Two U.S. State Department employees — one who speaks out against anti-Semitism, the other against Islamaphobia – have teamed up to promote a global campaign to get young people to combat racial, ethnic and religious bigotry by volunteering their time for people unlike them.

Now, I don’t need to tell this audience that we know what the benefits are of these Open Skies agreements. They not only allow us to cross great distances, which I have been doing a lot of recently, but also to open up markets, create jobs, allow people in far -removed countries to interact, share information, and build businesses together.

New USCCD member organization Global Citizen Year (GCY) defines itself as a citizen diplomacy organization by providing recent high school graduates with the opportunity to spend a 'bridge year' working in a developing country before they move on to attend college.

From all the terrible news typically coming out of reports from Israel and the West Bank, a March 15 article from Bloomberg Press, struck a happier note. For advocates of public diplomacy between Israelis and Palestinians, corporate diplomacy could be a key factor in restarting the peace process.

Addressing a conference in Hanoi on March 15 to review people-to-people diplomacy in 2010 and discuss activities for 2011, Truong Tan Sang...stressed the need for the diplomacy to focus on efficiency in external relations, particularly the ties with people in neighbouring and traditionally friendly countries and progressive forces around the world.

Eleven Tufts students with the New Initiative for Middle East Peace (NIMEP) spent two weeks in the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region of Iraq on a fact-finding mission in January. Participants met with several local leaders, including Kurdistan's regional president Massoud Barzani.

There are reasons to believe this next year will usher in an increased period of time of citizen diplomacy. We are indeed likely to see a jump in the amount of citizen to citizen diplomacy. Through the use of new media and incorporating traditional forms to breaking down barriers of communication between people.

In an article in the Huffington Post, Vivian Glyck, founder of the Just Like My Child Foundation writes about preparing the next generation to be world citizens and the process by which we can broaden their horizons and perspectives to be more globally focused.