Gabrielle is an ex-legal professional and humanitarian with a lifelong passion and commitment to women's rights. Gabrielle founded Action for Women (link: afw.ngo) in the summer of 2015. She has since worked on the Balkan route, Italy and Greece where she spent 20 months on the Aegean island of Chios. It was there she witnessed first hand how the EU-Turkey deal trapped her fellow human beings fleeing war and persecution in overcrowded and inhumane living conditions, and how navigating the sluggish asylum processes worsened their already fragile mental health and impacted their resilience. Working in the camps, she observed how women's voices are unheard and needs specific to the gender, unmet in this man-made political crisis. She opened the Athena Centre for Women on Chios in July 2016 - the first all-women space outside of official camp structures in Greece, that provides crucial services requested by vulnerable women resident of the camps in order to address the gaps in protection and incidents of gender-based violence.

She is currently based in Athens, Greece and runs the Pomegranate Project (link: https://afw.ngo/projects) - Greece's first holistic model of protection and empowerment for women refugee, migrants and asylum seekers who are survivors of or at risk of gender-based violence, with services to support each individual's recovery, resilience for integration in their new society.

Gabrielle's decision to join the board of trustees on the Pandora Project is motivated by her experience working in Greece where she has witnessed the impact of trauma not only on the refugees and asylum seekers, but on anyone who has lent a helping hand. The importance of the Pandora Project's work aligns with Gabrielle's favourite quote by American writer, radical feminist and civil rights activist, Audre Lorde: *Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare."