Build - Connect - Collaborate
Peace holds where people have something to build together.
Balkans United is a member organization creating economic opportunity and professional connection across the Balkans, for the generation born after the wars.
Why this exists
Western Europe did not reconcile by apologising. It reconciled by trading.
In 1951, six countries that had spent forty years destroying each other pooled their coal and steel. The point was not friendship. The point was to make the next war expensive and the next decade profitable. Friendship arrived later, and it arrived because a generation had grown up with something to lose.
The Balkans never got that part. We have tribunals, anniversaries, memorials and apologies, and almost no shared infrastructure for the people under thirty who did not choose any of it. A designer in Sarajevo and a founder in Belgrade are two hours apart and will never meet. Both are already talking to someone in Berlin.
Balkans United exists to close that distance. We are not a reconciliation project. We are an opportunity project. Reconciliation is what happens once the work is shared.
We are independent and non-partisan. We do not endorse parties, governments or candidates, and we do not adjudicate history. Everyone here keeps their own memory. The work is what we hold in common.
What we do
Four things, run properly.
Opportunity board
Jobs, internships, freelance briefs and paid projects, posted by members and partner companies. Open to anyone in the region or the diaspora, at no cost to either side.
Introductions
Members tell us what they do and what they need. We connect them to someone across a border who can help. Students to graduates, designers to founders, builders to buyers.
Chapters
University and city chapters run their own events under the organization and keep their own character. A student organization at the University of Michigan already uses the network as its hub.
Build nights
Design competitions and short collaborative projects where teams are formed across countries on purpose. Work is published under the names of the members who made it.
The network
One map with no borders drawn on it.
Every line here connects two cities in different countries. That is the whole idea, rendered exactly as it works in practice.
And the diaspora
- Chicago
- St. Louis
- Toronto
- Vienna
- Munich
- Stockholm
- Zurich
- Melbourne
Chapters
Start one where you are.
Tell us who and where
Two people and a city is enough to begin. University, capital or a town of four thousand, it makes no difference to us.
Take the kit
You get the name, the brand assets, your own space in the network, and a working template for a first event that people actually attend.
Run it your way
Your chapter keeps its own character and its own decisions. We handle the introductions, the opportunities and the rest of the network.
No dues. No franchise fee. No approval from anyone's government.
Get involved
Three ways in.
Join the network
Free, open, and already ten thousand people deep. Bring what you do and what you are looking for.
Join now → For organisersStart a chapter
Bring the network to your university or your city. Tell us who you are and where you are, and we will send the kit.
Apply → For companiesPost opportunities
Hiring across the region, or looking for talent that does not show up on the usual boards. Posting costs nothing.
Get in touch →Build - Connect - Collaborate
The generation that inherited this gets to decide what happens to it.
Ten thousand of us have already decided.
Join the network →