About Sredata

Neli Makedonska
Program & Operations Manager

Neli works across the full life cycle of projects: from the initial idea and concept to team building, planning, budgeting, coordination, and delivery. She has more than ten years of experience in public administration, having worked across several ministries and public institutions. In recent years, her work has focused increasingly on culture and youth engagement. She has co-authored and coordinated three editions of the European Week of Sport, as well as projects connected to UNESCO. Neli holds a degree in International Relations and a master’s degree in Psychological Counselling.
She joined Sredata because she knows the institutions from the inside: both their limitations and what becomes possible when there is purpose, commitment, and a group of people who refuse to give up. She believes that our environment shapes us, but that sometimes it takes only one person to begin changing it.
Neli is convinced that Bulgaria has far more opportunities than we often realise. What is usually missing is not potential, but access to information, confidence, and the persistence to seek those opportunities out and make use of them. She wants more people to be informed, alert, curious, engaged, and less easily discouraged. She believes Sredata can help make that possible.

Zlatko Galabov
Co-Founder

Zlatko is a psychologist and cognitive-behavioural counsellor with many years of professional practice. He joined Sredata for a very natural reason: the people behind it and the purpose they share: the common ground, the unconventional thinking, and the drive to turn ideas into action.
Through his work, Zlatko has come to understand the deep and often damaging relationship people develop with their environment. For decades, life in Bulgaria has often been shaped by the need to survive, and survival depends on adaptation. People adjust to economic, social, psychological, and educational pressure, among many others. Yet adaptation is a two-way process: we are shaped by our environment, but we also have the ability to shape it in return. When that pressure continues for too long, the balance is lost. People become over-adapted — focused entirely on fitting into the environment, while gradually giving up on changing it to meet their own needs.
For Zlatko, Sredata is a small but purposeful engine for changing that dynamic. Bulgarian society has spent a long time pursuing freedom from; now it is time to build the freedom – to the freedom to take initiative, to work together, and to create a healthier environment for the critical mass of people who make society function. His ambition is for Sredata to become a point of connection between real problems and workable solutions, and a source of support for people who refuse to accept that nothing can be changed.

Nikola Papukchiev
Director & Co-Founder

Nikola has spent more than two decades working across media, marketing, and content. Over the years, he has been an editor and publisher, and has led media brands, creative projects, and large-scale events. He joined Sredata for a simple reason: he finds it difficult to accept as normal things that clearly are not. He has an instinctive intolerance for injustice, especially when it becomes part of everyday life and is dismissed with a shrug and a familiar “that’s just how things work here.” Sredata is his way of turning that frustration into focused work on tangible problems with tangible solutions. His ambition is to help build a country where the relationship between people and institutions is constructive, respectful, and genuinely works in people’s interests.

Yordan Zhechev
Co-Founder