Venera Hajrullahu led KCSF for 13 years in a row, during the period of the greatest development of the organization, from February 2006 to September 2018.
A graduate of the French language at the University of Pristina, Venera completed postgraduate studies at the European Institute of the University of Geneva in Switzerland in the early 90s. After a short period of professional engagement in Switzerland, she returned to Kosovo and in 1998-1999 was engaged in the OSCE Monitoring Mission in Kosovo. Just months after the end of the war in Kosovo in June 1999, she was among the key people who helped found the public broadcaster, Radio Television of Kosovo (RTK). After two years of involvement in the Kosovo Foundation for Open Society (KFOS) in support programs for public administration and local self-government, in 2004 she was first appointed as the deputy director of the Unit for Monitoring the Stabilization and Association Process, and immediately afterwards she founded and was the first head of the Office for of European integration in the Office of the Prime
Minister of Kosovo, within which she was responsible for the creation of various structures and programs related to the European integration process of Kosovo. Also, she was the chairperson of the Group of Experts for Public Administration Reform in 2006-2007, while she was also an external advisor for European integration to several prime ministers, as well as President Jahjaga.
In February 2007, she accepted the position of Executive Director of KCSF, at a time when the organization was in a period of deep crisis. Continuing to work in the basic mission of civil society development, Venera added to the work of KCSF a special perspective of European integration, as a reflection of the opening of the European perspective of the entire region, including Kosovo. With her exceptional dedication and the team, she created, Venera managed not only to get KCSF out of the crisis, but very quickly exceeded the level of development of the organization up to that time. In parallel with the deepening of the School for European Integration and numerous other EU-related projects, under Venera’s leadership, KCSF re-established its civil society grant programs in 2009, while simultaneously creating and developing special research units, that is, the Center of KCSF for capacity building of civil society. During the period of her leadership, KCSF became one of the main civil society organizations in Kosovo and in the region, managing the civil society funds of the main bilateral donors, successfully representing numerous topics on the space for civil society action in Kosovo and towards the EU institutions in Brussels, as well as building capacity of hundreds of organizations and civil society activists. Before her departure from KCSF in September 2018, Venera led the organization in its first serious steps towards organizational sustainability.
Since 2018, as an independent expert, she has been involved in numerous projects, initiatives and publications in Kosovo, in the region and beyond, in the areas of civil society development, building democratic institutions, European integration, public administration reform and cooperation.
