About us

The Right Choice

Impact House provides tailor made, individual services in order to make room for testing, retesting and strictly needs-based development of innovation and positive social impact. From mentoring, services and short needs-based ad hoc support, to three year star project development and support, we have proven to be a space where great new ideas can be translated into real change – making our business but also out communities and societies better. Our job is to make the world better, and we need you to do it! Check out our impact commitment bellow and read about our impact business culture and how we measure the impact we generate in the society.

We are a social enterprise, we generate income exclusively on the market.

We are social scientists that respect and use scientific methods such as data based research, analysis, quantitative and qualitative research and social impact measurement.

We are strategists and trend- setters using innovation and further developing current trends such as design thinking and user centric mapping.

We generate 2.06 SROI for every EUR you pay us, so when you contract us you are also making the world a better place not just through your work with us but also through the impact we create working pro bono or investing in impact projects.

We tackle the tough issues! not because we perceive them as challenges but because they are tough for a reason.Thats why we are a small company for big ideas we practice what we preach!

From the right to make mistakes, to planning for unplanned work, sustainable workplace and putting in place measures so we ensure we don’t overcommit we have a unique impact business culture.

We are the toughest on ourselves and we continuously reexamine our impact.

We make sure to keep important things in focus – this is why each year we chose our Impact in Focus both internally and externally to guide and focus our work.

We invest financially as we as other resources in our in-house impact project.

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Tamara Puhovski

Founder

Tamara is the founder of both ProPuh and Impact House, led by a passion for social impact hacking and 20 year experience in innovating, managing and measuring positive social impact across all sectors. Tamara has worked with and in international institutions (UNDP), European institutions (EU Parliament) as well as the national government as an adviser to the Deputy Foreign Minister heading the Open Government Partnership and leading in open, innovative and impact policy revolution. Tamara has worked with large corporates in developing core business through the perspective of social impact as well as numerous startups as a mentor in the field of innovation and impact. She has worked as a researcher and professor at the university and has worked and continues to volunteer in several NGOs as project manager, trainer and community manager working with youth, Roma, migrants, women and other communities.Tamara was selected by the European Comission as 30 best social innovators in Europe.

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SUPERPOWER:

Inovation

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PROFESSION:

Sociology
Political Science

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EDUCATION:

Social impact hacker

INNOVATION & IDEATION 50% 50%
RESEARCH & ANALYSIS 80% 80%
TEACHING & MENTORING 80% 80%
IMPACT MANAGEMENT 80% 80%
COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT 80% 80%

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Paula Damaška

Junior

Paula Damaska studied sociology of research at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, and continued her education in the field of enterprenurship, innovative entrepreneurship and worked as an administrative assistant on research projects. Her master thesis focused on youth participation, voting and technology. Paula works in Impact House as a project cooridnator on projects such as Open Lab Policy Lab working on organizing and implementing a policy lab as well as specialising in measuring social impact, especially focusing on the SROI (Social return on investment) method.

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SUPERPOWER:

Analitics

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PROFESSION:

Sociology

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EDUCATION:

Project coordinator and impact measurement

ANALYSIS 100% 100%
ORGANISATION 95% 95%
COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT 85% 85%
IMPACT MEASUREMENT 98% 98%
PROJECT COORDINATION 80% 80%

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Nataša Kalauz

Partner

Nataša is a former Director of Trade & Investment for UK in Croatia where she led a team of trade policy experts and advisors focussed on increasing bilateral trade and promoting commercial diplomacy. Before that Nataša led the programme team of UN Development Programme mission in Croatia where she was responsible for 4 streams of activity that included local economic development, energy efficiency and environmnet, private sector development, and human development index. She is a long time collaborator of CEPOR – policy think-tank for the development of entrepreneurship and National Competitiveness Council where she worked as a special projects advisors. Nataša has close to 20 years of professional experience in international organisations and has led teams, delivered against complex policy tasks and introduced novel concepts and ideas into the work of her teams. She is a specialist for competitiveness, strategic thinking and business development. She is the initiator of Women in Tech chapter for Croatia and the founding director of British and Commonwealth Chamber of Commerce.

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SUPERPOWER:

Strategic planning and corporate governance

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PROFESSION:

International relations scientis

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EDUCATION:

International business specialist

MANAGEMENT: 100% 100%
ORGANISATION: 95% 95%
PUBLIC & GOVERNMENT AFFAIRS: 80% 80%
CORPORATE GOVERNENANCE 75% 75%
BUSINESS STRATEGY 80% 80%

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Michael Freer

Partner

Michael Freer is serial social entrepreneur with a strong love of travelling and the outdoors. He currently spends his time between Croatia and the UK, running workshops for youth, consulting social startups and developing a few of his own social enterprise ideas.
In 2010 he started working for a local charity – Druglink, where his passion for social entrepreneurship began. Firstly, implementing a mental health and substance misuse training arm, before developing, raising funds, opening and running ‘Links Drinks’, a cafe that employed people with substance misuse or mental health issues. His love of travel then pulled him away from the UK, and halfway across the world to Cambodia, where he worked at a local NGO. His time was split between teaching students and teachers, and developing their tailoring school to start generating revenue to part-fund the NGO. He was also recruited on a part time basis to develop and implement the SA8000 (social accountability) quality standards for Pactics, owners of a garment factory in Siem Reap.
He decided to head back to Europe in 2015, choosing Croatia as his main base. Since then he has worked to promote social entrepreneurship in Croatia, as well as supporting NGOs and individuals to develop and grow their social startups, looking at themes such as permaculture, art, education, food and fashion. He has also consulted companies on how to become more socially and environmentally minded, and always challenges them to become a fully fledged social enterprise!

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SUPERPOWER:

Turning ideas into actions

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PROFESSION:

International Business

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EDUCATION:

Early stage social enterprise or CSR consultant

BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT 90% 90%
BUSINESS STRATEGY 90% 90%
STARTUP FINANCE 70% 70%
IMPACT DEVELOPMENT 70% 70%
IDEA DEVELOPMENT 100% 100%

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Stjepan Mikec

Partner

Stjepan has over 15 year of experience in management, and development, of social economy organisations. He is specialised in green economy, community development and new technologies. His employment history includes a full mandate as the Executive Director of ACT Group, a consortium of social enterprises, as well as leading support organisation for entrepreneurs with positive social impact. Before becoming the CEO, in said consortium (which employs over 70 people and are a leading example in the region) his roles were development and capacity building. As the CEO he founded an incubator and accelerator, brining networking, mentoring and access to finance to social enterprises and impact startups in Croatia. He mentors in areas of: strategic management, people management, project management, services development, social impact management, operations and processes.

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