Dear CCI Friends and Colleagues,

We hope that all of you are doing well and thank you for responding to our request for input. We have read, and considered, all of your responses. Your thoughts, insights and suggestions are greatly appreciated.  

Three main themes have emerged,

• Take action now, resume trips as well as broaden our community outreach.
• Delay trips until the end of the SMO while working to broaden our community outreach.
• Close CCI, it has served its purpose.

As we head into 2024 our action plan is as follows,

• We would like to plan a trip with a small group of people who are willing to be active listeners and bring back the messages of the Russian people to the United States.
• We intend to resume larger group trips when it makes sense to do so from an overall interest as well as receptiveness in Russia perspective.
• We are seeking firsthand experience articles and perspectives to share with our CCI community.
• We have initiated, and will continue to coordinate, Zoom calls with Sharon and people interested in visiting together online.
• We will continue to send and post articles relevant to CCI’s mission and seek input on how to broaden our community outreach.

The three current Board members are volunteers.  We welcome, and need, the involvement of more volunteers across all aspects of CCI’s activities.  We hope you will join us as active participants in advocating for peace and the multipolar world in which the United States and Russia are equal.

We wish you, your families and friends a Happy New Year,

Pamela, Paula and Krishen
Center for Citizen Initiatives

Dear CCI Friends,

I met with Pamela Tetarenko and Volodya Shestakov this past weekend.

They were here seeking my advice for the direction of CCI in its current manifestation.

We have had long discussions about CCI’s “Sharon Tennison book”.

They would like to preserve CCI’s history and my book does represent a significant core of that history.  We all agree that there are additional informations that could be added for the first time.  I’ve agreed to add more over the following weeks.

For further information, I want to share with you Pam Tetarenko’s background.  Pam’s Great Grandmother was Alexandra Babkin in 1912, a very challenging time.  Her great-grandparents, both Russian, made the very difficult decision to take her grandfather to Canada.

We had dinner tonight and discussed how to link all of this for your readership in the coming months.

With gratitude to each of you, 

Sharon Tennison

Center for Citizen Initiatives

Dear Friends of CCI,

It is with heartfelt emotion that I communicate with you today.

Our history together has been the driving force in my life since 1982 when I began putting together what has become known internationally as “Citizen Diplomacy”; that is working toward peaceful relations between countries facing war. So it was between the US and the USSR that I learned what is possible between two warring nations. A few others were thinking about other inroads in peaceful directions. We at CCI have been the international leader in this direction since the beginning of our work.

We developed other programs in totally different directions like private food production, cleaning up the Environment, Alcoholic Anonymous across 11 time Zones, private clothing companies.  

At 86 years of age, it is impossible for me to continue as I did until 2021. At that time Kaiser took me off of a medication, Metoprolol, that had allowed me to function amazingly well considering multiple Endocrine challenges throughout my life. I went into a downturn from which I’m now recovering somewhat but never sufficiently to lead CCI again. It is past time for me to resign as Chair of the Board, which I have done.   I continue to be involved as Chair Emeritus and Advisor to the Board and am creating a PodCast to be able to continue with audio communications.

Thankfully, we have three new Board members who are capable of giving CCI new life. Each has traveled to Russia with me twice in the recent past and will do so again in the near future. They each bring much needed skills during this dangerous period in which we are now moving.

Paula Day is an Attorney with great background in legal matters, but more importantly she is deeply involved in International affairs and has been all of her life. Pamela Tetarenko is an Engineer and has amazing credentials in solution thinking in her past careers, more on these in future communications. Krishen Mehta’s career has been in International Accounting as a Partner in PricehouseCoopers. He and his wife have lived abroad when work necessitated it. Krishen is deeply concerned with the issues existing in today’s world. As is his wife, a NGO manager for girls sold into slavery.

Each of these three Board members have large databases from which to draw as they become more involved in CCI’s future work.  

I encourage you to support their efforts in CCI’s and the world’s behalf.
Let us work and pray for peaceful co-existence to avoid Nuclear War.

Sharon Tennison
Chair Emeritus & Advisor to the Board
Center for Citizen Initiatives

Holiday Blessings to you … 2022/2023

Dear CCI friends and colleagues,

We are thinking of you and your loved ones during the end of this turbulent year 2022! Join us in actively putting out more love, kindness and patience with others, sharing food to those in need, supporting every opportunity from Salvation Army to those standing on street corners with “Help signs.” One such young mother dressed in a normal coat, a child at her side, held a sign saying “I have four small children and lost my job.” Too often we are seeing such evidences among us. Let us be generous wherever we can be.

Let us meditate, chant, pray for those Ukrainian, Russian, Poles and other boys at this moment in uniform in snow, slosh, mud across the world from our safe homes. War is such a tragic use of youth, mid-aged planners and aging generals … it’s an abomination to humankind. Pray that we earthlings will realize how degrading Wars really are. They make us all poorer at the financial, national level and at the spiritual level.

Start the discussion with your neighbors, your club members, your families, your senators, representatives and your spiritual leaders for the sake of our futures … which could end up destroying us and our fragile planet.

Sharon Tennison, Paula Day, Krishen Mehta, Sylvia Demarest, Pam Tetarenko
Center for Citizen Initiatives

Dear CCI Followers,

I explained earlier that I would be in touch with you about changes occurring at CCI. I am in my 85th year and it is imperative that my workload be reduced.

We are setting up a new Board of Directors for CCI.

Fortunately, I’ve had the advantage of close relations with VIP Americans and numerous other top-end professionals who have traveled on CCI’s Russia trips since 2010.  Several of them have communicated weekly and some daily at specific times. They have been a God-send to me. It’s past time for a few of them to become CCI’s new Board Members. The first two who have been loyal supporters are as follows: Paula Day and Krishen Mehta.

Their responsibilities will be established in the near future.

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