Interest in rebuilding war-torn communities leads Dr. Carmen Luca Sugawara to Croatia

Can parents’ involvement at their children’s school become a stepping stone in the reconstruction of the social fabric in communities left torn by war?

That question has led Indiana University School of Social Work Assistant Professor Carmen Luca Sugawara to the region surrounding Vukovar, Croatia, a community that endured a siege and bombardment during the Serb-Croat War in the early 1990s.

Dr. Carmen Luca

Vukovar is an important regional center sitting on the Danube River between Croatia and Serbia. While it is a city of beautiful homes and buildings, war damaged structures continue to serve as a reminder of the devastation that occurred there during the war.

The community remained under Serb occupation for nearly three years and more than a 1,000 Croats and non –Serbs civilians were massacred and thousands more were expelled from the town in 1991 during the Croatian war of Independence from Yugoslavia.

A street scene from Vukovar today

Dr. Luca Sugawara has received a $15,000 grant from the the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research of the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, through an International Development Fund mechanism (IDF) to investigate the role parental involvement plays in the community reconstruction efforts in Vukovar region.

Bullet holes mar school building in Vukovar

“The research team hopes to generate new ideas and develop new models of practice that will be solicited and implemented by local and international development agents,” she explained in a grant application to the IDF.

Dr. Luca Sugawara’s research project in Croatia represents a homecoming of sorts. A native, of Romania, she has more than 10 years experience in international social development. She was a former program officer with the Academy for Educational Development (AED). There, she was responsible for AED’s Eastern European civil society strengthening portfolio and served as a consultant for UNICEF in Romania, working on developing partnership programs between governments, schools, and child welfare agencies.

The path that has led Dr. Luca Sugawara on her most recent research project had its start before the fall of communism in Romania where she worked as an OBGYN nurse. There, she struggled under a system that was more interested in women having children than in their ability to care for them.

“The policy was you needed to bring as many into the world for the labor force,” Dr. Luca Sugawara said. “So women would have unwanted pregnancies, but most of them didn’t have enough food.” The result was many children were placed in orphanages, which were state-run institutions.

Interested in developing new services for women’s health after the fall of communism in Romania, she decided to explore “this revived profession called social work,” Dr. Luca Sugawara noted. She began her undergraduate work, and with a grant from UNICEF ended up creating a nonprofit agency to offer sex education and information about measures to prevent pregnancies.

Understating that the international social development agents were central to reshaping the structure of social services in post-communism Romania, Dr. Luca Sugawara became a consultant to UNICEF where she worked with the national Family Education program officer and provided technical assistance to nonprofit agencies and universities joining the effort of re-building their social work programs.

To continue her education, she came to America on a Fulbright Scholarship where she first started as a Fulbright Exchange Scholar at Case Western Reserve University, continued her MSW at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, and received her PhD from Catholic University of America. During her graduate work, she discovered her interest lay with understanding global problems and began working with the AED’s Center for Civil Society and Governance (CCSG).

While working with AED’s CCSG programs, Dr. Luca Sugawara focused on efforts to assist local nongovernmental agencies enhance citizen’s participation in democratic processes and strengthen the civil society sector. It was then that she noticed that little attention was being given to the role of schools in rebuilding communities affected by war.

“I was intrigued that schools were not as much a key focus in bringing about change in areas affected by war,” Dr. Luca Sugawara said. If research shows schools are central to change in communities affected by war, policy makers could consider directing more funding to such efforts, Dr. Luca Sugawara noted.

After joining the School of Social Work, Dr. Luca Sugawara decided to pursue the question concerning the role of parental involvement in rebuilding the social fabric of communities affected by war.

She chose the Vukovar region because of her experience in working in Croatia and the setup of the community’s elementary schools. In Vukovar, three of the town’s six elementary schools remain segregated, separating Croatian from Serbian students, while three are desegregated.

Dr. Luca Sugawara is working with researchers from PRONI Centre for Social Education, a nongovernmental agency that has worked in Vukovar for the last decade, and a researcher from the University of Zagreb to gather evidence about the role parents have at schools.

Researchers are now working with parents of children at schools surrounding Vukovar to determine what activities they come to school for, how often they meet with other parents outside of school and whether they have developed relationships because of their involvement at school. Parents will also be asked if a problem comes up would they help the other person regardless of their ethnic identity.

When the survey phase of the research is completed, the next step will be to establish focus groups of parents to gain a deeper understanding of issues of community and parental involvement and set-up interviews with school principals, teachers, parents and national and international stakeholders.

Dr. Luca Sugawara also plans on undertaking the same type of research in another Croatian community that had a different type of experience during the war. There, a number of people left because of their ethnicity. They have since returned but the community remains divided along ethnic lines. She would like to expand the same type of research into other Eastern European communities that have been subjected to conflicts, like Bosnia and Herzegovina and Georgia.

From a young nurse who wanted to do something more to help women the provide medical care, Dr. Luca Sugawara has expanded her vision to helping communities overcome a devastating time and be able to look to the future with hope.