All this year’s finalists of the Little Lighthouse competition are extraordinary people with inspiring life stories, but the victory was claimed by Pula resident Helena Babić, a person who lives and works on her mission to help those whom few have the courage to assist.
The Little Lighthouse competition has been operating since 2018 and rewards the best workers in Croatia. The founders, who are also successful Croatian entrepreneurs Kristijan Cinotti and Ivan Topčić, joined forces with partner companies and continued the work inspired by the late Dr. Dražen Glavaš, which is to discover and reward the beacons around us whose personality and effort inspire and give hope for a better Croatia.
So far, a total of 135,000 euros has been awarded and 85 extraordinary stories have been told, with the main prize of 15,000 euros awarded to the winner and 1,000 euros each to the other 9 finalists.
As part of the Global Leadership Summit in Zagreb, the award ceremony was held on November 7, rounding off this year-long project and mission to raise awareness about those humble yet inspiring people – the beacons.
After Mirjana Zgrablić Matika, a nurse from Pazin who won the Little Lighthouse Award in 2023, the award has once again gone to Istria! The title of the best was awarded to Helena Babić from Pula, a well-known philanthropist and president of the AjA association. Helena is also a nurse by profession and was born in Slavonski Brod, and she began her journey of helping through volunteering with the Red Cross. Later, she worked as the manager of a homeless shelter and gradually developed her path, a path of helping and community development in which she lives and works.
Today, Helena operates in Pula through the AjA association and is focused on providing support to homeless individuals in a warmer and different way. It can be confidently said that Helena and her team have laid the foundations and encouraged real changes and improvements in the area of the social problem of homelessness, and through numerous actions such as the “Housing First” model, the first such project in the region, ensured that 13 homeless individuals in Pula received their homes and a new beginning.
Colleagues and friends claim that Helena is not just a leader, but she is the ‘driving force of their team and a person who daily demonstrates what it means to lead with integrity and empathy.’
Helena sincerely and emotionally emphasized: – What the Little Lighthouse has done not only for me but for my entire team and the AjA Association is that it has encouraged the whole community to be positive, not just in the city of Pula but throughout Istria. Everyone was full of support when it was announced that I made it to the finals of the competition.
This whole story in which my Association and I find ourselves in recent months has greatly surprised us, and I have the impression that due to a lot of negativity and bad stories from Croatia and the world, it has encouraged the entire community to believe in positive stories because they certainly exist. I think that next year there will be even more applications because this is a great recognition and a boost for those who are trying to do good. –
It is important to note that the AjA Association, which has been operating for just one year and 10 months, has managed through its projects to shift “an entire world” of work around people who are on the street and road in inadequate conditions and more and more people who are at risk of experiencing the worst.
– We are the first Association that has access to this problem in a different and more humane way because we deal with housing solutions so that every person in need has a roof over their head. We believe that we have initiated a small cog towards more associations having the courage to move in that direction over time – said the winner of the Little Lighthouse for 2025, Helena Babić after the award ceremony.
