Starting her career in humanitarian response and migration support, Sofia has worked on emergency assistance and community-empowerment initiatives in Mexico, including with the International Organization for Migration (IOM), as well as consultancy and volunteer roles with migrant shelters. She is a motivated, detail-oriented professional with experience in project coordination and rights-based initiatives, particularly in gender equality and community empowerment.

Sofia is part of the Walking the Talk consortium at Hivos, where she supports coordination, logistics, event organization, and partner engagement, including work on conferences, finance processes, and communication with international partners. In this role, she applies strong organizational and communication skills to help ensure smooth collaboration and contribute to inclusive, feminist approaches across the consortium.”

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Starting his career as Youth Ambassador for Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights, Gender Equality, and Bodily Autonomy for the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Jim amplified voices from young people to ensure that Dutch foreign policy aligns with the realities of these young people. Next to his advocacy work, Jim has experience in researching youth perspectives on comprehensive sexuality education in both Dutch and international contexts. Core values for Jim are building bridges, co-creating, and positivity. Jim will lead advocacy efforts at the Dutch foreign policy level within the Walking the Talk program and he is happy to create a positive impact together with the consortium! 

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Having worked in multiple small teams, Marion has a can-do attitude and enjoys crafting creative content across all production stages, from the research to the distribution phase. She takes joy in fostering connections between individuals. In that perspective, she actively contributed to organizing and promoting various (inter)national events, both small and large in scale.

Within Walking the Talk, she coordinates communications across the consortium and leads the communication efforts in the Netherlands. Being fluent in French, English, and German, as well as some Dutch and Portuguese she enjoys working in multilingual environments and co-creating content that resonates with diverse audiences.

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Gunay, originally from the South Caucasus, runs online campaigns advocating for the cultural and political rights of ethnic groups in the region against assimilation amidst the challenges of globalization and political discrimination. She operates a social enterprise aimed at revitalizing the traditional crafts of indigenous communities and improving their socio-economic well-being.

Additionally, Gunay contributes to TRACK II diplomacy between Azerbaijan and Armenia, focusing on uniting youth-led initiatives. She speaks Azerbaijani, Turkish, Russian, and English, and has some knowledge of Ukrainian. Gunay joined the Walking the Talk program as a Finance Officer.

After briefly working for the Red Cross Netherlands as a program support officer, Laura jumped at the opportunity to continue this kind of facilitating work at Hivos for the Walking the Talk program where, as a Project Assistant, she coordinates meetings, takes notes, books flights, translates Spanish texts or provides any other kind of help needed by the team, consortium or partners.

Due to her dual nationality (Dutch/Bolivian), Laura has been building bridges between diverse groups of people and ideas from a young age and she enjoys co-creating joyous spaces in which people can be themselves and excel in their work. She can best be described as a generalist who knows a little about a lot and as such, her interests are broad. She is looking forward to engaging further with the content of the Walking the Talk program while simultaneously supporting its processes.