Civil Society

Zorana Gajic is a program officer with GMF’s Transatlantic Trusts. She has over 30 years of experience in several international organizations, including the Open Society Foundations and the World Bank/IFC (Regulatory Reform in Serbia), as well as with numerous USAID and EU-funded projects in the Western Balkans. Her expertise spans the areas of higher education reform, regulatory reform, public administration reform, EU enlargement, and the Western Balkans. She holds a Master’s degree in political science from Central European University, and a Bachelor’s degree in law from the University of Belgrade, Serbia.

Eka Tkeshelashvili is a distinguished visiting fellow with GMF’s Transatlantic Democracy Working Group (TDWG). She works on anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine and provides expertise on Georgian civil society and the geostrategy of the Black Sea region.

Tkeshelashvili previously served as Georgia’s deputy prime minister, minister of justice, minister of foreign affairs, National Security Council secretary, and state minister for reintegration. She also established and led the EU Anti-Corruption Initiative in Ukraine and the Support to Anti-Corruption Campion Institutions, the two largest international assistance programs dedicated to countering corruption in Ukraine. 

Tkeshelashvili is a professor at Kyiv’s Civil and Political School and at Tbilisi’s Black Sea University, and leads the Georgian Institute for Strategic Studies. She holds a master’s degree in international law from Notre Dame Law School, a certificate in human rights law from Oxford University, and a diploma in law from Tbilisi State University.

Sameer Padania is a nonresident fellow with GMF Cities and runs the independent consultancy Macroscope, which works with diverse stakeholders—including independent media, philanthropy, civil society, businesses, think tanks, and governments—on strategies, policies, and funding mechanisms to defend, support, and grow public interest journalism ecosystems worldwide. He is working with the Public Interest News Foundation in the United Kingdom to help communities develop local news plans and to launch the country's first local news fund. His reports include the Forum on Information and Democracy’s global report, which calls on governments to deliver “A New Deal for Journalism”, and guides grantmaking to journalism, funding investigative journalism, and developing national funds for journalism. 

Padania has written about the funding environment for journalism in Europe for the Journalism Funders Forum and now writes a regular, independent newsletter. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and is a trustee of the Indigo Trust, Doc Society and the Orwell Foundation. 

Philip M. Napoli is is a nonresident fellow with GMF Cities. He is the James R. Shepley professor of public policy at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy, where he is also the director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy. He is a docent at the University of Helsinki and the principal investigator of the News Measures Research Project, an initiative that has focused, since 2014, on conducting actionable research on assessing the health of local news and information ecosystems. 

Napoli has provided research and expert testimony on issues such as local journalism and media ownership to the Federal Communications Commission, the US Senate Commerce Committee, the US Government Accountability Office, and the Congressional Research Service. He has also engaged in research collaborations with organizations such as the New America Foundation, the Center for American Progress, and the Benton Institute for Broadband and Society.

Napoli is the author/editor of eight books, most recently News Quality in the Digital Age (with Regina Lawrence) and Social Media and the Public Interest: Media Regulation in the Disinformation Age. His earlier books include Audience Evolution: New Technologies and the Transformation of Media Audiences and Foundations of Communications Policy: Principles and Process in the Regulation of Electronic Media. He has published more than 50 articles in legal, public policy, journalism, and communication journals, and more than 30 invited book chapters in edited collections.