WAVE’s mission is to enable all women and their children to live free from violence, particularly through strengthening and sustaining a European network of women’s specialized support and prevention services, experts and survivors; to share expertise and experience to prevent, challenge, address and ultimately end male violence against women and their children, through an intersectional feminist approach.
Find out more about WAVE’s structure on this page:
WAVE Members
The WAVE Network consists of over 170 member organisations in 46 European countries.
Click on a country to learn more about our members.
Advisory Board
The WAVE Advisory Board supports the WAVE Board in the development, implementation and evaluation of policies and activities, in order to intensify the coordination and planning for the WAVE Network, and to ensure representation from all regions. It consists of one delegate and one co-delegate (substitute) from each country. The Advisory Board further consists of academic and thematic experts nominated by the board for a certain period of time, and are international experts. During bi-annual network meetings the WAVE Advisory Board enables the WAVE Office to work closely with its members.
Board Members
The WAVE Board is comprised of eight members from different countries and is elected by the General Assembly. WAVE’s Board members are responsible for overseeing the strategic direction of the organisation.
Marcella Pirrone
President
about
Marcella Pirrone is a feminist lawyer who has worked for over thirty years in Italy and at the international level to promote and advocate for the rights of women, specifically women victims of violence. She works as a family and criminal lawyer, public service commissioner for sexual harassment and discrimination and formerly held roles including co-founder and President of a women’s shelter, co-founder of D.i.Re (the Italian umbrella association for autonomous women’s shelters) and member of its board, and university law professor.At the international level, she has participated in several projects, including an active role in WAVE representing Italy for over 20 years and most recently as a member of its Advisory Board. In collaboration with Elena Biaggioni, and on behalf of D.i.Re and several other Italian women’s NGOs, she is coordinating the preparation of the shadow report outlining Italy’s response to Istanbul Convention.
Susana Pavlou
Vice-President
about
Susana started her career at the Mediterranean Institute of Gender Studies (MIGS) in 2005 and has served as Director of the Institute since 2008. In this capacity, she has coordinated and implemented transnational projects on violence against women including domestic violence, sexual violence and rape, female genital mutilation, and gender-based violence among adolescents.
Susana has also served as an expert on violence against women for European networks and organisations including the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE), and the Council of Europe. She served as an expert in the EWL Observatory on Violence against women for six years and served on the Advisory Board of the WAVE Network. As a senior researcher for the European Institute for Gender Equality, she has worked specifically on administrative data collection on violence against women, gender-based violence among refugee women and, most recently, on risk assessment by police on intimate partner violence.
In Cyprus, Susana is currently President of the Advisory Committee for the Prevention and Combating of Violence in the Family, a coordinating body for the implementation of the law on domestic violence and to promote multi-agency cooperation. In her capacity as expert on violence against women and domestic violence, she has worked closely with the Cyprus Ministry of Justice on mapping the legislative framework of Cyprus and its compliance with the standards of the Council of Europe Convention on Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence, as well as in preparing a study on models and tools on risk assessment and risk management of intimate partner violence.
Baljit Banga
Board member
about
Baljit served as director of London Black Women’s Project (LBWP) from 2007 to 2019. She became the Executive Director at Imkaan in May 2019. In 2019, she also joined the board at WAVE. She has a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from York University and a Masters in Planning and Policy from Heriot Watt now located in the University of Edinburgh. Baljit’s professional life has been involved in and dedicated to policy research and practice specifically gender policy, women’s human rights, and how official state policy can impact upon women’s equal representation, access to resources and opportunity and citizenship rights. She is dedicated to working as an intersectional black feminist. Her work has involved strategic development and sustainability of black and minoritised women’s organisations. Areas of interest focus on intersectionality and black feminism in reimagining public administration and policy-making away from neo-liberal framing and towards a transformative social justice approach. She is currently completing her Doctorate at the University of Bath at the Institute of Policy Research.
Selime Büyükgöze
Board member
about
Selime Büyükgöze has been a volunteer at Mor Çatı Women’s Shelter Foundation since 2011, which is a feminist organization working in the field of violence against women. She is mostly involved in communication activities, writing statements and monitoring reports for national and international bodies on violence against women in Türkiye. She has also been involved in various feminist campaigns and platforms in Türkiye and the organization of the annual feminist march. She is one of the members of feminist zine Çatlak Zemin. She holds a PhD in communications and works as a university lecturer.
Dušana Karlovská
Board member
about
is a feminist activist and practicing psychologist. Over the past 17 years, she has been directly supporting women and their children, developing and carrying out trainings, campaigns and advocacy activities on violence against women. She is Program Director of Fenestra – a grassroots feminist organization working with women – survivors of violence, one of the first in Slovakia. She represents the organization in dialogue with different authorities, NGOs and with the Slovak government. She has initiated the establishment of multi-agency cooperation in Kosice, as well as founding of an informal network of women’s NGOs in Slovakia.
She is the author of several publications and a member of the Gender Equality Committee, an advisory body under the Ministry of Labor, Social Affairs and Family in Slovakia, as well as of the Government Council for Crime Prevention. At the international level, she has participated in many international projects. She has been involved in WAVE network since 2005. She has been an Advisory Board member representing Slovakia in the recent years.
She strongly believes that feminist women´s groups, organizations and networks play a key role in changing women and girls´ lives.
Veronica Teleuca
Board member
about
Currently, Veronica is the coordinator of the National Coalition ”Life without Violence” (Republic of Moldova) comprising of 22 civil society and service provider organizations responsible for running the country-wide advocacy platform on gender-based violence (since 2015). The Coalition is the only national network specialized on GBV in the Republic of Moldova for advocacy initiatives and working on building and advancing the women’s rights movement. Veronica holds a Masters degree in clinic psychology, and her thesis was titled “Gender based violence and particularities of different approaches. Feministic therapeutic approach.”
Veronica is also a lawyer, women’s human rights defender and justice sector expert, with relevant experience and understanding of working with women’s organizations, the format of donor assistance in the GBV area and its impact on women, activists and organizations. She also has extensive experience on working with different public actors, including the opposition, as well as justice sector reforms, development and implementation of relevant policy instruments. Veronica also has experience in providing technical assistance under UN agencies, the Council of Europe, the EU, and other international organization’s assignments in Moldova, Ukraine, Armenia, Kirghizstan and Turkmenistan. Furthermore, Veronica is a holder of the Diploma of Honor of the International Women Rights Training Institute (Bulgaria) and a participant of the International Advanced Training Programme on Gender-Based Violence (Sweden).
Branislava Marvánová Vargová
Board member
about
Is head of the Information and counselling centre ROSA that provides support and counselling for women who experienced violence in their close relationships. ROSA – Centre for women has been established 25 years ago as one of the first women’s NGOs in this field in the Czech Republic. She is psychologist, psychotherapist, working with women, who experienced violence, for more that 18 years. Since 2016 she has been chairwoman of the Government Committee for the Prevention of Domestic Violence and Violence against Women, which prepares national Action Plan to Prevent Domestic and Gender-Based Violence and monitors its implementation. By combining her activities in direct work with women, victims of violence and at policy-making level, she seeks to promote that the voices and needs of women are always at the heart of all planned and implemented measures on individual as well as structural level. She has been actively engaged with WAVE since 2004, participated in several WAVE projects (Bridging Gaps, Protect I, Protect II) and have been a trainer at the WAVE training institute. She is author of several publications and actively involved in international exchange and cooperation.
Irene Zeilinger
Board member
about
Irene Zeilinger is a sociologist and feminist self-defence trainer with more than 25 years of experience in the field under her belt. She is the founder, former executive director and current international affairs officer at Garance ASBL, a Belgian feminist NGO combating gender-based violence by the means of primary prevention. Irene has taught thousands of women, girls and professionals across Europe on how to prevent violence and protect themselves from it. She is also at the forefront of feminist advocacy against violence in Belgium, has participated in the writing of the shadow report on Belgium’s failure to apply the Istanbul Convention and sits on the advisory board overseeing the implementation of the Belgian francophone action plan to combat violence against women.
At WAVE, Irene represented Belgium in the Advisory Board. She has participated in the creation of the Handbook “How Gender Neutral Policy and Practice is Dismantling Women’s Specialist Support Services and Ways to Counteract It” and is the author of “Let’s Shut Down Antifeminism: The Verbal Self-Defence Guide for Feminists.
WAVE Office
The WAVE office is the operative headquarter that organises the network’s activities, facilitates communication between the other bodies, and oversees all operational matters.
about
Stephanie Futter-Orel is passionate about fighting Violence Against Women and has a Master’s degree in Political Science from the University of Vienna as well as a Master’s degree in Development Management from the London School of Economics. Austrian by birth, she has lived in London for the past 9 years and worked for over 7 years in women’s specialist organisations dedicated to fighting Violence Against women (frontline roles as well as Senior Management).She was responsible for a wide range of direct support services to women who experienced domestic and/or sexual abuse (DA/SA) including e.g. advice and advocacy, shelters, counselling services, representation of survivors in the criminal justice system, helplines, group programmes, awareness raising about DA/SA in the health care sector, prevention work with young people and specialist support services for women with complex needs, trafficked women and those from minority backgrounds. She has also volunteered for several community projects dedicated to empowering women and young people around the world amongst others in Brazil, India, Bolivia, Portugal, etc. Stephanie joined the WAVE Office in June 2017.
about
Anca Ciupa is currently working as a Team Leader at WAVE, leading various European projects on combating violence against women, in cooperation with international stakeholders such as Council of Europe and UN Women.
She is also one of the four experts that contributed to development of the Council of Europe E-learning online course on ‘Violence against Women and Domestic Violence’, part of the HELP Platform (Human rights Education for Legal Professionals). Anca Ciupa is also a HELP Tutor, recently, co-tutoring the ‘Women’s access to justice course’ for legal professionals in South East Europe.
Anca has a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in Law and has obtained a postgraduate diploma in International Relations at the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna.
about
Léa Dudouet holds an MPhil in the Sociology of Reproduction from the University of Cambridge and a BSc in Sociology from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her studies were geared towards intersecting aspects of sociology, focusing on gender, race and sexuality. Aside from academia, Léa has been involved with different feminist groups and non-profit organisations both in London as well as in Berlin.
Léa has been at WAVE since September 2020 and her current role is Project and Network Coordinator. She is on the one hand responsible for managing some of WAVE’s ongoing projects, while also coordinating network-related activities such as Advisory Board Meetings, new membership applications, and the members’ only section on the website.
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Elena Floriani holds a Bachelor’s degree in Cultural Mediation and a Master’s degree in Comparative International Relations. After study and work experiences in Italy, France, Germany, Tanzania, and Austria, she joined the WAVE Team in May 2019. In the last years, Elena made her interest in feminism and women’s rights her area of research and work. Following an experience at the Embassy of Italy in Tanzania, she decided to focus her Master’s thesis on the legal protection of women’s rights in Africa, conducting research on the recent developments of the African Union’s human rights system. Before joining WAVE in her current position, Elena worked for one of WAVE’s members, the Domestic violence intervention centre of Vienna. Elena is currently working at WAVE as Project & Research Coordinator: she is in charge of leading the production of the bi-annual WAVE Country Report, a key publication presenting the situation of women’s support services in 46 European countries, and of coordinating and implementing WAVE’s international project work.
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As the Grant Development Coordinator, Maria Knaub is responsible for liaising with funders and donors and developing projects and grant proposals. During the grant cycles, she oversees the delivery of all project outputs and is responsible for grant reporting. As part of her second role, Monitoring and Evaluation Coordinator, she is responsible for the development and management of the international M&E framework, to ensure quality control and measure WAVE’s progress towards objectives. As a passionate advocate for social justice and intersectional feminism, she is humbled to use her skills to work towards the elimination of gender-based violence.
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Susanne Wunderer is the cover for the position of Grant Development Coordinator until September 2023. She holds a masters degree in commercial sciences. Coming from one of the more traditional parts in Austria where women are expected to stick to their traditional roles, she has been a feminist ever since. But it was not until she become a mother herself, that she understood how far away from gender equality the society still is. So she started advocating for women’s rights. She has a lot of experience in politics on all levels, built up a feminist NGO herself and specialised on violence against women in the context of family lawsuits.
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Beverly Mtui has a Bachelor’s Degree in Transcultural Communication (German, English & French) and is currently pursuing her Master’s in Development Studies at the University of Vienna. Before she started working at WAVE as the Youth Ambassador Coordinator, she interned and volunteered for various organisations such as Austrian WAVE Member “AÖF” and “Work With Perpetrators European Network – WWP EN”. From 2018-2020, she volunteered for a local NGO in Vienna supporting women survivors of violence and human trafficking. She was head of the fundraising team and board member (treasurer) in her last year with the NGO. Since February 2021, she is the WAVE Communications Coordinator and thus responsible for ensuring and strengthening the visibility and presence of the network and its projects, on the digital sphere and beyond. Besides being passionate about intersectional feminism and gender equality, she also believes in social equality and aims to empower people of African descent through her work.
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Eliana Jimeno is an international human rights advocate with 15+ years of experience. She is a self-aware leader who thrives in diversity and shapes-up creative solutions. Eliana worked with governmental agencies in her country, Colombia, in areas including public policy, inter-agency cooperation, and institutional lobbying. She has ample experience in institutional strengthening and post-conflict peacebuilding. In her international work, she led a 3-year project fostering innovation in preventing violent extremism; and launched a self-sustained international network of 1000+ peacebuilders. Eliana has an intersectional approach to her work and seeks to dismantle structures that perpetuate harm. She believes in the political power of everyday actions. As WAVE’s A&C coordinator, Eliana focuses on network-led campaigning and strategic advocacy focusing on partnership building and stakeholder analysis. Eliana holds a B.A. in Political Science, a postgraduate diploma in Public Policy and Government, and an M.A. in International Peace and Conflict Resolution from American University.
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Branislava Arađan has a BA in Law Studies, and graduated from the Faculty of Law, University of Novi Sad, Serbia. She started her path as a human rights activist at the age of 16, which has led her to more than ten years of experience within different NGOs. She also runs her own NGO focused on youth rights and empowerment.
She was part of the working group for developing the local action plan for gender equality 2019/2020 for the City of Novi Sad and she participated in changing the national law regarding the abuse of psychoactive substances. So far, she performed as an educator about human trafficking, domestic violence, digital safety, human rights in general and project management topics.
Branislava has been at WAVE since November 2021 and her current role is WAVE Project and Youth Ambassador Coordinator. She also coordinates the Safeguarding and Empowering Children Project and co-coordinates internships at WAVE.
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Katharina Öfner has a Bachelor’s Degree in Romance Studies (Spanish) and in Political Science and completed her Master’s Degree in International Humanitarian Action (NOHA) with a focus on Conflict and Peacebuilding. Due to her interest in gender equality and intersectional feminism, she not only focused her studies on these issues but also dedicated her time to volunteer at different NGOs and programs. After studying and working in Austria, Chile, Costa Rica, Colombia, Spain and Sweden, she joined the WAVE team as office administrator in April 2022. In her role she is in charge of coordinating the WAVE office administration, supporting the WAVE event coordinator and accountant as well as being the administrative contact for the WAVE board.
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After her traineeship in the retail trade and several years in this area as a manager, Renate Tomenendal completed a part time training course to become a proofed and graduated balance accountant and personnel accountant. After completing this training, she switched to work as an accountant. After the birth of her son and her maternity leave, Renate resumed her employment in 2014 at WAVE, where she has now been working in the non-profit sector for 7 years. Currently, she is working for the non-profit women’s rights associations AÖF and WAVE. In her very demanding job, she is responsible for accounting, personnel administration, balance sheets, budgeting and reporting. As such, her working day is not only very varied but also entertaining and fulfilling. An important balance to this is her much loved sideline as a highly and fully qualified dance instructor in Vienna and Lower Austria.
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Amina Reiss holds a Bachelor’s degree in Cultural and Social Anthropology and is currently pursuing her Master’s degree in International Development with a focus on intersectional global gender inequalities. In her master thesis she is analysing the exploitation of women and their bodies in the global reproductive industry. Next to her studies she gathered two years of working experience in the field of international conference organising and event management. In March 2023 she joined the WAVE team as Event Coordinator. In her role she is responsible for planning and organising WAVE events, such as online trainings, and webinars as well as on site events like the annual WAVE Conference.
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Rüya Langenberger has successfully completed her studies at the Business Academy in Vienna, Austria, and collaborated with two classmates on a thesis exploring patriarchal structures and capitalism. With her background in accounting, she has gained experience as a bookkeeping assistant and junior accountant in two different companies. Seeking a career that aligns with her values, ideas, education and experience, Rüya has found her way to WAVE. With a passion for combining her skills in finance with her personal beliefs, she is excited to contribute to a workplace that resonates with her values.
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Alexandra Legentil holds a Bachelor degree in International Business and a Master degree in Humanitarian Action with a focus on forced migration and human security. She is currently enrolled in a Peace and Conflict Research Master during which she focuses on mediation & negotiation as well as gender, peace, and war. She has gained valuable experience while working for a legal clinic in France, with asylum seekers in Malta and refugee women and minors in shelters in Luxembourg. She translated her interest in promoting gender equality by writing her Master thesis on communication and cultural barriers that pregnant refugees experience in healthcare in Luxembourg.
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Yasmine Aburaya holds a bachelor’s degree in political science and identifies as an intersectional feminist. She is currently pursuing her master’s degree in international cooperation on human rights and intercultural heritage at the University of Bologna, where she specialises in the protection of human rights and international cooperation. She has gained a variety of experiences through her volunteer work with numerous organisations that are concerned with gender equality, gender data, and migration. She is writing her thesis on the relationship between the Istanbul Convention and gender-based violence against migrant women, as well as their right to protection and to effective remedy. Since 2020, she has been working on the issue of violence against women and domestic abuse, where she founded her own online advocacy initiative to raise awareness of the issue and provide support to abuse victims.
