The ECON Coordinating Team consists of 5 members, is elected by the ECON Member Organizations, and serve a 3 year term. The ECON Coordinating Team along with the ECON programmatic staff forms the ECON Leadership Team. ECON programmatic staff attend the meetings and participate in the ongoing communications of the ECON Coordinating Team, but as non-voting members.
The Coordinating Team is responsible for helping to give overall direction to and coordinating the acitivities of the ECON Network on an ongoing basis, in consultation with the ECON National Represantatives. The Coordinating Team serves as a Personal Committee responsible for hiring, firing, and supporting professional staff with extensive experience in community organizing to help accomplish ECON's mission. The Coordinating Team is responsible for "Intermediary Service Organization" operations of ECON - i.e. helping to raise, coordinate, and distribute funding received by ECON for local community organizing. The Coordinating Team helps prepare annual and long-term budgets for ECON.
Dagmara Kubik
Community organizer, trainer, supervisor. Board member of Common Thing Foundation. First community organizer in Poland and an initiator of using and developing this method in this country. She started her work with CO method in 2011, creating a neighbourhood association on the Osiedle im. Franciszka Ścigały w Katowicach (currently Stowarzyszenie Nasze Osiedle Ścigały Association). Since then she cooperated in creating 6 community organizations in Katowice and 2 in Bielsko-Biała and supervised work of 4 community organizers. Specialist in the “Organizujmy się - budowanie silnych społeczności lokalnych” project, run by Stowarzyszenie Aktywności Obywatelskiej Bona Fides in Katowice, years 2014-2015. Co-author of “Przewodnika po partycypacji społecznej” and author of workshop programmes for community organizers from Eastern and Central Europe. Author of European Community Organizing School – european international programme for educating community organizers.
Monika Balint is a community organizer at Workfare Movement for the Future group. Monika is a sociologist and social activist. Community research and community work have been in the center of her interest for the past ten years. She has been developing participatory and community artworks in Hungary and in other European countries. Also she has experience in making participatory action research.
Monika started to work as a community organizer in September 2014, with the Workfare Movement for the Future group. The main goal of the group is to represent the interests of the workfare workers (called public workers in Hungarian). Members of the group are workfare workers themselves. They want to be treated as any other worker, with all those rights and entitlements that the national law on work provides to ordinary workers. They meet regularly in work groups, hold different public events, demonstrations, presentations, media events, informal hearings, fundraising events and so forth. They operate mainly in Budapest, but they have a growing number of activists and alliances with other non profit organisations all over the country. It is a crucial goal for the group to be able to grow both on local level and through its contacts on national level.
Balint Vojtonovszki holds an MA from Sociology from the Eotvos Lorand Science University, Budapest, Hungary. Since 2006, during his university years he started to participate in campaigns of different alter-globalizational NGOs with topics ranging from environmental justice through trying to stop the demolition of the already half-dead Hungarian welfare state to the issue of homelessness. In 2009 he participated in founding the City Is For All initiative, which is a voluntary community organization with members who are experiencing housing poverty and their allies.
From 2012 he worked for the Hungarian Anti Poverty Network, which supported the organization of unemployed people enrolled in the workfare system. He helped to found the group Workfare Movement for the Future as a community organizer. Balint now lives in Berlin, Germany.
balint.vojtonovszki@gmail.com
Chuck Hirt has a career of working with community based organizations. He worked more that twenty years in the USA building and developing a number of community based organizations providing a range of activities from organizing, community development and more direct services to people. He helped to start more than five different organizations including People Working Cooperatively – The Home Repair People and the Camp Wahsington Community Center. International work consists of sixteen years in Slovakia of building local and international organizations and developing leadership at the local, regional, national and international level. He helped to form the Center for Community Organizing in Slovakia, the Central and Eastern Europe Citizens Network and the European Community Organizing Network.
chuck@cko.sk
