Cristina Goñi

Cristina Goñi is the Learning and Impact Director at the ECF. In her role, she conceptualizes and leads on the implementation of ECF’s new learning and impact management model, while also supporting ECF programmes’ strategies and learning and impact practices of field-level partners directly.

Cristina brings 22 years of experience as a manager with an ability to lead teams and strategic planning processes that seek to bring strategic thinking, evidence, and adaptive learning to life.

She has a proven record of creating, testing, and iterating processes that explore the interface between impact, grant-making and policy change. Her professional portfolio includes working in civil society organisations, public administrations and philanthropy on topics ranging from security, democracy, and digital policy.

Before joining the ECF in 2023, Cristina headed learning, evaluation and strategy efforts across Europe and Central Asia. In 2016, she joined Open Society Foundations (OSF) as Regional Manager for Advocacy & Public Policy. She was responsible for the inception of the advocacy model that sought to elevate the impact of OSF’s public policy agenda in EU capitals. Prior to joining Open Society, she served as the secretary general of the International Juvenile Justice Observatory in Brussels where she lived for eight years. Before that, she held managerial roles at migration, international development and criminal justice services and organisations in Portugal and Spain.

Cristina is fiercely dedicated to equity and inclusion and applying these lenses to her interactions with external partners and culture and change management processes.