Meet our team:
Olga Kennelly, Project Director
As a Director of GDSI, Olga has been responsible for the design and implementation of GDSI projects internationally for more than 15 years. She has many years of hands-on experience in carrying out long-term assignments in transition countries.
Olga has worked in the area of regional development, public administration reform, economic development programming, training and capacity building, organisational development, managerial leadership enhancement, quality assurance, project results dissemination, etc. A fluent Russian speaker and native of Kazakhstan, she is fully aware of all the key developments in economic and social policy in the Eastern Partnership member states that are likely to have an impact on the implementation of the current project. She has worked in Azerbaijan, Moldova and Ukraine, as well as in Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, and this wide experience in the region will be important in finding practical solutions to key project problems as they arise.
Olga is an experienced trainer having delivered over 50 specialised training programmes, both in organisational development areas and other fields, e.g. MIS for development projects, peer mentoring of young public officials, methodologies for recruitment of public servants and project planning.
Monica Bucurenciu, Team Leader
Monica started working with civil society organisations more than 15 years ago, and what started as a volunteer activity in Romania, continued in a different form while she was working for the European Commission in Brussels on multi-country projects supporting civil society in the Eastern Partnership region.
She has been covering the region since the Eastern Partnership initiative was launched: first at the European Commission, then at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and now as the Team Leader of the “Eastern Partnership Civil Society Facility” Project.
She is a founding member of the Athens-based NGO Balkans beyond Borders and an alumna of the South-East Europe Leadership Development Programme. Monica holds a Master of Science degree from Oxford University and a BA degree from the University of Bucharest.
Simon Forrester, Capacity Building Coordinator
Simon has more than 25 years’ experience in supporting the development of civil society in countries in transition. In the 1990s he served as a UNDP Programme Officer in Kazakhstan and Nepal and then worked for 5 years with the UK’s International NGO Training and Research Centre leading their civil society strengthening programme in Central Asia.
Since 2010 he has been a founding member of the Eurasia Social Change collective and has provided consultancy to a range of international organisations and national CSOs, including the British Council, the European Commission, Friends of the Earth, Macedonian Centre for International Cooperation, Partners for Development, Palestinian NGO Network, Swiss Development Cooperation, Sida, Ukraine Womens Fund, UNDP, UN Women, UNESCO, the World Bank Institute, and the Yunus Emre Institute.
Simon’s professional focus is on organisation development, designing and delivering learning support for CSOs, and on promoting methodologies which assist organised civil society to empower the most vulnerable. He has authored many handbooks and guides for CSOs, including the recent ‘Practitioner’s Guide for Community Mobilization for Empowerment in Ukraine’, and ‘CSOs and Citizen Participation’ for organisations in the Balkans.
Iryna Velska, Expert on Developing New Digital Content and Organising Hackathons
Iryna holds a Master’s Degree in Journalism and Media Management. She has proven experience working as visibility expert for EU-funded projects: she has designed communication strategies, selected communication channels and developed online and offline tools for a number of projects.
She is proficient in developing and administrating websites built on open source and commercial platforms. Being a professional graphic artist, she supervised and directly participated in the development of more than 10 websites: blogging platforms, companies’ and projects’ web-pages, news portals, internal staff portals, online media, and online catalogues. Her special area of expertise is usability and user-friendliness of resources.
Iryna has worked as a reporter for Kazakh, Georgian and international mainstream and new media, and in media development organisations. Being a member of Panama Papers Project, she is an advanced user of online tools for structuring, sharing and visualizing information. As a coordinator of development projects, she took part in the implementation of projects focused on media and civil society in Central Asia, legislation analysis and protection of civil and political rights.
Elena Palivoda, Communication and Visibility Expert
Elena is a communication and PR professional with over 20 years of experience in multicultural environment in EU-funded projects and private companies with a focus on public relations, communication, media activities. She holds a master’s degree in philology and accomplished an Advanced Certificate in Public Relations from the Chartered Institute of Public Relation (UK).
From November 2011 to June 2015 Elena worked as a Key Communication Expert in the EU funded project “Eastern Partnership Culture Programme, Regional Monitoring and Capacity Building Unit”, where she coordinated and implemented the communication strategies in six Eastern Partnership countries – Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine.
From 2005 – 2011 Elena was a Development and Marketing Director of FGL Energy, a private company specialised on marketing, media relations and event management in the energy sector. Dating back to 2002 she started to work on communication and PR issues with a focus on the energy sector as a promotional expert of the EU- funded INOGATE project.