Elaine Tan is a veteran professional in the non-profit sector with specialist skills in strategic planning, branding and communication, and resource mobilisation in addition to her management skills in leadership.
She has close to 20 years of extensive senior management and leadership experience with international non-profit organisations and social service organisations including St Luke’s ElderCare, YMCA, WWF Singapore, World Vision Singapore, and Breast Cancer Foundation. She was chief executive at WWF Singapore and general manager of programmes at the YMCA respectively over ten years. Her other voluntary appointments included being one of the founding board members of WWF International’s Earth Hour, a global ground-up movement on climate change, and an honorary advisor on the International NGO Committee, Taichung, R.O.C. Taiwan. Prior to joining the nonprofit sector, Elaine helmed corporate communications in the public service including in healthcare for more than a decade.
From humanitarian to conservation, she returned to the healthcare sector in 2021 contributing to the branding, strategic communication, and fundraising in the senior leadership team at St Luke’s ElderCare, a leading Christian healthcare service provider committed to meeting the evolving needs of elders and transforming community care.
Elaine graduated from the National University of Singapore with a Bachelor of Art in Language and Linguistics.
Elaine joins EMCC at a time when Singapore had recently announced a new national mental health and well-being strategy.
When asked for her thoughts as the new Executive Director of EMCC in conjunction with the launch of Singapore’s blueprint on mental health 2023, she said, “The national strategy is goal posting for us in the mental health sector. These are exciting and strategic times for EMCC whose reputation as one of the early intervenors in counselling and mediation has been honed since 1997. We look forward to aligning and evolving our role under the guidance of the new strategy and co-create with others an ecosystem of care so that more from the community can be supported through our clinical interventions and services.”
Look out in the next few months as we share more when Elaine and the EMCC team navigate the waters and together with the EMCC Board chart the destination and path for the organisation for the next three to five years.
There is Hope – our vision.
Elaine Tan appointed Executive Director, EMCC on 2 October 2023.
EMCC would like to thank Joachim Lee for his immense contribution and tenure as Executive Director from January 2022 to September 2023. Joachim stepped down as ED to focus on his clinical profession and will continue to support EMCC in an associate capacity in training and development.
