Kristen McGeeney is the Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa. She currently leads ICNL’s work in Morocco, Iraq, Algeria, and Palestine, where she works with civil society organizations and governments to improve the legal environment for civil society organizations and laws and policies that facilitate CSOs’ participation in the legislative and policy-making processes.
Her work and interests at ICNL have covered a variety of topics, including, inter alia, the drafting, and implementation of laws regulating CSOs and foundations, public consultations, CSO-government cooperation, and public participation. Her research includes topics on the standards for public consultations, the creation of effective consultative councils, and the laws requiring governments to accept petitions and motions. Increasingly, her work has also focused on laws and regulations impacting funding for CSOs, including laws regulating crowdfunding, public fundraising, taxation of CSOs, economic activities, and social enterprises, and her research has contributed to the creation of global principles for the regulation of public fundraising. She has also been a president and board member of the Washington Foreign Law Society, an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, and an Adjunct Professor at the Washburn University School of Law.
Prior to joining ICNL, Kristen worked at the U.S. Department of State in the Multilateral and Global Affairs Office of the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. Kristen is a graduate of the Washington College of Law at American University in Washington, DC, where she specialized in international law, earning a Juris Doctorate with honors. Kristen earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Iowa with additional undergraduate studies at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland. She is a member of the Virginia and Washington DC bars.