Hope- The Vision, The Mission

A lifelong peacemaker, I accepted an invitation in the nineteen eighties from the founder of our local Sister City chapter to join her in establishing a sister city relationship with a city in the (then) Soviet Union. I became a member and later, an executive officer.

For the next two decades, I worked to promote citizen diplomacy and peace between Russians and Americans. Having grown up under the threat of nuclear war, it became important to make friends of the enemy. If the leaders of the superpowers didn't know how to behave well, we the people would demonstrate how civilized citizens behave toward each other for them.

We began with photography and posted a portrait photo exhibit of ordinary Russians... "Faces of the Enemy" in shows and galleries. The shocking discovery was that the communists, the enemy, the Russians that we had grown up to fear and loathe, looked just like us!

Our group began programs of educational exchanges: first between universities and later, high schools and grade schools; medical exchanges between doctors and hospitals; police department exchanges; business and industry exchanges; humanitarian and social program exchanges.

In 1999 I wrote a grant for USAID to fund a mission under the START II Treaty Cooperative Threat Reduction to establish the social infrastructure to support the construction of a chemical weapons decommissioning facility. And in 2000 that grant helped Russian and American citizens cooperate together in the mission to destroy weapons of mass destruction after their governments each built them to threaten death to the other.

My writing, artwork and humanitarian programs ever since have been in service to the creation of peace among the peoples of earth.

To create peace, people must first have hope. And that is the current mission. If you are sincerely interested in the mission and would like to play a role in "hope rising on the planet," send me a personal email and I will send you details.