Maria Netsova joined the Foundation's team in February 2024 as coordinator of the employment and job placement platform. She is an engineer by education, she graduated with a Master's degree from the Technical University of Sofia, but the beginning of the refugee wave in 2013 changed her development in another direction.

She has more than 10 years of experience in working with asylum seekers and beneficiaries of international protection, first as a volunteer for the Refugees Project of Caritas Sofia and CVS Bulgaria, and later as a social expert and Director of the Directorate for Social Activities and Adaptation at the State Agency for Refugees. Over the years she has participated in numerous trainings, seminars, conferences and other events on access to rights and services and social adaptation of refugees. In the period 2016 - 2023, she was the national contact point of the Republic of Bulgaria in the Expert Network on Vulnerability Issues of the European Asylum Support Office, replaced in 2022 by the European Union Asylum Agency (EUAA), and a substitute for the national contact point in the Expert Network on Reception Issues.

In 2020, Maria became a Master in Social Work and graduated with the first class of the MSc in Social Work with Refugees and Migrants of the Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski. 
 

In 2022 she is a lecturer at the Sofia University of St. Kliment Ohridski" and leads practice in the discipline "Social work with refugees in state structures" and participates as a guest lecturer at the Faculty of Law in the free elective discipline - Refugee Law.