Advisory Body

The Advisory Body consists of experts providing strategic and content advice to the Coalition at the ad hoc basis. The members of the Advisory Body have been invited to join it due to their expertise and long term involvement in the KARAT Coalition’s work.

Regina Barendt, Germany

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 the context of globalization and EU-accession, and also facilitating a government-NGOs working group on Bulgarian gender equality machinery. After 22 years in Bulgaria, she returned to Germany and started promoting the East-West exchange between gender and development NGOs, particularly 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 on domestic violence. Regina has been involved with KARAT from its very early stage, since the Beijing Conference. She has served several terms at KARAT’s Steering Committee and Board.

Silke Steinhilber, Germany

Silke has worked as a researcher and trainer on gender equality in social and employment policies in Central and Eastern Europe, Caucasus, Central Asia and the European Union since 1999. In 2001, she established her consultancy firm “Research, Evaluation and Capacity Development for Gender Equality” and has since consulted with the International Labour Organisation, UNICEF, UNDP, Council of Europe, UN/ECE, and others, including trade unions and women’s organizations – 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 holds a PhD from the New School for Social Research, New York. Her dissertation was about family policy reforms in Poland and the Czech Republic between 1990 and 2005. She has two daughters and lives in Berlin, Germany.