Project & Programme Coordinator · Cultural & mission-driven organisations

I coordinate the programmes, events, and teams that keep mission-driven organisations running.

Over a decade turning ideas into delivered work — EU youth programmes, festivals, funding, and the operations underneath them. I grew from volunteer to board member of a non-profit arts hub in Greece, ran the full lifecycle of Erasmus+ projects, and now bring that to organisations in the Netherlands. I'm the one who makes sure the room works.

Programme coordination Programme management Events administration Community & volunteer coordination
Available now — remote or hybrid, Randstad area Based in Leiden, Netherlands Languages Greek · English · Dutch (learning)
10+ years
Coordinating events & programmes
6 years
Erasmus+ & ESC — full lifecycle
15+
Volunteers per team, recruited & led
5,000+
Attendees across festivals I helped run

Selected work

Four projects, each chosen to show one kind of coordination work — what it was, what I owned, what I actually did, and how it landed. The full record is in my CV and in the experience section below.

Programme coordination 2018 – 2024

Erasmus+ & European Solidarity Corps — six years, full lifecycle

EU-accredited youth programmes · Fix In Art (Αναζητητές Θεάτρου) · SALTO-YOUTH registered

Context

Fix In Art is an EU-accredited organisation on the Youth Portal and SALTO-YOUTH, hosting and running Erasmus+ youth exchanges, training courses, and European Solidarity Corps volunteer placements across European partners.

My role

Programme coordinator for six years — responsible for the end-to-end lifecycle of multiple EU youth projects and for hosting international volunteers.

What I did

Coordinated logistics and international travel, managed partner communication across EU countries, and ran programme administration, budget tracking, and EU reporting. I looked after the full ESC hosting experience — onboarding, placements, and mentorship — keeping everything compliant with EU guidelines. I also built the partner database: ~80 organisations across 18 EU programme and partner countries, sorted by project field so we could match the right partner to the right funding call.

Outcome

Six unbroken years of delivered youth exchanges, training courses, and volunteer placements with real participants — programmes that stayed compliant and actually happened, year after year.

Full project lifecycleYouth exchanges & trainingVolunteer hostingBudget & reportingMulti-country partners
Weekly programme schedule built for a themed workshop week
A weekly programme schedule I built for a themed workshop week — the working documents behind each project.
Events administration 25–26 Jan 2020

Fix in Sex Festival — built from zero in four months, staged over two days

Two-day public festival · Old FIX Brewery, Thessaloniki · Co-founded via SHAAG

Context

The culminating public event of SHAAG (Sexual Health Awareness Across Genders), a youth initiative on sexual health and gender equality I co-founded — created to open honest, science-led conversations and give the LGBTQ+ community a welcoming space in a city where those conversations were rare.

My role

Co-founder and festival lead — responsible for programming, logistics, promotion, and the volunteer team behind a two-day event.

What I did

Over four months of preparation, I sourced and briefed speakers with medical and scientific credentials, and coordinated vendors plus a 15-person international volunteer team — from Turkey, Spain, Sweden, the UK and Latvia — with schedules and assignments. Planning ran on Trello and Excel, on a €1,000 total budget. I curated a photo exhibition, ran promotion and interactive programming with the LGBTQ+ collective, and wrote the post-event report.

Outcome

A fully delivered two-day festival drawing ~200 people a day — locals and Thessaloniki's international community — turning a difficult, taboo subject into an open public event, all on €1,000. It taught me to trust myself to carry a project from concept to completion.

“It was a well thought-out, well executed festival that I would hope others could look to for inspiration in the future.”
Antony Pilkington — worked on the Fix in Sex Festival team
Event lifecycle: concept → report4-month buildSpeaker liaisonInternational volunteer team (15)€1,000 budgetPromotionExhibition curation
Fix in Sex Festival 2020 poster
Festival poster — 25–26 January 2020, Old FIX Brewery.
Fix in Sex Festival programme poster listing film screenings with RFSU, workshops, seminars, performances and art exhibitions on sexual health and pleasure
Programme poster — film screenings with RFSU, workshops, seminars, performances and art exhibitions.
Community & volunteer coordination 2022 – 2024

Building the recruitment function a growing non-profit never had

Internship & volunteer recruitment · Fix In Art · international candidates

Context

A growing non-profit relying on international interns and volunteers, with hiring handled ad-hoc and no standard process to onboard or keep people.

My role

Recruiter & HR coordinator — owning the full pipeline from sourcing to onboarding and mentorship, and the systems behind it.

What I did

Wrote role descriptions, sourced candidates internationally (interns.org, Youth for Europe, Facebook, LinkedIn), screened, interviewed, and selected, then designed onboarding and mentored new arrivals. Created the organisation's first procedure book — email templates, workflow manuals, and standardised processes.

Outcome

Ad-hoc hiring became a repeatable, humane system — the procedure book was still in use after I left. And it sharpened the skill underneath it all: reading quickly what someone is good at, and placing them where they'll actually want to stay.

Sourcing & screeningInterviewingOnboarding & mentorshipProcess designDocumentation
Communications department workflow mind-map
Communications-department workflow map from the procedure book — the system new arrivals were onboarded into.
Recruiter structure mind-map — roles, meeting cadence, and the intern pipeline
Recruiter structure map — roles, meeting cadence, and the intern pipeline I designed.
Sound & technical production 2014 – 2024

Live sound & technical operations — the layer underneath every event

Old FIX Brewery (est. 1888), HELEXPO & live venues · Thessaloniki · Fix In Art & festival stages

Context

Fix In Art's home was the Old FIX Brewery — a historic 1888 building with rehearsal spaces, a theatre, exhibition halls, a library and a community kitchen, all needing coordinated technical support for the art, theatre and live music happening inside. Beyond it, festival and concert stages across Thessaloniki needed sound run reliably, night after night.

My role

Technical operations and live sound — owning the venue's audio/visual inventory and production setup, and engineering live sound on stages from intimate bars to national-scale events.

What I did

Managed AV inventory, production liaison, and setup/teardown for every Fix In Art event across a complex multi-space venue — running inventory and budget spreadsheets, weekly programme schedules for the recurring strands (theatre workshops, jazz nights, cinema, children's shows), and the space-hire agreements used when partner organisations hired the theatre.

Engineered live sound and recorded performances — at HELEXPO's 27,000 m² Asterokosmos park for named Greek artists (Βαγγέλης Γερμανός / Vangelis Germanos, Κατερίνα Στικούδη / Katerina Stikoudi), at The Barrister's live nights, and on the parallel programme around international acts including Dub Inc, Parov Stelar Band and Thievery Corporation.

Outcome

A decade of events that got on stage on time — the right equipment in place, tested, and operated when it mattered. And a skill no course teaches: calm under live pressure. When something breaks mid-event there's no pause button, so I learned to troubleshoot fast, communicate clearly, and keep the show moving.

Live sound engineeringAV inventory & setupProduction liaisonHistoric 1888 venueNational-scale events
Fix In Art venue spaces
The multi-space venue every event ran through — theatre, garden, and workshop spaces.
The venue garden with upcycled flower-pot chairs
The garden stage area — upcycled chairs turned planters, typical of the venue's DIY spirit.

More experience

Full events list (PDF) →

The wider track record behind the four projects above — festivals run on the ground, EU and community work, and the operations roles that taught me how organisations actually function.

Festivals & live events

Coordination & production, Greece

5th Thessaloniki Animation Festival 2019 poster
TAF — Thessaloniki Animation Festival
2016 / 2017 / 2019
Volunteer coordinator for Northern Greece's only animation festival (~3,000 film submissions and 2,500+ visitors a year in the years I worked on it) — ran the full volunteer cycle: recruiting, interviewing and matching people to roles, a training manual with per-role job descriptions, shift schedules across stations, participation tracking, and reporting to funders.
Festival site
Select Respect 2019 festival poster
Select Respect Festival
Nov 2019
Volunteer coordination across a four-day human-rights film festival with 3,000+ competition entries, run by a nine-member NGO network coordinated by the Heinrich Böll Stiftung.
Heinrich Böll Stiftung — 2019 programme
GreenWave Festival 2019 poster
GreenWave Festival
2016 / 2019
Volunteer coordination across a four-day eco-festival with 50+ organisations and an eco-bazaar of 100+ producers.
Festival site
International concerts · Παλιό FIX / Old FIX
2015
Ran the parallel programme and catering around Dub Inc, Parov Stelar Band, and Thievery Corporation.
Parallaxi — Parov Stelar at the venue, June 2015
Rockwave Festival
2015
Volunteer management at one of Greece's biggest festivals — Terra Vibe Park, Malakasa.
Πενία Τέχνας / Penia Technas
2011 – 2016
Multi-role support, performer, and sound assistant at a recurring municipal festival.

EU & community

Funding, solidarity & service

Empowerment Foundation — Funding & Partnerships
2023 – 2024
Started the foundation's funding work from scratch — a role that didn't exist before. Researched EU and private funding calls, developed partner relationships, and did the groundwork for a monthly job fair in Leiden.
Foundation site
FOOD-Y project card — Erasmus+ KA220 cooperation partnership with partner logos including Fix In Art
FOOD-Y — Erasmus+ cooperation project (support)
2024
Supported Fix In Art's part in FOOD-Y, an EU-funded Erasmus+ cooperation partnership led by partners in Sweden and Italy. I helped where the Greek side needed it — translating materials into Greek and preparing the documents for the local workshop in Epanomi.
Erasmus+ project record
TEH #98 Argatia woodworking workshop card, carrying the Trans Europe Halles and Fix In Art logos
TEH #98 Camp Meeting — assisting (Trans Europe Halles)
Oct 2024
Helped behind the scenes when Fix In Art hosted this international gathering of European cultural centres (10–13 October 2024, Epanomi). I prepared some of the texts and did small administrative work on the database documents, supporting the team wherever they needed an extra hand.
Trans Europe Halles — event page
Food rescue pickup at the market — volunteer in ΦΙΞ vest
Μπορούμε / Boroume — food rescue
2018 – 2023
Coordinated food and supply distribution through Fix In Art's partnership with Greece's leading food-rescue NPO — a fixed weekly pickup from two donor branches to a community kitchen, sustained for years because the pickup always happened. Partnerships survive on reliability.
Boroume
Black Canvas final exhibition — participants' artwork hung in a raw industrial space
Black Canvas — Erasmus+ youth exchange
2019
Coordinator and participant on an Erasmus+ youth exchange in Latvia (18–26 May 2019) — a week of art workshops (ceramics, painting) closing with a public exhibition of the participants' work.
ΚΕΑΤ / KEAT — theatre with blind children
2019
Coordinated an inclusive summer-school theatre performance at Greece's only public institution for the visually impaired.

Operations & content

The systems behind the scenes

Arts Administrator & Operations Coordinator
2015 – 2017
Ran budgeting, scheduling, logistics, and day-to-day office operations for theatre productions at the Fix In Art venues.
With Elli — published articles and social cards
With Elli — creator & facilitator
2025 – present
My current independent practice — a registered trade name (KVK), publishing guides in three languages (English, Dutch, Greek) and facilitating workshops online and in person in Leiden. withelli.com
Floating Orb Productions channel banner
Floating Orb Productions — Ops Assistant
2022
Built and ran the Notion backbone — content calendars, advertiser database, invoicing, and outreach — for an independent media channel.
Volunteer to board member · Fix In Art
2015 – 2024
Grew from volunteer to a seat on the board of this non-profit promoting education and human rights through art — staying nearly a decade, across nearly every department.
European Youth Portal — organisation record

About

Portrait of Elli Zafeiridou Georgiadou

Elli Zafeiridou Georgiadou — Leiden, NL

I'm a project and programme coordinator who learned the work by doing it — for a decade, inside a non-profit arts hub in Greece where I grew from volunteer to board member.

That meant a bit of everything: running the full lifecycle of Erasmus+ and European Solidarity Corps programmes, producing festivals, securing funding, building a recruitment function from scratch, and handling the live sound and operations underneath it all. What ties it together is coordination — taking something ambitious and under-resourced and giving it the structure to actually happen.

I work well with diverse, multicultural teams and the messy middle of a project, where most things quietly go wrong unless someone is paying attention. I care most about art and culture as tools for social change — youth, education, inclusion, human rights.

That instinct doesn't switch off at home: I build the automations and scenes that run our house on Home Assistant, and use it every day. It's the same habit — noticing the small repeated things and making them happen on their own.

Now based in Leiden, I'm looking for coordination and programme roles with cultural and mission-driven organisations where that experience is useful from day one.

My path

How I got here, in my own words — from a family arts hub in Thessaloniki to coordination work in the Netherlands.

I didn't set out to become a coordinator. I grew into it — by being the person who built the structure everything else could run on.

The beginning
Fix In Art · Thessaloniki

It started as a family thing

My parents founded Fix In Art, and I started helping while I was still at school — working the kitchen and bar at music events, cleaning, assisting with whatever was needed. I grew up inside the place before I ever had a title in it.

2015 – 2024
Volunteer → board member

I became the one who built the structure

I started as a volunteer and intern, and over the years became an executive and a board member. What I loved most was the structure and the workflow of the organisation — the templates, the manuals, the systems that let it actually run.

So that became my part. I built the internship department from zero: its workflow and structure, the accounts behind it, and the manuals for how we would find interns and define what we needed and wanted from them.

Early on
Social media, from zero

Given a blank page, I built the whole thing

At the start of the organisation I was handed the social media with nothing in place. I opened every account, gathered and took the photos, made the videos and the content to post, and organised it into a consistent presence. Taking something from zero to running is the work I like most.

2023 – 2024
Empowerment Foundation · Leiden

A new country, and the same instinct

When I moved to the Netherlands I was looking for opportunities and people to build with. I answered a LinkedIn ad to volunteer with the Empowerment Foundation, met the team, brought ideas, and set about building them — meeting people for collaborations and explaining the projects we already had.

My part was to start the funding department — it didn't exist before me — and gather my knowledge into it: researching opportunities, organising everything in Notion, and mapping the next steps — where to go and who to meet. Getting all of it into a clear, usable structure, documented so others could pick it up, was the work I'm proudest of there.

2024 – present
Leiden · building here

Putting down roots — and building again

After nine intense years I settled properly into a new country — learning Dutch, working customer-facing retail at Zizzi in Leiden, and getting to know how Dutch organisations work from the inside. And I did what I always do with a blank page: I built something. With Elli is my registered independent platform (KVK) — publishing practical guides in three languages and facilitating workshops online and in person in Leiden. It keeps my coordination, content, and facilitation work active while I look for the next programme role.

What I carry
Into the next role

What all of it taught me

How to communicate what needs to be done. How to organise a project from the first idea to the final report. How to improvise when things don't go to plan. And, more recently, patience — that some things can't be pushed before they're ready. Along the way I also learned how non-profits in the Netherlands really work: their structure, their options, their opportunities.

How I work

The working principles a decade of coordination left me with.

01

Start to finish

I take a project from the first idea all the way to the final report — and I keep track of the whole arc, not just my slice of it.

02

Communication is the job

Most of coordination is making sure everyone knows what has to be done, and by when. Clear beats clever.

03

Build systems that outlast me

I leave behind templates, manuals and structure, so the work doesn't depend on me being in the room. The procedure book I wrote was still in use after I left.

04

Improvise when the plan breaks

Something goes wrong in the middle of every project. I stay calm and find another way through rather than freezing.

05

Patience

I've learned not to force things before they're ready — some things need time, and pushing only breaks them.

06

Structure over chaos

Give me something ambitious and under-resourced and my instinct is to organise it — into a workflow, a schedule, a system that holds.

Skills, languages & learning

What I do

Project & programme coordinationEU programmes (Erasmus+, ESC)Funding research & applicationsEvent productionVolunteer coordinationRecruitment & onboardingBudget trackingLogistics & schedulingPartner & stakeholder communicationReporting & documentationLive sound & technical ops

Tools

NotionTrelloNextcloudMicrosoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint)Google WorkspaceGTD methodSocial media management

Languages

GreekNative
EnglishFluent · professional
DutchActively learning · I publish written guides in Dutch

Education

Music & Optoacoustic Technologies — coursework
Hellenic Mediterranean University · 2016–2021
Performing Arts & Drama
Vassilis Diamantopoulos Drama School · 2012–2014
Music Technology — certification
I.E.K Delta (Institute of Vocational Training) · 2014–2016

Learning & certification

Project Management Principles & Practices
Coursera / UC Irvine — Specialisation · 2023
Project Management Foundations
LinkedIn Learning — 7-course series · 2023
Advan+AGE — Intergenerational Work
SGRIM e.V. · 2023
Sexual Education & Psychology of Young Relationships
K.E.DI.VI.M — Panteios University · 2021

What colleagues say

From public LinkedIn recommendations — verifiable on my profile.

“I could always trust her to complete any task that she took on, and I always knew that it would be done to a promised standard. She has great communication skills and is never afraid to challenge the room.”
Sofie SafarovaConversion Content Manager — worked together for over a year at Fix In Art
“She offered valuable help to Project Coordinators in organizational matters with professionalism and excellent team work.”
Agapi-Evangelia TsampaziHeinrich Böll Stiftung, Thessaloniki — managed Elli directly
“She has shown great responsibility and efficiency. I was more than happy to work with Elli.”
Dimitris SavvaidisCEO & founder, Funny Tales animation studio — managed Elli directly

Full recommendations on LinkedIn · References available on request.

Get in touch

Let's talk about your next programme or event.

If you're a cultural or mission-driven organisation looking for someone to coordinate the work and make the room run — I'd love to hear from you.

Email
elli.zafeiridou@protonmail.com
Location
Leiden, South Holland, NL
Links
linktr.ee/withelli
Full events list
Download (PDF)

© 2026 Elli Zafeiridou Georgiadou · Project & Programme Coordinator