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…