in fulfilling their social responsibilities (see Page 4).
May played no small part in that legacy. He also made invaluable contributions to the M&G Greening the Future Awards, partnering them with The Green Trust Awards at the turn of the century. His inspiration helped Greening the Future become a leading forum for environmental investment and responsibility.
In honour of May’s tireless support the Mail & Guardian has added a Dr Ivan May Memorial Award to this year’s Investing in the Future Awards. The judges will award it to the project or programme that best reflects his forward-thinking humanitarian vision.
May’s titles on the judges’ page of Investing in the Future supplements were always the longest. His list of achievements grew every year and were certainly too numerous to cover in that space.
Shortly before his death, he took on running the Constitution Hill Trust and was a member of the King III committee on corporate governance. He ran his own strategic business consultancy and was chief executive of community radio station 1485 Radio Today.
He was on the board of the Vodacom Foundation and the National Research Foundation, a patron of the Field Band Foundation and of Business and Arts SA, and a board member of Care, the Ifa Lethu Foundation, the Cheetah Outreach Trust, the Salvation Army, the Leigh Matthews Memorial Trust, ProBono.org, and a member of the Institute of Directors’s sustainability committee.
He received local and international recognition for his work from places as diverse as Oprah Winfrey’s O magazine, Israel’s Ben Gurion University and the World Wide Fund for Nature.
He was also made a Knight of the Venerable Order of St John of Jerusalem in London and was jointly awarded the Jewish Report‘s inaugural Humanitarian of the Year Award with then-president Nelson Mandela.