SNAPSHOT:
The organisation: The St Cyril and St Methodius International Foundation was in 1982 as the first foundation on the Balkan Peninsula. Now the foundation organises courses in English, German and Spanish languages, as well as preparation for the exams SAT, TOEFL and GRE. Students can also sit exams for SAT, TOEFL and GRE at the foundation, as well as attend language courses abroad with its help. CMF has various programmes supporting young talented students.
The manager: Mihail Tachev
The job: St Cyril and St Methodius International Foundation (CMF) executive director
In brief: Born in 1949, Tachev holds a master’s degree from Sofia’s Technical University and a MBA from Moscow Academy on International Economy Relations. His previous work experience includes a three-year training period at Balkan Holidays. Between 1973 and 1987 he worked at WTO Izotimpex as director of different trade export departments and offices. Currently, besides working at CMF, Tachev is also president of a club for tea ceremony, chairperson of his family farm, managing board member of the European Centre on Foundations, member of the board of directors of PAGE (a real estate company), public board member of the Civil Society Development Foundation in Bulgaria, of World from Music Association and of Culture Forum Foundation, Bulgarian Business Leader Forum consultancy board member, Rotary Club Sofia Centre board member and managing board member of the Bulgarian Industrial Capital Association.
Tachev works in the first paid position of the managerial bodies of the St Cyril and St Methodius International Foundation (CMF), which everybody knows as “the foundation”. He is also a member of CMF’s management and executive board, a position for which he reapplies every three years.
“CMF has a management board that inherited the wishes of the 164 people who created the foundation,” Tachev says.
Tachev started working as CMF’s financial director in 1987. He stresses that the 1989 regime change involved dramatic changes for the organisation. It triggered a full-scale re-structuring, as well as a name change because the CMF had previously been called the Lyudmila Zhivkova Foundation after the daughter of Bulgarian communist dictator Todor Zhivkov.
As financial director, Tachev was entrusted with safeguarding the foundation’s property and money. He was also charged with improving CMF’s financial standing.
In 1990 Tachev became CMF’s executive director. His appointment came after he proposed that the foundation restructure its main activities but “preserve the spirit of its main mission, namely caring for talented young people”.
Tachev believes that we all have special role models from whom we learn special skills or whose examples we can emulate. “In my case, perhaps, the first person was Lyuben Hristov, the director of the school from which I graduated, the Plovdiv English-Language High School. Unfortunately, he’s now dead but I learnt discipline, persistence and the importance of systematic effort from him,” Tachev says.
Tachev explains that in those days there were only two English-language high schools in Bulgaria, in Sofia and in Plovdiv. Sofia’s was meant to cater exclusively to students from the capital and its environs while Plovdiv’s school served students from the rest of Bulgaria. At that time his family lived in Sliven.
“I applied there in the footsteps of a friend of mine, Evgeni Kirilov, currently a member of the European Parliament, who graduated from the same language school,” Tachev says. Years later, Kirilov, by then the executive director of CMF, invited Tachev to start working as the foundation’s treasurer.
It may seem strange that Tachev decided not to live and work abroad given his education and opportunities. “This was in a previous incarnation, so to speak. I worked in the system of the foreign trade, so they first wanted to send me to Mozambique. Later, I was offered the chance to go to Italy.” However, he chose not to accept the first offer for personal family-related reasons. By the time of the second invitation to work in Italy he simply decided he’d prefer to remain in Bulgaria. At that time he was working with another partner.
“Unfortunately, he died at a young age. Following his passing I somehow lost the motivation to continue working at the (foreign trade) company where I was based at that time. Then I accepted an offer to start working as CMF financial manager,” he says.
Before 1989 the foundation was one of the first of its kind not only in Bulgaria, but also in Central and Eastern Europe. Tachev relates that Zhivkova’s death (she died in 1981 at the age of 39) gathered momentum towards the establishment of a foundation.
“Zhivkova herself was interested in setting up a similar institution after she returned from studying art history at St. Anthony’s College, Oxford. She later became a minister of culture due to family reasons but she remained strongly influenced by the time she spent in the UK. Zhivkova started trying to open Bulgaria up to the outside world but found ideological restrictions within the Communist Bloc. She was never trusted by the USSR,” Tachev says.
“CMF was not a formal structure. It was established to further her contacts and, at the same time, break out of the (ideological) mindset of the time. It was also set up as a way of honouring Lyudmila Zhivkova’s memory. In this way it won over her father (Todor Zhivkov) who was grief-stricken. Ironically, he ended up supporting something unprecedented in the Central and Eastern Europe Communist Bloc at that time because the foundation was an independent entity subordinated to its own goals,” Tachev says. In the days of communism, of course, everything was supposed to belong to the state.
“The property resulted from donations from people sympathetic to Zhivkov’s loss. Perhaps they also wanted to curry favour with him so as to be allowed to undertake economic activities in and out of the country. Some of them were motivated by altruism but others were driven by pure pragmatism,” Tachev says.
One third of this capital was invested in a printing house with equipment and buildings, and the rest remained as money. CMF activities were then conducted from the proceeds of interest from the capital, he says.
Tachev says the foundation initially employed 22 people in different activities. He had proposed the development of several activities, connected to the preparation and training of young people interested in proceeding with their education abroad. In this way the foundation has started preparing students for entrance exams in different universities: British, European and American.
“We developed an advising programme, part of which is about finding the highest quality education at the most affordable price. We started consulting young people who want to proceed with their education abroad but lack sufficient information and analyses about the different conditions in UK, France, Germany and Denmark,” Tachev says. CMF also developed short-term summer programmes for students wanting to practise their language skills in a particular country.
The foundation administrates scholarship programmes as well, awarded by different organisations from various countries. Tachev cites as examples the US Military Academy, the Japanese education ministry programme, the Swiss confederation programme and the German programme for academic exchange, DAAD. Scholarships’ administration is frequently conducted in co-operation with the organisations’ representatives from the relevant country who either work there or in their own representations in Bulgaria.
“When it was created, CMF adhered to the German model, just as to a certain extent it adopted the Swiss model of organisation at its inception in 1982,” Tachev says, illustrating the current situation via the past.
“By creating all these possibilities, 10 people from the foundation were moved to the relevant activities, which started to generate income enabling a decrease in the administrative burden of the foundation’s costs through the execution of its programme. The foundation’s administration (currently) has nine permanent staff. The others work in its enterprises, which place educational and training services on a paid basis. In this way the companies within CMF cover their own costs for maintenance, salaries and others, but also generate income to cover half the foundation’s overhead,” Tachev says.
CMF works with the Council of Europe Development Bank, which awards grants for social development. “In our case we received one grant, which supported a pilot programme for pre-school education of 60 Roma children in the region of Nova Zagora, where the Roma population’s concentration is very high. We modernised three kindergartens and started pre-school education, including tuition in Bulgarian for the Roma children, aimed at facilitating their integration into first grade educational programmes,” Tachev relates.
“Some other funds used by the foundation – I’m talking only about the big amounts – are money given to CMF by way of scholarships from the group United World Colleges, where young Bulgarians study during their final two years of high school education. Awarding scholarships is a very competitive business and they’re only given to four or five children a year,” Tachev says.
CMF has about 35 programmes in total. Tachev is proud of the achievement of the foundation and of what he and his employees, who mostly work in the financial part of the foundation, have managed to achieve. “What I mostly value is their enterprise, responsibility and persistence in achieving a diversification of what we started long ago alongside our continued development in various fields,” Tachev says. He says that the foundation’s economic activities are extremely important in order to secure the continued supply and range of services CMF offers.
There are four smaller companies within the overall company, all owned by CMF. Tachev also reveals that the foundation is constructing a building at the Black Sea coast in the region of Arkutino beach, which in the summer will be used as a tourist centre to generate income to support CMF. During the rest of the year the building, called by Tachev “a home for the creative development of young people”, will be used for master classes, conferences and other events arranged by the organisation.
Questioned about how he overcame the stress surrounding the foundation’s development during the years of regime transition, Tachev attributes his resilience to the five years he spent in the English-language high school, which taught him the systematic skills he needed to cope with a heavy workload. Since his graduation, life’s professional challenges proved easier for him as he grew accustomed to this “faster speed”.
He also cites “a personal attack” that, he says, encouraged him to maintain his dignity and clear his name during the transition period. “I was accused of some fabricated criminal activities (misuse of funds). The state even despatched an investigator to probe the allegations. The reason was exceptionally silly the threat was quite serious. This drama, which received no publicity at all, illustrates the spirit of the first years of transition,” Tachev says.
At that time, a period in which there was pressure on CMF to close down, he spent a considerable period analysisng the foundation and surveying its potential.
CMF has been a member of the European Foundation Centre since before Bulgaria became a European Union member, Tachev says.
Questioned how the organisation copes with competition in the non-governmental sector, Tachev says that, as CMF existed in an early stage of the development of Bulgaria’s non-governmental sector, this meant it faced many challenges but that at the same time it provided the opportunity to create a bridge for efficient working practices. “Many local organisations were created with the co-operation, help, experience and practice of the foundation,” Tachev says.
He is also the chairperson of another foundation as well, Bulgarian Charity Aid Foundation, which is his voluntary activity. Another non-governmental structure Tachev names is Civil Society Development Foundation in Bulgaria, which also used CMF experience. There are other organisations, which development CMF assisted, in nearly 10 fields, including music, the Union of the Bulgarian Foundations (Tachev was a managing board member), Open Society, the American University in Blagoevgrad and the reconstruction of the American College in Sofia.
Tachev doesn’t have much spare time, because, in addition to all his other duties, he’s the chairperson of the National Milk Processors Association (NMPA), which has 140 members and “literally consumes all my free time”.
“It all started when they restituted the lands of my great-grandfather and by looking for what to do there, we established a family farm. We started with planting and later with milk production, and now we reached the moment we distribute milk products,” Tachev says, talking about his white and yellow cheese brand Dyado Liben. On May 8 the brand was certified for export to other EU member states.
“The whole thing on top of the 10 hours here (at CMF), adds another three or four hours, so at 5.30-6pm my second shift starts and I finish at about 10-11pm every day. In general I hope that the relatives, who work with me – one of my sons and various cousins – will be taking over more of these activities so that at some point I’ll be able to have time for my own,” he says.
Tachev likes to travel but, lately, the only trips he makes are related to business. At the beginning of May he travelled to Romania to compare the conditions and practices employed there to address problems in the milk industry. “I realised that there’s scope for improvement here and now we’re proposing them as a platform at the general assembly of the association (NMPA) on May 29,” he says.
Tachev has two sons, one of whom is helping him in the business. The other one works for a software company. He now looks forward to becoming a grandfather.
However, when he finds some spare time Tachev also likes to read historic literature and fiction, travel books and comparative analyses of the East and the West, psychology and social-economic literature. He also likes skiing and playing football in the summer.
