A young activist from Croatia sees great potential in collaboration locally and regionally trough the project of ethical banks.

Iva Kvakic is a wide known activist and politician from Zagreb, who recently resigned from her position of MP in Zagreb assembly in order to pursue her dream – to create an ethical bank in Croatia.

“It isn’t particularly clear to many people, how the bank can be ethical, however the core idea of creating a bank in the past was to finance people’s projects, (to solve) the problem of housing etc, with time, the banks turned into entrepreneurships with the goal to maximize the income of its owner, while the clients were set aside” she explains.

The idea of ethical bank is slightly different. Kvakic sees it as a financial institution, where the clients are also the owners of the ethical bank. Solidarity, transparency and understanding of values need to be shared and accepted among the clients prior to joining the organization. Kvakic hopes that this attitude will help in financing projects enabling local eco food and renewable energy production and other socially positive, sustainable ideas.

“Local food production, renewable energy, social entrepreneurship will be seen as prioritized projects, and it will be clear for all who want to join us that these are the projects we want to work on,” Kvakic highlighted.

Kvakic as a young politician and activists sees the future of Croatia in responsible and sustainable development.

“Croatia is full of potential when it comes to the production of energy from renewable resources, this issue has been raised by many studies. It’s ridiculous we aren’t yet covered with solar batteries taking into account how many sunny days in a year do we have here,” she points out.

Except the sustainable developement, Kvakic is also interested in the newest market developing trends.

“In economy people often say that concurrence is important, but I think that cooperation is a crucial thing (for developement),” she points out.

In her opinion there are a lot of examples which prove this mindset to be accurate. She believes that creating a responsible bussiness enviroment trough Collectives (Zadruge) has great potential.

“The whole point of Zadruga (Collective ZEF) is to bring different actors interested in development with a joint economic interest together to collaborate, but also not to forget to care about the community,” she concluded.

The idea of ethical banks and Collectives are recognized as examples of good practice by the EU, and are successfully implemented in Portugal, Finland, Slovenia and now Croatia.

“Now imagine if it happened in all the regions, and if they started to collaborate, and connect enterprises with physical persons who want to follow this new principle of economic behavior, I think it has enormous potential, the point is to network (the people) ,” she says.

Kvakic is convinced that traditional way of thinking is an outdated thing.

“While we deal with the issues like the names for the Marsal Tito square, people deal with bitcoin and crazy programmers, in next twenty years the world is going change dramatically, and so should we,” Kvakic conluded. 

Video Interview with iva Kvakic