Bucharest Leaders’ Summit:
The Highway to Success
Speakers 23 November

Ioana Crihana is working, for more than 20 years, in various leadership positions in highly competitive business entities: a government institution, a national newspaper, a well-known Romanian Branding & Advertising Agency, a multinational ICT corporation and in the most representative National Library Association in Romania - ANBPR.

Getting involved in several development projects, Ioana Crihana has expertise in creating, restructuring and revitalizing different products, services and organizational structures, and, also, in the implementation of some business plans and strategies for sustainability, both in private and institutional environment.

In her position of CEO within ANBPR, the most representative professional association of public libraries in Romania, with a network of 41 county branches, bringing together over 3300 individual and institutional members, recognized by the Romanian Government as a public utility association, Ioana Crihana has substantially contributed to increase the Operational Department's performance as an operational management structure and to strengthen the ANBPR’s organizational capacity in projects field.

Her main objective as a CEO was to achieve the organizational and financial autonomy of the Association through a strategic repositioning in the relationship with its partners, its own members, governmental decision-makers and the community at large. To achieve this, Ioana Crihana was in charge with bringing together all the players involved in the organizational development process: ANBPR’s leadership, members of the organization, project partners, external collaborators, mass media, and representatives of the authorities, similar associations, financiers and other stakeholders.

As a binder of the emancipation ideas in terms of librarianship, Ioana Crihana was involved in large programs and initiatives that aim reforming the cultural field. In her quality of CEO of ANBPR, she has been involved in a series of partnership brokering activities in order to implement the most important national program of IT competences for public libraries - BIBLIONET – The world in my library, with a budget of 26.9 million US dollars.

The most impactful program in the ANBPR’s portfolio, Biblionet represents the largest private investment in introducing technology in public libraries in Romania, part of the Global Libraries Initiative of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, program that positively changed the life of Romanian communities, especially of the persons belonging to the vulnerable groups or with limited access to training opportunities and exposed to the risk of social exclusion.