Civil Society

Jörg Forbrig is managing director for the Transatlantic Trusts, GMF’s long-term programming to assist civil society and bolster democracy in Central and Eastern Europe. Based in GMF’s Berlin office, he leads the “Engaging Central Europe” program, the Fund for Belarus Democracy, and the “Ukraine: Resilience and Recovery” initiative. He also works closely with the Balkan Trust for Democracy and the Black Sea Trust for Regional Cooperation.  

Forbrig’s analytical and policy work focuses on the eastern-most member countries of the European Union and NATO, the EU's eastern and southeastern neighborhoods, and Russia. He has been published widely on democracy, civil society, and Central and Eastern European affairs, and is the author of Reclaiming Democracy (2007), Prospects for Democracy in Belarus (2006), and Revisiting Youth Political Participation (2005). He is also a regular contributor to major international media. 

Alina Inayeh is currently a non-resident fellow. She joined GMF in 2007 as the director of the Black Sea Trust for Regional Cooperation, a project dedicated to strengthening cooperation and fostering development in the Black Sea region. She is an active practitioner in the field of international development and democratization, having run the Freedom House office in Ukraine in 2004 and the NDI office in Russia in 2000-2003, with a focus on civic education and political processes. She has trained NGOs throughout Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union on issues related to NGO development and democratization. She was a leading civic activist in the 1990s in Romania and an active promoter of the NGO sector in the country.

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.