About the project

The U.S. Affiliates Community in Croatia is a project initiated due to a problem currently present in Croatia that is shared by the public, corporate and civil sector: the lack of human and organizational capacities for effectively managing the societal and structural changes that are taking place in Croatia. Croatia’s integration into Euro-Atlantic integrations requires reform and acceptance of new standards in state administration and in the corporate sector. The role of civil society organizations in Croatia is also being redefined in terms of NGOs gradually becoming the government’s strategic partners, policy–makers, or providers of state-supported public services.

At the same time, the intellectual potential of Croatian individuals who have participated in U.S. government/ECA funded programs or earned their degrees at U.S. universities has not been exploited sufficiently. These individuals belong to the 5% of the most educated citizens and often hold positions of power within various sectors. However, up until now, U.S. government/ECA and U.S. universities alumni in Croatia have only partially fulfilled the mission of the programs they participated in: although U.S. scholarships have facilitated their individual academic and professional development, the alumni have often not been directly involved in civic/public reform initiatives, nor have they served as a resource/institutional contact to colleagues involved in reforms.

Additionally, the alumni of U.S. government/ECA funded programs or U.S. universities are not sufficiently linked amongst themselves, which hinders them from being more active as a community and from securing the transfer of their knowledge and expertise to different sectors of Croatian society. As a consequence, there is an absence of synergic effects that these diverse initiatives and individuals might have already produced.

The U.S Embassy in Zagreb and the Institute for the Development of Education share a joint concern for the above-mentioned matters and thus they have embarked on this significant project together. The U.S. Affiliates Community in Croatia project was developed and implemented by the Institute for the Development of Education and was funded and supported by the U.S. Embassy in Zagreb.

The goal of the U.S. Affiliates Community in Croatia was to create an online U.S. affiliates community that would interconnect U.S. alumni in Croatia and facilitate the transfer of their knowledge and expertise to public, corporate and civil sector in Croatia. The main objectives of the project were: 

• Creating a database of U.S. alumni from Croatia 
• Creating a database of U.S. government supported institutions within the public, corporate and civil sectors in Croatia 
• Connecting U.S. alumni, U.S. government-supported institutions and the wider public by creating an online U.S. affiliates community 
• Reaching out to individuals in need of knowledge and expertise possessed by U.S. alumni.