Operational Team
Our Operation Team develops the program and implements its actions, in close partnerships with several tens of employees of local authorities and associations in Ukraine working to implement them.
Benjamin Abtan
Co-Founder and Director
A former advisor to the French Ministers of Foreign Affairs and of Justice, he established a European network of 400 Members of Parliaments for democracy in 25 countries and a European network of human rights NGOs in 40 countries. An Adjunct professor at Sciences Po Paris and ESCP Europe Business School, he is a Fulbright Fellow and holds an MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School.
Vilena Yaniuk
Program Assistant
A Ukrainian citizen specialized in intercultural cooperation, formerly a student at La Sorbonne University, she has welcomed her family who had to flee Ukraine in Paris.
Yuliana Khymchuk
Project Manager
Coming from the entertainment industry, she established a center for internally displaced people in Lviv at the beginning of the war, and has organized humanitarian support in Ukraine.
Founded and managed reception centers in Lviv, and has organized humanitarian support for people in Ukraine and Poland since the beginning of the war.
François Trésorier
Project Manager
Active in the tech sector before the war, he has organized humanitarian support in Poland and Ukraine, including in zones that are the most affected by the war, and has supported the Lviv center for IDPs.
Advisory Committee
Our Advisory Committee provides guidance to the program.
It is chaired by our Co-Founder Colleen Thouez.
Colleen Thouez
Co-founder and Chair
Appointed concurrently as senior fellow at Sciences Po Paris and the New School in 2022, Dr. Thouez is an expert in global governance and migration. She advises the highest levels of decision-making at the multilateral sphere, dozens of national governments, and hundreds of cities. She is the former director of the Welcoming and Inclusive Cities at the Open Society Foundations (OSF), where she founded the Mayors Migration Council, the Africa-Europe Mayors Dialogue, among others. She served previously as the Head of the United Nations Institute for Training & Research (UNITAR), and as special advisor of the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative on Migration.
Bernard Kouchner
Member
Former Minister of Foreign Affairs in France, founder of Doctors Without Borders, Doctors of the World and a reference for the humanitarian action and human rights around the world.
Dominique Bussereau
Member
Former Minister of Agriculture and Secretary of State for Transport and for the Budget, former President of the Assemblée des Départements de France.
Maksym Kozystskyy
Member
Head of the Lviv Regional Administration.
