Lenka Plavuchová Antalová
Lenka led a local family centre in Bratislava for four years which gradually turned into a strong community player with a great team of volunteers and very popular community activities.
Nataliya Vyshnevetska
Nataliya moved from Donetsk to Ivano-Frankivsk in 2014, when the war began there following the Ukrainian Maidan Revolution. Prior to that she had worked for many years in international commerce and was in charge of HR, CSR and other administrative functions. After relocating, she and her new IDP friends decided to create a NGO to breakdown stereotypes about IDPs and promote democratic values and a professional work ethic. Being a happy, active mother of a 3-year-old girl and a 10-month-old boy, she also promotes active motherhood by working, volunteering, studying and travelling with children.
Tereza Kulhánková
Tereza Kulhánková is a passionate explorer of people’s ways of living together and with nature, a permaculture enthusiast and a mother. Over the past few years she has been navigating life between little villages near Tišnov in the Czech Republic, rural squats in the Pyrenees and France.
Ulla Potsonen
Ulla Pötsönen has a background in humanities, cultural production and education. She splits her time between Joensuu, Eastern Finland, where she works for a public library, and Prague, Czech Republic. This gives her a dual perspective on communities: in Finland she is the facilitator, developing better services, working on integration and more collaboration. In the Czech Republic she’s a foreigner, the newcomer and an outsider searching for services, integration and opportunities for meaningful collaboration, volunteering and networking.
Věra Vávra
I am 38 years old, married, without children; a university-educated woman based in Vimperk and in Zurich, where my husband, a Swiss/Czech dual citizen, lives and works. I cherish democracy, human rights and, above all, the wealth of knowledge humans have been able to generate and record in the West as well as in the East. Currently, I am a Ph. D. student in Philosophy at the Faculty of Humanities of the Charles University.
Zuzana Tabačková
Zuzana is part of SPOLKA – a collective of architects, artists and sociologists based in Bratislava, Prague, Berlin and Košice. Their aim is to cultivate the public realm through educational activities, artistic and architectural interventions, and institutional and public dialogue. SPOLKA concentrates on concrete issues related to the city, public spaces, participation, inequality and communication.
Justyna Weber
Justyna is a very active community member and likes to network with people living around the world and from all over the world. She is a bridge builder between different migrant communities because she can speak eight languages. Through various study programs in different countries, she has gained strong language skills and begun thinking as a cosmopolitan. She has played an active role in many transnational projects in Argentina, France, Russia and the US.
Oksana Olynyik
Oksana moved from Kyiv to a small village in Poltava Region, Ukraine, four years ago. She and her husband Orest have the idea that in the future people will choose to live in the villages, surrounded by the fields, woods and rivers. At the same time, they will live in comfort using the newest technologies in socially and culturally active communities. It is this type of community they want to build.
Martina Stefanova
Martina graduated in art and graphic design in Moscow, where she lived for many years. Following her studies there, she spent one year in specialized multimedia design studies in South Korea. She then she decided to return to Bulgaria. Over the years, Martina has explored various aspects of design while working in advertising as a designer and art director, focusing on corporate communications, advertising strategies and development.
Emilia Ciurchea
Emilia Ciurchea is a dreamer who believes that a group of people who have the same passions and aspirations for their community can achieve great things when they start doing something! Working with the community foundation, she helps inspire and support local initiatives and brings together people and organizations that have the will and capacity to bring about changes for the better in her local community.
Petru Vinari
After studying PR and communication studies, Petru dedicated himself to environmental issues and community work because he is strongly convinced that these two components can work well only together. His basis for understanding community work was the village field work that he did when he was little. He was also involved in cultural community work. Today he is highly motivated by the environmental aspects, which are largely ignored in his country nowadays.
Galin Popov
Galin is active in community work in Bulgaria. Along with his job as a personal assistant, he organizes events for the neighborhood of Veliko Tarnovo and its residents. In 2012 he registered an NGO called VT Events to create a place for cultural and social initiatives, which is called “TAM”. Galin has been its head manager ever since.
Zuzana Šrůmová
Zuzana is a primary school teacher on maternity leave who works in a local cultural NGO and develops small fruitful projects with other people in Roztoky, a small town near Prague. She runs a huge community flea market. She found herself in Roztoky by accident, and after a few months she realized to her great surprise that the town had become her home much more so than any other place ever had. Which brings a great deal of commitment…
Bojan Milovanović
Along with a group of friends (young people who want to do some particular things related to various themes including protecting the environment and promoting a healthy lifestyle and culture in its universal meaning), Bojan Milovanović established a NGO called “GM Optimist” in January 2008.
Ieva Lace
is 27 years old and grew up in Liepaja, Latvia. Ieva Lace holds a dual BA degree in management and business studies (Riga, RISEBAA and InHolland, the Netherlands) and is a MA graduate of Global Studies (Freiburg University, Germany and FLACSO, Argentina), where she specialized in researching social enterprises.
Orhan Ceka
is a human rights activist from Macedonia dedicated to reconciliation and community building in his ethnically divided country. He is the co-founder and program director for Human Rights and Culture at the Liberal Alternative Institute where he actively works in the area of dealing with the past, individual citizen rights, community service and development and cultural exchanges.
Valentyna Zalevska
was born in 1988, graduated in Culture and Arts at the Ivan Franko Lviv National University and spent an exchange year at the University of Nebraska (USA). From 2009 she worked as the cooperation manager and producer of the International Short Film Festival Wiz-Art in the NGO “Wiz-Art”.
Cili Lohasz
lives in Budapest and loves the smell of the Danube. She would like to get closer to it more often. Let’s change how it looks now – come and build a new riverside with us!
Štěpán Janča
was born in 1972. Currently he is a minister of the Evangelical Church of the Czech Brethren in the city of Orlová, specializing in youth and community work. He organizes concerts, lectures, community events, creative activities for youth, camps for children and international exchanges.