As director of the American Chamber of Commerce in Kazakhstan, Jeff works to improve the business climate for more than 200 member companies.
From 2019 to 2024, Jeff was a senior social performance advisor for Chevron, helping define and execute strategy for win-win engagements with stakeholders and communities in the United States and abroad.
From 2014 to 2019, he was deputy head ofthe Organization for Security and Cooperation’s long-term mission in Ukraine, supporting a wide range of efforts across the OSCE’s political-military, economic and environmental and human dimensions.
He first came to Kazakhstan in 1998 as a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer in Baikonur. After, he joined the Eurasia Foundation and became president of the Eurasia Foundation of Central Asia when it spun off. Jeff has also served on the boards of KIMEP, Spoon Foundation and the Kazakhstan Community Loan Fund. Before that, he worked as a journalist in Washington.
Jeff holds master’s degrees from the Fletcher School and the University of Massachusetts and a bachelor’s degree from The American University. He speaks Russian and some Kazakh, Spanish, Ukrainian and Thai.
He and his wife Halida are happy to see that their older son, Joseph Dolkun, recently graduated university, and their second son, William Kasim, is a freshman at American University. Jeff enjoys cycling, scuba diving, skiing and, when the weather’s bad, reading and discussing history and cultures.