Ostrava Expat Centre

The purpose of the new centre is to ensure that foreigners coming to work in Ostrava have a “soft landing” here. Another key activity of the Expat Centre is to build up a constantly expanding community that offers services to foreign residents – with partners including companies, official institutions, organizations already offering expat services, expat clubs, universities and other educational institutions, health care providers, accommodation providers and more. Relevant information is published on the centre’s website and social networks. Online communication channels include:

a blog about life in Ostrava
key information and instructions for new arrivals
an overview of events
expat networking
opinion surveys and a newsletter.

In the pilot phase, the Expat Centre operated as a point of contact providing all its services in English. The main target group consists of qualified foreign citizens who want to work, study or do business in Ostrava and the Moravian-Silesian Region – and of course their families too. The Expat Centre should help the City of Ostrava achieve one of the main goals in its Strategic Development Plan – stopping the “drain” of people away from the city by 2030 and raising the number of foreign residents in Ostrava. The idea was inspired by the Expat Centre in Brno, which was established in 2010. Last year Prague also opened its own Expat Centre.

Initially, Ostrava’s Expat Centre operates in a pilot phase which lasted a year. In the next phase, the Expat Centre will seek to actively attract foreign residents to Ostrava and the Region. The Expat Centre runs by the Moravian-Silesian Innovation Centre (MSIC).