TEAM
The team behind The Leadership for Social Change Academy is young, inspired and experienced. We’ve been working together since 2010.
Yanina Taneva is one of the founders of Ideas Factory. Her great passion is exploring the creative potential for social change – in people as well as in societies. A media expert, publicist, documentalist, psychologist, trainer, traveler, activist and an aspiring psychodramatist, Yanina has won a number of different awards for finding innovative ways to empower the voice of the people in mainstream media (with campaigns like Let Us Save Irakli) as well as for public journalism (Association of European Journalists). She is a Robert Bosch Foundation fellow: Theodor Heuss Kolleg (Berlin), US Department of State (YLDA, Washington) alumna, CEE Trust fellow, a fellow of the program for leadership in the field of sustainable development at LEAD International (London/Brussels), The British Council and Asia Europe Foundation (Bangkok, Beijing) fellow.
Sashka Vitanova has been on board of the Ideas Factory team since December 2009. The main drive in her life is nature and the restoration of man to nature and man to man connections. She is an academically trained vet, a profession she has practiced for over 5 years at Green Balkans’ Wildlife Rescue Center in Stara Zagora. At the Centre Sashka also developed and coordinated a volunteers program. Her further academic preparation is of a trainer in informal education, volunteer programs and environmental topics. She is also an experiences project developer. Sashka is an alumni of The Bulgarian Young Leaders’ Program at IIE (International Institute for Education) – Junior Environmental Professionals Training Program, USA 2010. Since 2007 she has participated in a number of trainings and projects on the Youth in Action Program and has built an international network of contacts and partners.
Alexandra Iotsova has been a tireless traveler on the road of social work and education for more than 10 years. Starting from experience learning, through corporate trainings, sensitive trainings, experimental groups and meditation, she is searching the right way to unleashing the personal potential of everyone coming across her way. She is lead by love to the human being and by the belief that any kind of poverty or aggression are induced by insufficient information and lack of knowledge. Alexandra thinks that a training is a means to a state of harmony and is the first step to realizing one’s inner power and universal responsibility for planet Earth. She is also a co-founder of one of the oldest environmental NGOs in Bulgaria – Za Zemiata – and a long term instructor at Outward Bound Bulgaria. She has joint the Ideas factory in 2010.