Who We Are
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 2,000 cities in 140 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. Ms. Press discussed forming a state chapter of Sister Cities International 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. 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 International Northern and Southern California chapters. State chapters of Sister Cities International then spread throughout the U.S. Today, California has more sister city organizations than any other state in the U.S.: 82 California cities have 356 partnerships with cities overseas in 70 countries.
In 2016, the Northern and Southern California Chapters came together for the first California statewide meeting, which was held in Paso Robles, California. In 2021, the first statewide program, the California Youth Leadership Summit, was organized and established by the Southern California Chapter and involved students from high schools and colleges all throughout the State of California and its sister cities overseas. In 2022, statewide programs were expanded to include the California Young Artists Expo, which involved artists from all over the state.
In order to more efficiently and effectively operate these statewide programs, the Sister Cities International Southern California and Northern California Chapter Presidents came together to form California Sister Cities, an organization that would oversee, do fundraising for and operate all statewide programs with the assistance and support of the Southern and Northern California Chapters. Today these programs involve students and faculty members from high schools and colleges throughout the State of California, as well as from 150 countries throughout the world.
