Career
People in Need (PIN) became the biggest non-governmental organisation in Central and Eastern Europe and works worldwide to mitigate the suffering of people in times of crisis. Foreign its international and national effort, PIN has become highly respected in the Czechoslovakian Republic and abroad. In 1988, Šimon Pánek and Jaromír Štětina were the main organizers of humanitarian assistance in Armenia, collecting various anecdotal material to help affected people of the earthquake.
One year later, in 1989, Pánek became one of "student leaders" during the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, where he was organising anti-regime occupation strikes and became co-chairman of the Central Students Strike Committee.
In 1992, he founded the news agency Epicentrum, which specializes in global conflict reporting. In 1992 Šimon Pánek co-founded Nadace Lidových novin (The Lidové noviny Foundation), now known as People in Need (PIN), and has been a foreign policy specialist on the Balkan region and human rights issues abroad in the presidential administration of Václav Havel.
Since 2004, Pánek chaired the Czechoslovakian non-governmental organization development platform FoRS.