About me

My name is Meda Andreea Căpîlna and I live in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. In public I go by the shorter name, Meda Căpîlna; written without Romanian diacritics it appears as Meda Capilna or Meda Andreea Capilna — same person, same work. I work as a speaker and as an event planner for children, and in my head these are not two separate jobs: both are about building a setting in which someone understands something they did not understand before.

This is not new for me. I grew up in Târgu Mureș and by 15 I was organising flashmobs and poetry evenings there. In 2018, with colleagues from Școala de Valori Mureș, I co-founded an association called facem — for educational events and for the town’s community of young people. From the same years comes “Verde-n față”: outdoor concerts, with workshops on self-knowledge, empathy and working as a team. It reached a second edition. In 2019 I was featured in DoR magazine’s “19 under 19” series.

I say all this not as a credential but because it is exactly what I still do: events held outdoors, built around what happens between people rather than around what is on the stage. What changed is the age of the audience, and that research now sits behind it. The rest has been the same for eight years.

I studied Communication and Public Relations at FSPAC in Cluj. That is where the least visible part of my work comes from: how you build a message for a particular audience and carry it through, whether that audience is six years old or forty and sitting in a conference hall.

I arrived here through culture. Photography, music and cultural events were my first territory — not a weekend hobby, but a way of reading the world. For a while I was an editor at OutInMureș, the town's events guide. I spent a lot of time around events: how a programme is built, how a room keeps its attention, what separates an event people attend from one they talk about afterwards. When I started working with children, I found the questions were the same, only the stakes are higher: children do not pretend to enjoy something.

That road did not close. Since May 2024 I have been, as a volunteer, marketing manager on the projects of the Future Hubs Association in Cluj: futurehubs.eu, which connects European cities, artists and cultural organisations, and bestcluj.com, which brings Cluj-Napoca's creative professionals forward. It is the same work I do at events, only the audience is thirty rather than seven — how you make visible something that deserves to be seen.

Since October 2026 I have also been working on ZestreaMea, a new project of the association, where I look after marketing and community and the activities for children. ZestreaMea is a free, non-profit platform started in Cluj-Napoca that brings financial education home: a child's money is split into three jars (spend, save, give), saved towards goals in stages and planned up to age 18, including the Junior Centenar account at the Romanian State Treasury. Grandparents and godparents can add to a goal from a link, and for children aged 6–8 we made “Anul Anei”, a free voiced game with no ads. The app never holds money. The team: Robert Eduard Antal (founder) and Loredana Vale (communication and partnerships). The project is now in pilot with families from the waiting list, and is looking for schools and kindergartens in Cluj for activities with children.

The thing that moved everything most was volunteering at a marine conservation centre in Thailand, working with sea turtles. I went thinking I would help some animals and came back with a lesson about patience and about scale of time. Conservation has no spectacular moments. It has feeding, cleaning tanks, measuring, writing things down, day after day, for a result you may never see yourself. That is where I understood what it means to be part of something longer than you are — and how well that translates for children, if you hand it to them to do rather than teach it to them.

When DoR asked me in 2019 what impact meant to me, I described something I would still sign today: take your time, enjoy being alone, reflect, be with yourself — without necessarily chasing productivity. I was eighteen and had read no studies. Everything I now write about unstructured time starts there; the research came afterwards, and it agreed with me.