Ides Debruyne is co-founder and Managing Director (since 2001) of Journalismfund.eu, the first independent non-profit organisation established in 1998 with the purpose of stimulating in-depth cross-border journalism in Europe.
Ides is also the co-founders of the Dutch-Flemish Association of Investigative Journalists (VVOJ). As a board member of VVOJ he co-organised the 3d Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Amsterdam (2005) and the first European Investigative Journalism Conference in Brussels (2008). Together with the team of Journalismfund.eu, he was the organiser of EIJC & Dataharvest from 2011 until 2018.
In 2018 he co-created the Flemish Journalism Fund to support diversity and innovation in journalism in Flanders. The Fund is a project of Journalismfund.eu, in partnership with the Flemish Association of Journalism and the Flemish government.
Since 2001, Debruyne has traveled and spoken publicly in 23 countries on four continents.
In 2004 he started the post-academic training International Research Journalism at Thomas More university college in Mechelen (Belgium).
With the support of the Flemish Government, he started the Wobbing project in 2007. The main goal was to make journalists, who use the various freedom of information acts, meet and to prepare future networking.
He also is the founder (2002) and chair of the Belgian non-profit organisation Scriptie vzw which promotes science communication and organises The Flemish dissertation award, The Flemish PhD Cup, Science Figured Out  and The Flemish dissertation database.
Debruyne was a board member of PEN Vlaanderen from 2013 until 2017.
Between 2014 and 2018, he was a member of the Assessment Committee (documentary series) of Flanders Audiovisual Fund.
In 2013 Ides Debruyne won - together with his former colleague Brigitte Alfter - the Prize for the Freedom and Future of the Media (Leipzig).
(Photo © Hadeer Mahmoud)