The Board

Lindy holds a BSc in Zoology and Psychology and a postgraduate teaching diploma from UCT. She started working with the Endangered Wildlife Trust in 1990 and spent the next 14 years developing crane conservation programmes across sub-Saharan Africa. For this work, she won two international awards: The Whitley Conservation Award and the Rolex Award for Enterprise. In 2000, she and her husband founded NVT, a community-based conservation NPO integrity whose mission is to maintain the environmental integrity of Nature’s Valley and its surrounds for future generations.

In 2008, Lindy took up a position as the relationship director for the Lewis Foundation, a private philanthropic foundation dedicated to funding conservation programmes. She also pursues her love of sculpture. Lindy lives in Cape Town and tries to spend two months of the year in Prince Albert in the Karoo restoring her sanity.

Chris is the founder and CEO of Future Purpose, a company that he formed in 2018 and which focuses on strategic talent alignment. Chris was previously a global partner of international executive search firm Spencer Stuart and prior to that was one of the founding directors of the Gordon Institute of Business Science. Before joining GIBS he was a career diplomat for eighteen years, during which time he represented South Africa in numerous capacities which included five years in New York at the SA Mission to the United Nations, four years working on developing relations with Central Europe and Russia and five years in Paris where he was Counsellor and then Deputy Ambassador to France.

Chris has been spending holidays in Nature’s Valley with his family since his childhood and is a long-standing NVT Trustee.

Cindy-Lee Cloete is the General Manager of the Schools and Youth Unit at WESSA (Wildlife and Environment Society of South Africa), coordinating the Eco-Schools, Learning About Forests (LEAF), and Young Reporters for the Environment (YRE) programmes in South Africa. Cindy spent 7 and a half years at NVT building the foundations for our environmental education and community outreach programmes.

Cindy completed her MEd: Environmental Education from Rhodes University in South Africa in 2016. Shortly after joining the environmental sector, Cindy grew an immense passion for Environmental Education within rural communities and to date has 12 years of experience in this sphere. It is her commitment to bridging the gap between our natural surroundings and everyday lives that encouraged her to enter the Civil Society platform. Passionate about social and environmental justice, Cindy prides herself on engaging South African youth on a journey of self-emancipation through the work she does.

Tanya McKenzie, was born in Johannesburg where her father, Ted Steyn, instilled a deep passion for the African wilderness in her. Ted was the founder of the Northern Tuli Game Reserve in Botswana, which has developed into one of the success stories of game reserves in Botswana. After studying archaeology at Stellenbosch and Pretoria Universities, she lived in The Northern Tuli Game Reserve with her late husband, Dr Andrew McKenzie who was a wildlife veterinarian. Tanya assisted Andrew with his research on Black-Backed Jackal to complete his doctorate and later in publishing “The Capture and Care Manual”.

Tanya founded the Children in the Wilderness programme in the Bobirwa district of Botswana and has been the coordinator since 2009. She is a trustee of the Tuli Conservation Trust and she has served on the executive committee of the Northern Tuli Game Reserve (Notugre) since 1995. Along with other Notugre Exco members, Tanya is a Botswana delegate on the conservation committee of the Greater Mapungubwe Transfrontier Conservation Area. She is a very keen mountain biker and has participated in the Tour de Tuli mountain bike event every year since 2008. Tanya and her husband, David Evans, have moved permanently to Nature’s Valley, where she hopes to continue playing a role in wildlife and environmental conservation.

Sue’s career began in teaching and went full circle to bring her back into tertiary education. After leaving teaching she worked for a couple of major FMCG organisations which sparked her ongoing passion for marketing and sales, and where she grew expertise in brand management, and all things marketing. An early adopter, and lover of all things Apple, technology and innovation, Sue has never lost her passion for the written word and embraces technology as an enabler in today’s digitised world.

She is a founding member of the Gordon Institute for Business Science (GIBS) where she made use of her experience across a broad spectrum of marketing disciplines.

After leaving the world of business, she relocated to Plettenberg Bay where she enjoys the change of pace and beautiful environment. Sue is semi-retired and continues her work through her company grammarista.

I am a practising attorney living in Johannesburg.  My practice area focuses on public law, including structures of government, governance of state-owned entities, constitutional and administrative law, public procurement and public finance. I strongly support the work of the NVT and hope to be able to apply some of my corporate governance and legal experience as a board member.  I’ve been coming to Nature’s Valley on holiday since I was a child, and about thirteen years ago bought a house here jointly with my husband and my brother.