Thomas Gay
A serial entrepreneur who had founded and sold two successful technology companies, Thomas Gay found his next calling in South Africa. With wife Patti, he founded Monte Christo Ministries (MCM), a Christian-based organization with a sustainability mission as fundamental as the proverb “Teach a man to fish, and he will be fed for a lifetime.”
MCM is based in the Western Cape region of South Africa in the Paarl Valley, an area of about 200,000 people hard hit by crime and poverty, and increasingly devastated by HIV/AIDS. It is estimated by UNAIDS/WHO that the disease claimed an estimated 1.9 million lives in Sub-Saharan Africa in 2007.
“We see this as the most important work of our entire lives,” says Gay. “To comfort a child, to feed and move each child in a direction where there is a future.” While MCM does help meet the basic daily needs of people in the region by feeding 2,500 children a day, its primary focus is to effect permanent change, offering hope in the form of training in life skills. Stability and success happen, says Gay, “by empowering people, not by loading planes with food and money.”
Gay draws on his Northeastern business degree and many years of experience to oversee MCM’s many initiatives. These include a European-style coffee shop where employees learn the food business; a farm whose crops produce revenue as well as food; a commercial bakery; and a food-manufacturing facility that eventually hopes to feed 5,000 people a day and train and employ 25 previously disadvantaged people.
New projects include a water-bottling facility, an HIV/AIDS resource center and a sports-oriented community center. This year MCM will plant a grove of 8,000 olive trees, which proceeds from will one day help fund the needs of the ministry. A retreat center and campgrounds are slated for 2010. MCM has partnerships with organizations from South Africa, Europe, and the United States.
“Our experience is that if we invest in the mind and heart, the rest will fall into place,” says Tom. “Change the way children look at themselves—it’s amazing what that does for a child who previously had no place to develop.”
