Marta Kotecká Misíková

Marta has worked with various NGOs and groups since the early 1990s, including a war reconstruction project in Croatia (1994) and community work in Roma settlements in East Slovakia (1999 - 2001). In 1999, she co-founded the association "Horizonty" with the aim to support the organizational development of Czech NGOs.

Professionally, Marta specializes in using participatory methods and approaches in management and organizational development. She gained knowledge and skills through a series of training by a Dutch agency Facilicom Consult (2000 - 2005). She is experienced in facilitating strategic workshops (planning, decision making, etc.).

Currently, she works for a nature conservation NGO.

Borys Kudar

Borys Kudar is the founder and director of the Training Center of Human Rights Advocacy HRTC. In the past, Borys worked at the Mykolayiv Center for Investigative Reporting CIR. Center HRTC has trained 180 specialists in applied specialties: development of training cases on human rights issues; social animation; tactics of small human rights groups; protection from propaganda in cyberspace. During this time, CIR's reporters conducted more than 100 journalistic investigations, the materials of which are published on the television channels Slіdstvo. Info, Gromadske.TB and First National. Including 20 investigations about the illegal seizure of land and the construction of the Black Sea coastline. Borys administered the projects to create a regional network of investigative journalists and involve young people in exposing corruption.  

Radek Kubala 

Radek is a climate justice activist from the Czech Republic. In the past, he was active in "Hnutí DUHA - Friends of the Earth Czech Republic" - and also in "Young Friends of the Earth Europe". In 2015 he was one of the founders of a grassroots climate justice movement "Limity jsme my" ("Limits Are Us"), which organizes Climate Camps including direct actions against the fossil industry in the Czech Republic. In recent years he has been working as an environmental journalist for the Czech eco-social daily Deník Referendum. Currently, he works for Greenpeace Slovakia.

Mariam Kvaratskhelia 

Mariam Kvaratskhelia is LGBTQ community member and activist. Mariam has worked at Georgian LGBTQ community organization 'Equality Movement' for several years where she has mainly worked on documenting and reporting Human Rights violations of LGBT persons and advocating for the changes nationally and internationally. 

Besides, legal and advocacy work Mariam has been actively involved in civic campaigning, organizing various creative and interesting actions. Approximately 1 year ago, Mariam has co-founded Tbilisi Pride movement and organized first ever Tbilisi Pride Week 2019 in Georgia.

Baia Pataraia

Baia Pataraia is a human rights lawyer and civil activist. Since 2013 she chairs women's organization "Sapari". In 2014 Baia Pataraia founded the Georgian Women's Movement, the informal group consists of up to 3000 women, who perform various advocacy activities and campaigns, including street demonstrations, performances, and social campaigns. The movement is very successful when it comes to lobbying for legislative changes and conducting wide awareness-raising campaigns on women's rights. In 2009-2013 Baia worked at the Ministry of Justice of Georgia on various managerial positions. Since 2008 has been a visiting lecturer at various universities in Georgia. Since 2011 in cooperation with international organizations and national training centers Baia Pataraia as a national expert trains judges, prosecutors, lawyers and activists on gender issues, gender-based violence and discrimination, gender mainstreaming and advocacy.

Joseph Alexander Smith 

Joseph Alexander Smith was born in the UK, and graduated from Cambridge University in 2007 with a degree in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies. During a short and unsatisfying stint as a Middle East Studies Librarian, he discovered the South Caucasus, which in turn led to a lifelong passion for the history and culture of the region. He moved in Georgia permanently in 2012, and has since worked as a multimedia journalist and radio host, focusing on environmental issues and the cultural heritage of the Georgian capital Tbilisi. He has written about these issues for publications such as The Guardian and Deutsche Welle and in 2017 he stood in Tbilisi's City Assembly elections as an independent candidate. 

Tadeáš Žďárský 

Tadeáš is a student of environmental studies in the Czech Republic and has spent а semester at the University of Oslo and progressive Hampshire College (USA).
He co-founded a student initiative Udržitelný Palacký (link тo https://udrzitelnypalacky.upol.cz/en/home/) whose main aim is to transform Palacky university into a sustainable institution. Together with many students coming from different study backgrounds, they work on raising environmental awareness among university students through public screenings, discussions and workshops. They created a student community garden and a big part of their work lies in trying to reduce the overall waste through campaigns and systemic changes of the waste management at the university.
Tadeáš participated in several climate direct actions of blocking coal mines in the Czech Republic and Germany. He's also a youth worker and a life coach.

Jaroslav Valuch 

Jaroslav Valuch is an experienced practitioner in the field of media literacy, social media activism, hate violence, hate speech, and communication with crisis-affected populations. He has worked with dozens of organizations and civic initiatives in Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. He is a project manager at Transitions, a Prague-based media development organization, where he runs the organization's media literacy and disinformation initiatives, including Factczech.cz, which provides support to Czech journalists and students in the field of verification and fact-checking and a program focused on senior citizens. At Transitions, he was also a project leader of Press Start, a global crowdfunding platform assisting journalists in countries where the press cannot work freely. Since 2005 Jaroslav has been working closely with the One World in Schools Program of the People in Need organization on the implementation of media literacy into the educational curriculum.

Jaroslav is also a co-founder of the Institute for Social Inclusion where he oversees hate violence and extremism related programs. He contributes to the Budapest Centre for Mass Atrocities Prevention as a senior researcher and recently led a nationwide communication campaign focused on monitoring, awareness-raising, and mapping of hate-motivated violence and hate speech organized by The Office of the Czech Government. In 2009 Jaroslav worked in Burma as a humanitarian and capacity-building projects coordinator before joining the Ushahidi Haiti earthquake deployment and later becoming the field representative in Port-au-Prince. In 2010 Jaroslav was a Fulbright Fellow at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland.

Ani Khachatryan 

Ani Khachatryan is a member of the Armenian Environmental Front
(www.armecofront.net). She has been involved in environmental movements
since 2012. She also organizes annual Vegan Fests in Yerevan, co-organizes Really Free Markets, and more.

More than a year ago, Jermuk community members started to blockade Amulsar gold-mining project site and didn't allow mining operations to begin. This was an escalation of a movement against mining at Amulsar
which was ongoing since 2011, and was inspired by the Velvet revolution in Armenia. The struggle for Amulsar received unprecedented international solidarity and wide public support in Armenia. Jermuk
and other neighboring communities started petitions to ban metal mining in their communities, which were endorsed by local community councils. The government of Armenia keeps silent. Corporations keep pressuring. Struggle for changing the mining realities in Armenia continues.

Daria Dobrynina 

Daria Dobrynina - a psychologist with extensive practical experience and an active social position.

For over 10 years, Daria has been working with victims of various types and forms of violence, with both children and adults.

She has been drawing her valuable experience from practice, as well as cooperation with organizations such as United Nations Foundation, UNICEF, OSCE, Red Cross, IOM, etc.

Over the years of work in the public service, social work and the implementation of social initiatives, she had noted that there were "gaps" in the provision of social services to vulnerable groups, including women and children suffering from violence.

In 2017, Daria Dobrynina initiated the implementation of the social campaign "Kherson - a territory free from violence", the purpose of which was to create a center for women - victims of violence.

Daria became the missing link between public organizations, government officials, and women directly suffering from violence. She, as a psychologist, subtly observes, "A woman suffering from domestic violence is a hostage of her own family, and not having the opportunity to tell her story, she becomes a prisoner of the social system".

At the end of 2017, the campaign "Kherson - a territory free from violence" was awarded the All-Ukrainian Social Project Award - the 1st place for the most creative and relevant social project in Ukraine.

Thanks to hard work, the crisis center for women suffering from violence began its work in Kherson in 2019.

At the moment, Daria is preparing to defend the certification of a psychotherapist and is in search of new opportunities and initiatives to solve the problem of preventing violence so that her city is a "territory free from violence".

Orkhan Mammad 

Orkhan Mammad is a journalist from Azerbaijan. He is a co-founder of the HamamTimes social media project and journalist at Meydan TV. HamamTimes is one of the biggest social media projects in Azerbaijan. Meydan TV is a Berlin-based Azerbaijani non-profit media organization. Orkhan is working as a journalist for more than 6 years. He is also managing social media accounts. He has also investigations and films about corruption, Ukraine-Russia war, and ecological issues.

Lilit Kalantaryan  

Lilit Kalantaryan is a Programme officer at the Prague Civil Society Centre. She moved to Prague 4 years ago and is happy to help Civil Society become stronger and more influential. She has worked in the field of media and communications in Armenia for 20 years. Lilit was a radio and TV journalist for 10 years in Internews Armenia and in other media organizations. About 10 years ago, Lilit decided to change professional direction and became a program coordinator at the British Council Armenia. Her last job in Armenia was at the British Embassy, she was the head of the communications department for three years. Lilit thinks that thanks to PCSC she has found her dream job; a place where it is possible to share and get experience from the very creative and inspirational active part of societies 

Aliona Marchkova 

Aliona Marchkova - former chairperson of Information and Law Center "Apriori" in Tiraspol (Transnistria). She was the founder and head of the organization for more than 8 years. For a long time she was engaged in communication with various public groups, promoting the rights of non-governmental organizations, and strengthening the capacity of Transnistrian NGOs. She is the author and editor of the electronic journal for Transnistrian organizations Infopost. She has extensive experience in the development and implementation of events aimed at working with the public. She was the initiator and one of the organizers of the first Transnistrian festival of human rights documentary films "Garlic". At BarCamp Kutaisi Aliona will present a topic of information manipulations and their influence on the formation of social illusions.

Irina Sopilniak  

Irina Sopilniak is a specialist in digital communications in the international non-governmental organization 350.org in EECCA region (Eastern Europe, Caucasus and Central Asia).

Having received an MA in Ecology, she conducted research on water quality in Germany in 2015.
The project of a "Solar Tree" on a university campus, which Irina coordinated in 2016, not only united the student community around an important idea, but it also showed that renewable energy is not some distant future, but already a reality, even in the small town of Ivano-Frankivsk.

Irina continued on her activist path in the Ukrainian Youth Climate Association. There, she successfully contributed to the promotion of the organization on social media. She also organized the international forum "Energy of Change", which brought together 150 participants from 5 countries.
Inspired by civic activism, Irina continued her social activities in coordinating the work of 18 initiatives and organizations during the "Action Days" series of events in 2017-2018.
Since 2018, Irina has been developing digital communications in 350.org. Thanks to a variety of digital tools, the number of people interested in the topic, and therefore the number of inspired activists, is growing steadily in the EECCA region.

The topic of the session: "Secrets to Successful Campaigns Focusing on Transfer to Renewable Energy Sources"

Stanislav Krupař 

Stanislav Krupař is a Prague-based documentary photographer.

His work appears regularly in Die Zeit, GEO, The New York Times, Time, De Standaard, NZZ, Focus, Internazionale, and other international media.

Besides covering news and current affairs, Stanislav is also working on several long-term documentary projects in Russia and Siberia.

He started his career as a freelance photographer in 2002, after graduating from the Mendel University in Brno in the Czech Republic. Stanislav Krupař spent time as an illegal migrant worker at farms in England, and worked as a special needs teacher at a primary school in Brno.

He was a staff photographer at the Czech weekly magazine Reflex between 2009 and 2013.

Since 2015 to 2016 Stanislav has been a contract photographer for the Czech version of Newsweek.

Stanislav Krupař's work is represented by German agency LAIF.

Jaromír Němec

Jaromír Němec graduated in sociology and has been active in the non-governmental sector since the 1990s. For thirteen years, he worked with Hnuti DUHA (Rainbow Movement) - Friends of the Earth Czech Republic. He has several years' experience in leading a large non-governmental organization. He worked as an independent facilitator and has led the process of creating strategic and campaign plans of a number of Czech and international NGOs. He also works with productivity methods, work organization and time management. Since 2015, he has been cooperating with NESEHNUTI more closely, coordinates the Initiative Way program and is active in the projects focused on the South Caucasus and Ukraine.

Barbora Knížková

Barbora Knížková has been working with NESEHNUTI since 2018, involved in "The Initiative Way" program, supporting civic society in South Caucasus and Ukraine. She graduated in Cultural Anthropology and International Development Studies and has been active in non-governmental sector since 2016. She is experienced in financial coordination, project cycle management, methods of qualitative research or methods of evaluation of projects. In her free time, she organizes summer camps for kids.

Martin Hyťha  

Martin Hytha started to work in an environmental NGO Children of the Earth in Czechia. He took part in dozens of campaigns and activities - for example protecting the landscape from illegal billboards or a campaign against animal factory farms. He also supported local initiatives trying to resolve cases of projects in their neighborhoods that were a threat to the environment. He has been with NESEHNUTI for eight years, involved in the program supporting civil society in the Caucasus and Ukraine - "The Initiative Way".

Patrik Salát

Patrik Salat is working as an EVS volunteer in Georgia for Jam-news.net. He studied History and Portuguese language at Masaryk University in Brno. He has been active in the non-governmental sector since 2015. He is experienced in journalistic work and methods or fact-checking due to his internships at Seznam zprávy and Aktuálně.cz. He is mostly interested in human rights or environmental issues and attempts to use a visual storytelling form like photography or video.

Archil Elbakidze

The Executive Director of the NGO Abkhazinterkont. The organization actively works in the western regions of Georgia and has 20 years of experience working on problems of internally displaced persons, on protecting the rights and interests of marginalized groups and on solving their social and economic problems. He is the initiator and author of more than 30 projects focused on lobbying and advocating processes that aim to improve the social conditions of IDPs, support their economic projects. He actively works with migrants and emigrants, former prisoners, members of their families and probationers, especially concerning their social rehabilitation, advancing their qualifications and employability. He is a trainer and consultant on microeconomics and agribusiness.