Civil Society

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. 

Sergiu Panainte is the deputy director of the Black Sea Trust (BST), overseeing the strategic and operational implementation of BST’s grantmaking and capacity building activities across the Black Sea region. He is responsible for conceptualizing and leading programs, engaging with major donors and stakeholders, and managing a diverse team to foster regional cooperation and development. 

Panainte is a seasoned professional in the field of international relations, grant management, and democracy, with a focus on the Black Sea basin and administration of programs that support civil society, media, human rights, and democratic development. His expertise also extends to monitoring, evaluation, and learning.

Fluent in Romanian, English, and Russian, Panainte holds master’s degrees in international relations and European studies from Central European University in Budapest and in international relations from Moldova State University. His scholarly work includes several publications focused on regional politics and EU relations.

Maria Florea oversees the Black Sea Trust’s (BST) Enhancing the Resilience of Civil Society in the Eastern Partnership project and BST’s grantmaking portfolio for the wider Black Sea region. 

Florea has extensive experience in leadership program design, having implemented GMF’s Leadership and Democracy Initiative for Eastern Europe, which focuses on Eastern Partnership countries. Over the course of her 10 years at GMF, she has helped hone the skills of more than 200 leaders and civil society activists, supported more than 100 organizations working to improve communities in the wider Black Sea region, and organized numerous events and large-scale forums. 

Florea holds a master’s degree in European governance from the University of Bristol and a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Vienna. She is also a graduate of the Georgetown Nonprofit Management Executive Certificate Program. She speaks English, German, French, Spanish, and Italian, in addition to her native Romanian.

Martin Klingst is a former visiting senior fellow.

Klingst was the news editor and a political journalist at the North German Broadcasting Corporation (NDR),  and he also served as the domestic and foreign affairs reporter, senior political editor, head of the political department, and US correspondent at the German weekly DIE ZEIT. At the Office of the Federal President of Germany,  he headed the strategic communications and speeches department.

During his career, Klingst reported from the war in the former Yugoslavia, and from India, China, the Middle East, and the United States. His work has taken him to domestic and foreign conflict hotspots and places wherever democracies and human rights were in danger. He chronicled some of these experiences in the books “Menschenrechte” (Human Rights) and “Trumps Amerika. Reise in ein wei�es Land” (Trump’s America. Journey to a White Country). In 2020, Klingst wrote a biography of Guido Goldman, the founder of major transatlantic institutions such as GMF. Its English edition was published in September 2021 by Berghahn Books under the title “Guido Goldman. Transatlantic Bridge Builder”.

Relations between Europe and the United States have long been at the core of Klingst’s interests. In 1971, aged sixteen, he flew across the Atlantic for the first time and spent a year as an exchange student in Colorado. He has since researched how, in times of growing authoritarianism and rapidly changing demographics, the intrinsic values of the transatlantic relationship—democracy, the rule of law, free trade, and civil and human rights—can be preserved.