Dear CCI Friends,
Please excuse my absence in reporting during these days surrounding the Trump-Putin Summit. It was critical to take “time out” to re-energize. In order to continue with my increasingly unmanageable workload, I’ve hired CCI’s first staff person since 2009. Maddelyn Bryan, a recent graduate from the University of San Francisco joined CCI on July 1 to train with me as CCI increases its programmatic work beyond what we’ve done during the past ten years.
CCI, to my knowledge, is the only organization in the field of citizen diplomacy between the US and Russia that has remained intact and working since the beginning of the 1980s. By the end of the ‘80s, other organizations closed their doors. We switched from plain goodwill travel programs to training young Russians how to survive in the radically different conditions of the 1990s. This was when the new Russia literally fell apart.
We ran a dozen major programs during the 1990s and 2000s to support the “new Russia” by training their brightest and best young entrepreneurs in American companies and NGOs. We designed our own programs which for two and a half decades, we received large U.S. State Department grants to carry out these first-ever programs (that we devised) between the two countries. See ccisf.org. That period ended in 2004 when USG funding was cut to support the Iraq war. After that young Russians paid fully for CCI’s U.S. trainings until 2009 when the U.S. financial crisis bled into Russia and many had to temporarily close their businesses. Sadly, I let 30 staff members go, closed our Presidio offices and began writing my book, The Power of Impossible Ideas; Ordinary Citizens’ Extraordinary Efforts to Avert International Crises.
Since 2009 I’ve kept relations alive in both countries by traveling around Russia doing long-term evaluations of Russian alumni’s US trainings. Still they credit their US experiences as being “life changing.” As a result, we have dedicated alumni in 71 regions of Russia and the same types of American contacts exist in 45 states. With the Ukraine crisis bursting forth in 2014, I began taking a few American delegations to Russia as fact-finders and understood by the end of 2017 that classic citizen diplomacy must be restarted.
Citizen diplomacy, people’s diplomacy, soft diplomacy … whatever one terms it, may be the only action that can shift the extremely dangerous dynamic between U.S. policy makers and media and the Russian government and their media. If so it will need to be done in large numbers. We did large numbers earlier; it can be done again.
CCI ran two former 1980s programs this year to check their efficacy for the present time: 1) We sent delegations of Americans to several regions in Russia to explore dozens of aspects of Russian life and attitudes toward their leadership and America, and 2) we brought small delegations of Russian citizens here to the U.S. to interact, answer hard questions and to create goodwill with American audiences across four states and Washington, DC. Both program types proved to be extraordinarily successful and welcomed by both American citizens and Russian participants. The only place we ran into challenges was in Washington, D.C.
We are now projecting increased numbers of both types of people’s diplomacy for 2019.
If you might consider traveling to Russia on one of our 2019 “signature” trips; or if you would ever consider bringing four Russian entrepreneurs from multiple regions to your area for discussions and goodwill for four days, please get in touch with us asap! We will give you more details.
Sharon Tennison
Founder and President (since 1983)
Center for Citizen Initiatives
ccisf.org