Throughout the year, CCSI organized or participated in a number of local and national public events. In June Holt Ruffin traveled to the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater to address more than a thousand high school students gathered for an annual week-long institute on international affairs organized by Rotary International.

Here in Seattle, we hosted visitors passing through from overseas, often under the U.S. government’s International Visitors Program. We offered several of these delegations demonstrations of good “civil society” resources available on the Internet, such as in the field of civic education.

In addition, we organized an event in the fall at the College Club, in which we heard a report by Mike Waske on “Labor and Civil Society in Poland, Lithuania and Belarus.” Mike is a representative of the American Center for International Labor Solidarity, AFL-CIO, based in Warsaw. Joining Mike was Izabela Dudek, head of the Foreign Relations Division, City of Gdynia, Poland. (Gdynia is a Seattle sister city.) CCSI intends to organize more such events in 1998.