What do we want Europe to be? - Europe Day

Ben Eersels is Co-executive Director of G1000, the Belgian platform for democratic innovation. He has advised numerous governments, from the national to the local level, on how to integrate citizens in policy-making. He holds a PhD on the topic of “political participation in the Middle Ages” and is an alumnus of Belgium’s 40 under 40.

Xavier is an engineer in computer science who is passionate about the digital renaissance. In 1999, while still at secondary school, he founded Tribal, a site that gathered student content from around Belgium for publication in a magazine that was distributed to 30,000 students nationwide. Ten years later, he co-founded Storify, a social media curation platform that enables users to create stories or timelines using content from social media such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Storify is now used by top brands, organisations and publishers around the world, including CNN, the New York Times, the United Nations and the White House. More recently, he co-founded OpenCollective, a company that enables groups to collect and spend money transparently without having to create a new bank account.

Hanna Liubakova is a journalist and analyst from Belarus. She is a Senior Fellow at Friends of Europe and has written about the latest developments in Belarus for The Washington Post, The Economist, Deutsche Welle and other international outlets. She is widely recognised as one of Belarus’s leading voices of the free press. Following the 2020 revolution, Liubakova was forced to flee Belarus and was put on the regime’s wanted list. She continued to report on the people’s resistance, including amid the Belarusian regime’s participation in the war against Ukraine. Liubakova also won the 2023 One Young World Journalist of the Year Award and was the 2021 European Press Prize finalist.

Meghan Milloy is the Co-Founder of Republican Women for Progress (RWFP) and the Director of Strategic Communications at the Institute for International Bankers. Prior to this, she was a fellow at the Robert Bosch Foundation, where her work focused on trade issues in the German public and private sectors. Meghan previously served as the chair of Republican Women for Hillary (RWFH) and director of financial services policy at the American Action Forum (AAF). During the Obama administration, Meghan worked as a presidential management fellow at the Small Business Administration on matters of financial inclusion and as a counsel with the House Financial Services Committee. She was an intern at the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the George W. Bush White House. Meghan has also worked in the office of former Senate majority leader Trent Lott and has volunteered for the campaigns of Haley Barbour, George W. Bush, John McCain, Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton.

Dana Spinant is the Director-General for Communication at the European Commission since 2023. Previously, she served as Director for Political Communication and Deputy Chief Spokesperson (2019–2023), shaping the Commission’s public messaging during critical EU policy debates. Her earlier roles included leading communication and budget strategy for Regional and Urban Policy, as well as heading units on irregular migration and drugs policy. Before joining the Commission in 2009, Dana was a Brussels-based journalist and editor, including as Editor of European Voice (2004–2009) and a political commentator for Romanian media. A graduate of the College of Europe (Bruges) and the University of Bucharest, she is fluent in Romanian, French, English, and German.

Born in Uzbekistan and educated at Aarhus University in Denmark, her unifying work is rooted in a corporate career in global shipping with Maersk Line and over 15 years advancing political participation and the employment of international talent, spouses and minorities in the Nordics, as well as youth Global Dignity programmes from Finland to Uzbekistan. With last eight years of shaping and guiding meaningful conversations and inclusion and belonging programs and initiatives, she has shown in practice that results and action happen where people, power and possibility meet. Her work ranges from citizen initiatives and municipal experimentation projects, to uniting entrepreneurs and investors in Europe and Central Eurasia around talent attraction and the urban–rural divide. Kamilla has written op‑eds,  supported policy makers on inclusion and employment, co-created media campaigns on cultural diversity in working life, and hosted the Finnish‑language podcast Suomi+ as a non‑native speaker to challenge accent bias and widen who is heard.  She believes that if we connect the humans first, the strategy will follow – turning big words like ‘European values’ into everyday choices in companies, communities and institutions that decide what kind of future we build together.

Kirsten van den Hul was the director of DutchCulture, the Dutch network and knowledge organisation for international cultural cooperation. Before assuming her current position, she worked as an independent consultant through her own company, The Change Agent, on different transition projects, mainly in the public sector. Previously, van den Hul served as member of parliament for the Dutch Labour Party, where she focused on culture, education, gender equality, foreign trade and development. An Eastern Europe specialist, she was also active on the crossroads between culture, human rights and international cooperation and worked for several international NGOs, including international women’s fund Mama Cash and the European Cultural Foundation.  Van den Hul was also a columnist for newspapers and magazines, contributed to a number of publications and wrote a book, “(S)hevolution”. In addition, she notably held the role of Dutch UN Women’s Representative.