Civil Society

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.

Maryna Rakhlei analyzes regional developments in Eastern Europe and is part of the team assisting civil society in Belarus. She studied in Minsk and in Berlin. Before joining GMF, Rakhlei covered foreign relations for the Belarusian newswire Belapan in Minsk, wrote for the German newswire DPA and blogged for EuObserver.

Verena Ringler is a former Visiting Fellow at GMF.

Veronika Zimova is a Program Coordinator at GMF's Engaging Central Europe program in Berlin. She is responsible for the program's grantmaking activities and for fostering relationships with grantees.

Zimova is a highly experienced project manager. At the Adventist Development and Relief Association in Slovakia, she coordinated EU-funded projects that collaborated with grassroots organizations worldwide. She began her career as a volunteer Project Assistant at ADRA Albania, during which she was named SlovakAid Volunteer of the Year (2018–2019) for her field work with vulnerable groups.

Zimova holds a master's degree in international relations from Matej Bel University in Slovakia. She wrote her bachelor's thesis on the transition to democracy in the early 1990s in central Europe.