Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Due to rapidly escalating tensions in U.S.-Russia relations, CCI is restarting or increasing “bottom-up” diplomacy programs with the intention to trigger citizen awareness and response in both nations. Working with other experts and organizations, we may be able to have an impact far greater than we can now envision.

Two programs are now in motion:

• Americans travel to Russia on CCI’s “signature” trips which are investigative, not cultural. These trips will be expanded in 2018. They will go to Moscow and St. Petersburg to meet with experts and counterparts to understand how Russia is developing, surviving the sanctions and what they think about U.S.-Russia relations. From there, between the two capitals, small subgroups of Americans travel to as many as eight different Russian regions to spend days assessing how outlying Russians think, work, build businesses, deal with corruption and bureaucrats, see U.S.-Russia relations and more. The large group then convenes in St. Petersburg to share information and confer on how to generate solutions, deal with stereotypical thinking and develop public awareness.

• Bring Russian citizens to our U.S. cities to hold discussions across our country through Russians Meet Mainstream Americans! (RMMA).  See details in the next message. We ran this program in the 1980’s with terrific success. It dissolved decades of misinformation between our two nations and its peoples in two short years.

All the best,

Sharon Tennison
Center for Citizen Initiatives