For the past 5 years, I have been involved with BAIA, Business Association Italy America. I am currently a member of the board and have been its Executive Director in 2009 and 2010. BAIA is a nonprofit association of professionals, entrepreneurs, students and business people who operate between Italy and the USA.
I am often asked “how is BAIA doing?”. The nonprofit just celebrated its 5th anniversary, so I took a step back and took a moment to look at what we have done lately. By all accounts, BAIA is going strong:
- BAIA has produced more than 75 content-rich events, both in Italy and the USA, featuring speakers of exceptional caliber such as Bill Draper, Federico Faggin, Alberto Sangiovanni Vincentelli, Vivek Wadhwa, Joanna Rees and many others.
- In 2010 alone BAIA produced 19 events (!) and so far in 2011 we are already at 10.
- The BAIA member community has reached 1300+ members.
- Subscribers to BAIA’s newsletter are just shy of 5000.
- In July 2011 BAIA launched BAIAbase, the first ever open and editable database of companies operating between Italy and the USA.
This massive amount of work has been accomplished through the efforts of a dedicated team of pro-bono volunteers (BAIA has no paid staff and every member of BAIA’s Governance and Board is required to volunteer time to run BAIA programs). Most of all, it has been the result of terrific team effort. It is so rare to find such level of team performance in a professional environment. The fact that those who contributed to it do so for free makes the results all the more remarkable.
