Citizen Diplomacy is a high visibility program started by the Sister Cities Commission in 2008 with an ambitious weekend-long program featuring Mary Jean Eisenhower*. (This was before the Town Commission was dissolved into the Association.**)
Side note: Thursday night was our latest 5th Thursday Social held at Mahoney's Pub. Several people showed up who had attended the last Citizen Diplomacy event at the Cary Arts Center on March 15, 2012 and want to get involved. Citizen Diplomacy is a great development tool for SCAC.The Citizen Diplomacy committee held our first planning meeting at Bocci's for lunch. Lots of good ideas, decisions and planning. This will be our 5th program in the series.
We only have ~4 months until the event which will be on March 21, 2013 from 6:30-9pm. Normally groups take a year planning something like this, but SCAC has event planning down to a seat-of-the-pants science! Some preliminary work was done to get the announcement in the Town's quarterly brochure so we are locked in on several details which may be constraining, but we will work with those.
SCAC will have a dinner program with a panel of 3 speakers; one from Business, one from International (State Department?) and one from the Non-Profit sector.
I'm looking forward to another great Cary program in the spring. Cary has a long history of citizen diplomacy, but I will leave that for another blog posting.
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* Mary Jean Eisenhower is the Executive Director of People to People International and is the Grand Daughter of Dwight D. Eisenhower who got the whole citizen diplomacy movement started with his summit on September 11, 1956.
** At their April 14, 2011 meeting, the Cary Town Council voted to approve Staff Report PR11-32 which included the removal of the Sister Cities Commission from the Town Ordinance. At that time the responsibilities of the Commission were transferred to the Association.
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