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Productivity Enhancement Program
PEP
The idea for this Productivity Enhancement
Program PEP was started over a coffee table by Sharon Tennison
an imaginative ICU registered nurse in San Francisco. She wondered
what would happen if we replicated the earlier Marshall Plan and
directed this new effort entirely towards Russia. Sharon was also
a great believer in the ability of individual citizens on a citizen
to citizen basis to leverage profound change on a global scale.
Surprising though it seems individual citizens relying on their
basic interest in the universal struggle of all humans to overcome
obstacles can cut through a wealth of seemingly insurmountable
obstacles that often delay super powers from taking needed action.
Sharon remembered the original Marshall Plan that brought 24,000
non-English-speaking European entrepreneurs to the United States
between 1949 until 1960. These business men and women were provided
with training in management principles an production concepts.
The cost of this part of the Marshall Plan was minimal. Even though
this training of the European entrepreneurs was just a small part
of the Marshall Plan overall it proved to be one of the most effective
ways of helping Europe recover economically following the end
of World War II.
Sharon began thinking of this idea
of helping Russia move from communism to a market based economy
in the early 1980s. To test her theories she undertook with a
small group of friends an initial trip to Russia to expose American
citizens to their Russian counterparts in the USSR. For a seven
year period between 1985 and 1991 she promoted travel to the Soviet
Union to encourage thousands of face to face contacts between
ordinary American and Soviet citizens. She must have been prophetic,
because when communism imploded in the late 1980's she had the
seeds of an idea to help Russia move from years of communism to
a market based economy. This engaging concept ultimately led to
the PEP program that revived the previously successful Marshall
Plan and focused these intensive education efforts entirely towards
Russia. The resultant PEP program is the center piece of the Center
for Citizen Initiatives which brought the first group of Russian
citizens to the United States in 1996 for a 24 day time frame
of which 15 days were allocated to intensive training in management
principles and productions concepts. Over the 20 years that Sharon
has been working on this idea she has raised over $60,000,000
to implement this exciting program. A major source of support
for bringing PEP delegations to the United States is the Bureau
of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the United States Department
of State that now funds 51% of the cost involved for this highly
successful program. . Today Sharon is highly respected in the
U.S. Congress as one person who knows a great deal about the Russian
economy. She has an open door to all the legislators' offices
whenever she goes to Congress. In 1993 she received a White House
appointment to sit on the 13-member Board for the Russian American
Enterprise Fund. Sharon is known for creating and executing streamlined,
low budget, cost-shared technical assistance programs for the
U.S. government.
Allen Kerr first learned about this
relatively new Rotary program when he made up a Rotary meeting
in Minnetonka, Minnesota this past summer. Since 1996 over 4,000
Russian entrepreneurs from all over Russia have come to the United
States from a variety of industrial groups. Because the Muscogee
Rotary Club, has 27.5% of its membership in the health care industry
we have elected to ask for a private medical clinic delegation.
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