In the 1990s, I visited Moscow and St. Petersburg as part of a tour group organized by the Center for Citizen Initiatives. During my trip to Russia, I was treated to a home stay in Moscow for 5 days where my hosts prepared my meals and discussed what life was like in their city and country. On one memorable occasion, I managed to rely on my limited understanding of the Russian language and Cyrillic alphabet to take the Moscow metro by myself to return to my hosts' flat.
-NW

Center for Citizen Initiatives
Bringing Russian and American citizens together in Peace since 1983.
https://ccisf.org/about-cci/

Vision and Mission
Our world has never faced a more challenging era than today. Massive nuclear arsenals are once again pointed between the United States and Russia. Misunderstandings, fallacious accusations, false flags and demonizing propaganda dominate our print media and television screens.

At CCI, we experienced one other such dangerous period in 1980. We flew in between the two enemy nations and dared to try to understand the challenges on both sides…. our citizen-to-citizen programs began to soften the environment between the two Superpowers of that era. Other American groups also got involved. War was averted and good relations began to grow in the 1990s.

Our vision is ….When real people in large numbers get involved, amazing changes begin to happen! If it happened in the 1980s, it can happen again …. Join us! Let’s help reduce the tensions existing today between the two Superpowers.

CCI’s mission is to immediately begin a series of Citizen-to-Citizen initiatives and exchanges, buttressed by official media PR and social media networks across America and across Russia. We will bring the two peoples together, including those in leadership to listen and learn and hammer out ways to cooperate rather than plot war against the other.

Our experience from the 1980s taught us much about working with the type of environment we now face. Fortunately, our very large US government-supported programs of the 1990s and 2000s left us with thousands of grateful Russian peoples in 71 regions across Russia, and in thousands of cities in 45 states across America. They will be called into service to carry our 2016/17 mission.