Damian Vavanos

General Manager and
Head of Business Development

Damian is passionate about all things that has to do with building relationships, supporting people reach their potential and all aspects of entrepreneurial mindset.

His background is in Marketing and Operations although his favourite aspect of his pre-NPO life was that he was a digital nomad.

As Head of Business Development he makes sure that our fundraising, partnerships and company’s strategy is  being implemented while making sure to build long lasting relationships with our stakeholders.

Slim Kasraoui

Lead Technical Instructor

Slim has worked in banking, physiotherapy, customer service, full-stack developer instructor, or entrepreneur. He has been switching his career, and it took him 34 years to find out his passion for development, especially hacking the formal education system. Now he is part of the education team of SHA.

Based now in Tunisia, he lived in Athens for three years. Nowadays, he prefers being called learn-teacher or learn-structor rather than teacher or instructor. He loves learning and trying new stuff.

Ghassen Eljday

Technical Instructor

Ghaseen is a Full-Stack Developer and Tech Instructor. He also worked as a Graphic Designer and as a UI & UX Designer. During that period he discovered artistic and other ways to implement on designing websites and that took him to the IT world. He studied in a coding bootcamp and started building his own websites. Also, he’s a Boxer and was a street workout freestyler for 2 years, and he really loves dogs.

Alex Garcia

School Administrator

Alex has graduated in naval engineering from the Polytechnic University of Catalunya and recently obtained a joint master’s degree in the same field in Belgium and Germany. After some years focusing on science, he is willing to add the social dimension to it since technological progress is senseless if the human part is left behind.

In the last years, he has been combining his studies with international activities and projects based on non-formal education. He is a member of an NGO in Barcelona which deals with cultural and artistic issues (one of its passions) and is currently developing an international project using art as a method of expression and dealing with socially vulnerable groups.

Mohamed Amine Grid

Junior Technical Instructor

Amine’s background is in Full Stack JavaScript development, he also studied English Literature and Linguistics. Amine is a passionate software engineer driven by his love for learning and passing knowledge to others.

Vaida Saulyte

Employment Manager

Originally from Lithuania, Vaida graduated with a degree in Business & Entrepreneurship in the UK. Most interested in forming new connections, exploring the intersection between technology and social change, Vaida is supporting SHA with finding hiring partners for the students.

Being passionate about exploring different cultures and gaining new perspectives, she worked, studied and volunteered in almost a dozen countries in Europe and Asia. Vaida has experience working in sales for an international consulting company.

Tara Clavel

Employment Officer

Tara is a true humanitarian at heart. In her Master’s Degree, she focused specifically on human rights and international development. Whilst finishing up her studies, Tara ended up on the island of Lesvos, where she worked in Kara Tepe refugee camp. This experience changed her career path.

For the last three years, Tara has been working in different coordination roles in refugee camps on the mainland of Greece. Here she worked on a variety of projects to support refugees. One of Tara’s core values is empowerment. She is very happy to join SHA’s mission as an Employment Officer and hopes to help many students find a job.

Laura Azorin

Lead Fundraiser

Laura Azorín’s journey begins with the degree of Business Administration and Management at the University of Zaragoza (Spain). She fell in love with a subject called Social Economic Entities Management. Thanks to that subject and some other experiences in social enterprises and associations, she knew she wanted to focus on something related to social impact, working for integration, equality, justice and change.

Laura found Social Hackers Academy thanks to an international internship, and she has been with them since then, working on the Fundraising team as a Project Manager. She defines herself as a passionate and hard worker who aims to contribute to making the world a better place.

Danai Vasileiou

Project Manager

Danai Vasileiou is an Economics graduate of the University of Piraeus, but she studied architecture at the Technical University of Munich. This mixture of creativity and analytical thinking she had developed characterizes her in every step until today.

She loves communicating with people and playing with the colours and fonts in PowerPoint. When she’s not in front of a laptop, you will probably find her hanging from a hammock -practising aerial yoga- or watching movies starring Ricardo Darin!

At SHA, she uses her organization and communication skills to serve the role of the Project Manager and Fundraiser.

Maro Samara

Proposal Writer

Maro is passionate about science and writing since she can remember. She managed to combine these two through studying physics and writing articles in online newspapers, blogs and magazines. She is also involved with arts, sports, traveling and languages and uses the experience gained to improve in any aspect. In SHA, she is a member of the fundraising team as a proposal writer.

She joined the organization because she believes SHA is the place where she can combine her love for STEM with writing and, as a result, produce something that has a social impact. Motivation moto: Even on your worst day, you can make better another’s day.

Ainoa Prieto

Project Manager & Fundraiser

Ainoa is a human rights advocate specialized in migration, women’s rights and vulnerable groups. After completing her Master’s Degree in International Affairs, she worked for the UN Human Rights Office in Geneva and collaborated with different humanitarian and human rights organizations internationally.

She is undoubtedly passionate about building a better society by helping other people thrive. After studying and working abroad for some years, she moved to Greece to support SHA’s Team as a Project Manager and Fundraiser.

Aya Ragheb

Social Media Manager

Aya is passionate about Social Media and travelling. Her passions led her to study a Bachelor’s Degree in Commerce and Business.

She has lived in Egypt, Kenya, and traveled in 7 countries which led her to move to Dubai, where she developed her career as a marketer and developed a “Think out of the Box” mentality which leads her to having creative ideas.

At SHA, she works as a Social Media Manager and she joined the organization to support the team reach its mission and support more people in achieving their goals.

Nil Muge Felekten

Marketing Manager & Designer

Nil studied Graphic Arts in Turkey, as she couldn’t stop drawing since childhood. After her graduation, she worked in Istanbul in different industries like publishing, tech, academy, and advertising. After gaining significant experience, she decided to study Master’s Degree in Graphic Arts and started freelancing as a designer.

During her studies, she had the chance to work in Spain and in Greece as an Erasmus+ intern. That was when she met with SHA and she feels lucky to be part of this team that drives her to learn more every day.

Paula Camara

Social Media Manager

Paula studied journalism and continued her path into Marketing doing a Master’s Degree. After her studies, she has worked in different NGOs, companies and media. She has always been reading, discovering new topics, and widening her understanding of the world.

In the Marketing team of SHA, she is working as a Social Media Manager and Press Officer, always searching for stories and content to share. Passionate about social issues, her main goal is to make visible the invisible through her job.

Ahmed Zaki

Digital Marketing Specialist

He started as a social media specialist in 2015 for an emerging startup in Cairo that worked in car-pooling, where he created social media strategies and social media content calendars. Later on, he expanded his expertise to digital marketing and took his content marketing skills a couple of steps ahead. For SHA, he handles Social Media Ads and writes for SEO on the website!

Apart from marketing, he has a passion for writing, filmmaking, and visual design.

Damianos Vavanos

Co-Founder

Damianos’ background is in Digital Marketing and Operations and has taken the role of Director. He’s worked in different NGOs all his life and recently he was working with Solidarity Mission as a Digital Marketing Consultant.

Right before embarking on the Social Hackers Academy project he was travelling the world while building his businesses.

Chris Owen

Co-Founder

Chris’s background is in Computer Science with several years professional experience working for start-ups, international companies and freelancing. Most recently he was working for The Guardian as part of their engineering team. Chris has taken on the role of CTO and deals more with the day to day running of the school.

Michael Thomas

Co-Founder & Investor

Michael is a US based entrepreneur and journalist who originally laid the groundwork that the organisation is built on. Having spent times in refugee camps as a journalist he gained vital knowledge for the project and developed the first concept for the code school as it exists today. In the past, Thomas has worked in San Francisco working on his own start-up. As a successful journalist and storyteller, Michael has written for Fast Company and The Atlantic.

Panos Papadopoulos

Panos Papadopoulos is a partner at Marathon VC, an Athens based venture capital investing in tech startups. Prior to joining the finance world, he was a co-founder and CEO at BugSense, a mobile analytics company that was acquired by Splunk Inc. He has invested in more than 20 startups and loves crypto-currencies, IoT and open source infrastructure. He is passionate about change and breaking down existing thinking models.

Chris Jones

Chris grew up between Australia and New Zealand but in 2015, at the height of the refugee crisis, moved to Europe. Feeling strongly for those that are most vulnerable and dismayed by what he saw as a lack of opportunity for refugees in Greece, he decided to seek out a partner in helping refugees achieve their full potential.