Democracy

Dinu Toderașcu is a Bucharest-based senior program officer responsible for managing ProElect and INCRES, both EU-funded projects. Prior to joining GMF, he worked for the National Democratic Institute in Moldova as a program officer, assisting the country director with program design and implementation. In 2019, he was appointed chief of staff to Moldova’s minister of foreign affairs and European integration. He was appointed three months later state secretary at the ministry and was responsible for bilateral and multilateral cooperation.

Toderașcu holds a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Bucharest and a master’s degree in European public affairs from Maastricht University. He is a fluent in English, Russian, and Romanian. 

Gordana Delić is the regional director of the GMF Balkans program, the Balkan Trust for Democracy and deputy managing director of the Transatlantic Trusts. She has 25 years of experience in the nonprofit sector in the area of civil society development, with extensive experience in program management and development, grant solicitation, corporate philanthropy, research and planning, election processes, get-out-to vote campaigns, human rights, and reconciliation. Delić has knowledge of both the nongovernmental and governmental sectors in the Balkans, as well as of international donor strategies, programs, procedures, and operations in Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe. Prior to joining the Balkan Trust for Democracy, Delić worked at Freedom House Serbia. Her international experience includes five years of work on different democracy development programs in Slovakia. Delić is fluent in Serbian, English, and Slovak. She also communicates in Czech, German, and Spanish.

Olena Prokopenko is a senior fellow at GMF. She formerly managed Eastern Neighborhood programs at the European Endowment for Democracy in Brussels and served as a development adviser at the Danish embassy in Kyiv. 

Prokopenko previously chaired international relations at RPR Coalition, Ukraine’s largest civil society platform, and advised Ukraine’s finance minister on donor relations. She served as a civil society expert for the UN Development Programme and the Council of Europe, and worked as a government relations manager at Hill+Knowlton Strategies.

Prokopenko is a co-founder of the Transatlantic Task Force for Ukraine and a government relations trainer at the Kyiv School of Economics. Her analysis of Russia’s war in Ukraine and Ukraine’s reform progress is regularly featured intop international media, including the BBC, Bloomberg, MSNBC, Al Jazeera, TIME magazine, Newsweek, and Le Monde.

Prokopenko is a lawyer by training and an alumna of the US State Department’s Edmund S. Muskie Graduate Fellowship Program. She holds a master’s degree in political science from Western Illinois University.