Dr. Rozman Clark was born in Ljubljana, Yugoslavia (now Slovenia) and it was there at age 15 that she experienced the effects of war first-hand. She was so profoundly moved by her experience that she vowed to do everything she could to help those whose lives had been unjustly disrupted by conflict. Dr. Rozman Clark has certainly kept her promise. Since then, she has volunteered countless hours to serving refugees and immigrant populations not only in Slovenia but in countries all over the world.
Professionally, she has worked for a variety of nonprofit organizations and has managed over twenty-five projects in three post-conflict countries, including Kosovo, Bosnia, and Macedonia. She worked as an intern in the United Nations Development Program’s Best Practices Office and wrote her Ph.D. thesis on the failed UN peacekeeping intervention during the Bosnian genocide. In fact, it was her work gathering personal testimonies from survivors and Dutch peacekeepers for her thesis that alerted her to the power of personal stories, which has become her signature work in the Upper Midwest region.
Dr. Rozman Clark is co-founder and executive director of Green Card Voices (GCV), an organization dedicated to sharing the stories of immigrants with the goal of shrinking the divide between immigrant and nonimmigrant communities in the United States. While part of Green Card Voices, she has interviewed over 300 first-generation immigrants and refugees from over 100 different countries and six continents, and organized over fifty exhibits throughout Minnesota, Wisconsin and North Dakota.
Since 2015 and under the leadership of Dr. Rozman Clark, Green Card Voices has self published the following titles:
VOICES OF IMMIGRANT STORYTELLERS: Teaching Guide for Middle and High Schools (2015),
Green Card Youth Voices: Immigration Stories from a Minneapolis High School (2016, gold medal winner for Best Multicultural Nonfiction Chapter Book in the Moonbeam Children’s Book Awards, and 2016 Foreword INDIES Finalist),
Green Card Youth Voices: Immigration Stories from a Fargo High School (March 2017)
Their forthcoming book Green Card Youth Voices: Immigration Stories from a St. Paul High School will be published in June 2017.
In 2015, Dr. Rozman Clark was awarded the prestigious Bush Leadership Fellowship, which has enabled her to grow Green Card Voices and continue to make good on the promise she made over 20 years ago. The fellowship has given her the opportunity to study with the world's leading social entrepreneurs at Stanford University, to learn how to mobilize her majority immigrant board at Harvard University, and to deepen her knowledge on finance, scaling, social entrepreneurship, management and leadership at the UMN’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs. Dr. Rozman Clark has accomplished this while raising two elementary-age daughters and mentoring many fellow immigrants, which have been the most gratifying of all.
