KARAT Coalition

Regina Barendt, Bulgaria/Germany

Women's rights activist

Regina’s experience in the area of women’s empowerment includes initiating the first Bulgarian shelter for women survivors (1994), organizing and managing an active Gender Resource Center and national gender network in Bulgaria (Women’s Alliance for Development); maintaining partnerships with sister organisations in CEE/CIS and most of the Balkan countries; social, labour market and NGO advocacy research in view of globalization and EU-accession; and also facilitating a Government-NGO Working Group on Bulgarian gender equality machinery. After 22 years in Bulgaria, she returned to Germany and been promoting the East-West exchange between gender and development NGOs, in particular between KARAT and the Clean Clothes Campaign. Further, she contributed to the establishment of a monitoring network on labour conditions in the Eastern European garment industry, and to elaboration of gender mainstreaming guidelines for the Bulgarian institutions of domestic violence. Regina has been involved with KARAT from its very early steps, since the Beijing Conference. She has served several terms at KARAT’s Steering Committee and Board.

Silke Steinhilber, Germany

Feminist political scientist

Silke has worked as a researcher and trainer on gender equality in employment and social policies in Central and Eastern Europe and the European Union since 1999. Since 2001 she is a freelance consultant, working in various paid and unpaid capacities for, among others, the International Labour Organisation, Council of Europe, UN/ECE, and various trade unions and women’s organizations in Europe – among them KARAT Coalition and Women in Development Europe (WIDE). A feminist political scientist by training, she has published widely on gender and the labor market, social security reforms and gender mainstreaming in social inclusion policy. She is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the New School for Social Research, New York. Her dissertation research focuses on the political dynamics of family policy reforms in Poland and the Czech Republic. She has a three-year old daughter, Laura, who has traveled to various CEE countries already with her mom.