business backgrounder | employment & workplace
“I am very pleased to
see the program
expanding here in Poland.”
Piotr Grodzki, president of Speednet, an IT company in Gdynia, Poland, talks to students in Gdansk about the value
of free enterprise. Grodzki has been a key Business Week volunteer since the program started in Poland in 2009.
and graduated 97 Polish students. Along with Gdynia’s
mayor, then-U.S. Ambassador to Poland, Victor Ashe,
and European Parliament President Jerzy Buzek were
featured speakers.
Poland Business Week was an instant hit. Sister Cities
International awarded Seattle-Gdynia Sister City Association with its 2010 Innovations: Youth & Education award
for Poland (Gdynia) Business Week. The City of Seattle
followed suit and awarded the Seattle-Gdynia Sister City
Association its honors for the best single project in 2010
to Poland Business Week.
This year, Poland Business Week expanded to Gdansk
and Tczew and it could expand further to other Polish
cities in the years ahead.
strong support in poland
Seattle’s Allen and Janice Jaworski are responsible for
the Poland program. Allen is Polish and the president
of the Seattle-Gdynia Sister City organization. Janice
works for the Foundation for Private Enterprise in Federal Way, which runs Business Week; she coordinates
the Poland program.
In Poland, the program has the strong endorsement of
the U.S. Embassy and American companies like The Boeing Company and Microsoft.
This summer, Ambassador Lee Feinstein told the Gdansk graduating class, “I am very pleased to see the program
—U.S. Ambassador to Poland,
Lee Feinstein
expanding here in Poland. Special thanks to the organizers from Washington Business Week and the Association
of Washington Business for their efforts in exporting the
program from the U.S. to Poland.”
Many notable Polish leaders, including Henryka Bochniarz, president for Central and Eastern Europe Region of
The Boeing Company, Piotr Grodzki, president of Speed
Net and Michael Jaworski of Microsoft Poland, have all
been a part of Poland Business Week since its inception.
Educators, such as Darby Vigus, a marketing teacher
from Monroe High School, and Fred McDonald, an
accounting instructor from Central Washington University, have traveled to Poland since 2009 to work with
Polish teachers. Polish educators are assigned to each
student group shadowing American advisers to learn
about free enterprise.
Finally, much of the reason for Poland Business Week’s
growth and success is the strong bonds between Poland
and the United States.
According to a recent
Pew Research Center
Seattle-Gdynia Sister City Association:
poll, seven out of 10
www.seattlegdynia.org
Poles love Americans.
With odds like that,
Washington Business Week:
Business Week is a
www.wbw.org
sure winner for years
to come.
fall 2011 43