Maria Belén  has been passionate about Children’s Rights and Child Participation from a very young age. Born in Bolivia, she studied at the French School in La Paz and moved to Paris in 2004 to study International Law and International Cooperation. Her voluntary work in different NGO’s led her to specialize in the Education and Children’s Rights sector. She worked for ‘Initiatives of Change France’ as the field coordinator of the ‘Education for Peace Programme’ in Paris for 5 years and then joined the CATS (Children as Actors for Transforming Society) core team on behalf of Initiative of Change. In 2016 she moved back to Bolivia where she opened the Latin America office dealing with children’s rights and intergenerational collaboration and has been developing, as the office Director, child participation projects and doing field research. She has now joined the Act2gether team as Director for development and Latin America. Maria is married and has a 5 year old daughter, she enjoys reading, travelling and meeting different people from all around the world.