Simon Panek

Simon Panek is the director and one of the founders of People in Need, one of the biggest Central-Eastern European non-governmental organisations. At the end of the 80s, Simon Panek was at the heart of the events that came to be known as the Velvet Revolution. As a young student, he was one of the organisers of the anti-regime occupation strikes as co-chairman of Central Students Strike Committee, which was the catalyst for the rapid collapse of the communist regime. During the last twenty years he was also for some period active in documentary film production, served as Vaclav Havel presidential office department for foreign policy employee and Chair of the Board of the Open Society Fund Prague and Chair of an NGO development platform FoRS.