About
Mission
Promoting Peace through people-to-people diplomacy
The “twinning” of cities first began in 836 between Paderborn, Germany and Le Mans, France. This system became better known with the establishment of the International Union of Local Authorities (IULA), a Netherlands-based organization founded in 1913 in The Hague. The first twinning of cities in the United States occurred in 1944 between Wichita, Kansas and Orleans, France.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower was introduced to this system through his brother Milton, the President of Kansas State University. President Eisenhower liked the idea of cities twinning themselves with cities, people becoming involved with people, and families becoming families with their twinned counterparts overseas. Through this concept, President Eisenhower hoped for world peace to be realized through the establishment of the Sister City Program in 1956.
Since 1956, the network of Sister Cities International has grown to unite tens of thousands of citizen diplomats and volunteers in programs through over 2,300 cities in 150 countries on six continents, with cities in the United States.
Sister Cities was originally adopted by the League of Cities, an organization to which all of the cities in the United States belong, until 1970 when Sister Cities International could establish its own headquarters in Washington, D.C. The first of Sister Cities’ annual conferences was held in 1967 in Los Angeles, California.
Ms. Thelma Press, who was involved in the 1959 establishment of the Sister City relationship between San Bernardino, California and Tachikawa, Japan was asked in 1972 to serve as the California State representative and sought out other community leaders to serve as state representatives throughout the U.S. Due to the number of sister city relationships between Japan and the United States, requests were received to form a chapter of Sister Cities International for Japanese and American cities. However, rather than splinter Sister Cities International into U.S. chapters for each country, Ms. Press met in 1974 with the Mayor of Santa Fe Springs, Ms. Betty Wilson who sat with President Eisenhower as one of the people who signed the agreement to form Sister Cities, to look at forming a state chapter of Sister Cities International. Together, they established rules and regulations for chapter by-laws. However, due to the size of the State of California, it was decided to establish two chapters simultaneously, and that was the birth of the Sister Cities Northern and Southern California chapters. State chapters of Sister Cities International then spread throughout the U.S.