Our Executive Team

Rudy Scholaert, M.A.

As the founder and President of Eagle Down, I have committed myself to help strengthen young leaders who are capable of holding their own against the forces of destruction, chaos, intolerance, and indifference.  Our goal is to support young leaders from troubled regions around the world to become constructive influences in their communities.

As a Program Director for international emergency relief operations in Mitrovica, Kosovo, the turning point for me came one cold autumn day in 1999 a few months after the end of the NATO-led bombing of that region.  I was asked to help negotiate the release of two bodies from the hospital in the predominantly Serbian North of the city and transport them across the Ibar River to the predominantly Albanian South side.  The severely maimed and disfigured bodies of a murdered mother and her seven-year-old daughter, Edona, were eventually released.  After having carried the stiff, mutilated bodies and loaded them into my jeep, I was able to transport them, with UN police and NATO military escort, across the bridge that separates the two communities in time for their family to provide them with the dignity of a proper Muslim burial.

That cold autumn day left a lasting impression on me…  one that I will never be able to forget.

The Eagle Down Foundation is dedicated to Edona, Sami, Sadet and the thousands of other children who have been murdered or who have gone missing in conflict zones around the world.  May their memories never fade… 

(click here for short bio)

Fatmire Feka

Fatmire is Eagle Down’s visionary and my source of inspiration.  As Director of Operations, Fatmire guides the selection of projects which we support every year.  She also leads our advocacy efforts. 

As a member of the “1000 Women of Peace Across the Globe” and as a “Nobel Peace Prize Nominee”, Fatmire dedicated her life to a more peaceful and tolerant world at the tender age of 12 when, after having lost her brother, Sami, and her sister, Sadet, in the war in Kosovo, she launched the Kids for Peace program so that, in her own words, “no other children would ever have to live what my siblings and I had to live through”…

(click here for short bio)