Bernadett Sebály is a former organizer and early-stage researcher supporting the organizing sector in Europe for years. Her organizing is rooted in a grassroots housing organization of homeless people and low-income tenants and a one-year professional development program in the U.S. with Virginia Organizing. Drawing on this experience, she played a leadership role in building the first Hungarian community organizing program with the Civil College Foundation, where she was a mentor and trainer. She contributed to laying down the theoretical foundations of the practice in Hungary by co-editing a book about the fundamentals of organizing. In addition, she coordinated Civilizáció, a Hungarian network of CSOs, during a period of repressive government measures. Since she started my PhD program, she has contributed to strengthening the organizing sector in an expert capacity. Her dissertation focuses on the relationship between movement structures and policy impact. She is particularly interested in how the combination of movement strategies, one of them is organizing, influences outcome. She was a Visiting Graduate Scholar at the P3 Lab at SNF Agora at Johns Hopkins University, a lab specializing in analyzing organizing processes, in 2022/2023.

She has been around ECON since 2014. In the first four years, she contributed to strengthening the organizing sector through her work at the Civil College Foundation. In 2018, she went back to academia and, from then on, supported ECON as an expert. Recently, she led a two-year participatory action research process with five organizers from five countries in Eastern Europe. They documented and analyzed their organizing strategy and contributed to creating the organizing history of the region. In the last few years, she acquired relevant knowledge and analytical skills that she could use to benefit ECON and the future of organizing. Her unique position as a longtime organizer (2009-2018) and a researcher (2018- ) enables her to bring new perspectives and knowledge relevant to organizers.