Bringing The World Together

Longmont’s Sister Cities Program is Building Global Connections and Shaping Future Citizens

Molly Riddle remembers feeling a mix of nerves and excitement as she prepared for a trip to Mexico last summer. She wasn’t heading to a beach resort for a vacation: The Silver Creek High School student was traveling south of the border as an official ambassador of Longmont through Longmont Sister Cities, a long-standing initiative that aims to bring the world together “one friendship at a time.”

At the time, Riddle had just finished her junior year and was heading to stay with a host family in Ciudad Guzmán, a city with roughly 100,000 residents in the state of Jalisco. She wasn’t going alone—she was traveling with a group of fellow Longmont-area students, plus adult chaperones—but she was apprehensive all the same. It was her first time traveling outside of Colorado without her family.

But when Riddle arrived and met her host family in late July 2024, she immediately felt at ease. Riddle wasn’t too confident in her Spanish, and her host brother, Erick, was still working on his English—but the two teenagers found a way to communicate all the same. They bonded over music, food, and games.  

“Ask anyone in my life; the trip genuinely changed me so much,” says Riddle, who is now 18. “I came back a different person.”

“Build a Road to an Enduring Peace”

Ciudad Guzmán, Mexico, is one of Longmont’s three sister cities, along with Chino, Japan, and the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. 

Sister cities are communities that have established long-term formal relationships with each other to help promote mutual respect, cooperation, and understanding. Today, 400-plus American communities maintain more than 1,800 partnerships in 140 countries, according to the national nonprofit Sister Cities International.

Sister Cities International formed out of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s People-to-People citizen diplomacy initiative, which he first proposed in September 1956 to foster global understanding and prevent future conflicts following the devastation of World War II.

“The purpose of this meeting is the most worthwhile purpose there is in the world today,” Eisenhower said while announcing the initiative from the White House. “To help build the road to peace, help build a road to an enduring peace.”

Longmont created its first sister city relationship with Chino, Japan, in 1990. The city is in the Nagano prefecture of central Japan and has roughly 55,000 residents.

Jimmie Kanemoto, an influential Longmont businessman and philanthropist who died in 2006, was one of the community leaders who helped establish the partnership with Chino. His father immigrated to the U.S. in the early 1900s from Japan, and they moved to Longmont when Kanemoto was two years old.

“We have some families that have lived in Longmont for several generations who are of Japanese descent,” says Courtney Michelle, president of the Longmont Sister Cities Association, an all-volunteer nonprofit formed in the mid-1990s to manage Longmont’s sister city relationships on behalf of the city. “A lot of Japanese immigrants came to Longmont in the early 1900s to farm.”

In the early 1990s, the relationship deepened when a group of Longmont teenagers visited Chino for an immersion in Japanese culture. Then, in June 1994, Longmont was honored with a visit from Japan’s Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko as they toured America.

Longmont added Ciudad Guzmán as its second sister city in 1997. That relationship was spearheaded by the late Dan Benavidez, the first Latino to win an at-large seat on the Longmont City Council.

Pioneering Partnership with the Northern Arapaho

Longmont made headlines in 2021 when it joined forces with the Northern Arapaho Tribe of the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming (Pow Wow pictured at top). Together, the two communities formed the first-ever sister city partnership between an American city and a sovereign tribal nation. 

Brian Bagley, who served as Longmont’s mayor from 2017 to 2021, first proposed the idea in 2018.

“It took us a while to wrap our heads around it because nobody had ever done this before,” says Michelle, who also owns CocoMichelle Salon & Spa on Emery Street. “We had no guidance; there was no precedent.”

There was a great deal of back-and-forth between Longmont officials and the tribe. Bagley had several meetings with tribal members to learn their stories and gain their trust.

“When I went up there, it was truly [to ask], ‘What do you want? How can we help?’” says Bagley in Little by Little: Becoming Sister Cities, a City of Longmont documentary about the relationship with the Northern Arapaho. “I learned, I listened, I asked questions, and [I] shut up.”

Both parties agreed to move forward with a partnership in 2019. 

“A lot of people discouraged us because other [cities] had tried and failed,” says Michelle. “But, we were like, ‘We’re going to do it anyway because we’re Longmont.’”

The COVID-19 pandemic temporarily put the relationship on hold, but when the world started to reopen, the two communities hosted a signing ceremony at the Longmont Museum in September 2021 to officially establish the partnership.

Lee Spoonhunter, who was the tribe’s chairman at the time, says the Northern Arapaho are “very conservative” by nature, but tribal leaders decided to enter into the partnership because they felt a deep level of respect and compassion from Longmont’s representatives.

The Northern Arapaho once lived on the land that now encompasses Longmont. But in the 1860s, after gold was discovered in Colorado, the U.S. government forced the tribe off their ancestral homelands, which spanned from present-day Laramie, Wyoming, to southern Denver. 

“There’s a very proud history in Colorado of the gold-mining days, but it’s a very dark time for the Northern Arapaho,” says Spoonhunter. “We didn’t know what gold was. It was not something we valued, and we didn’t know the value of it.”

The federal government promised the tribe a reservation of their own but never provided one. Instead, in 1878, the Northern Arapaho were forced onto a reservation in central Wyoming that was already occupied by the Eastern Shoshone, an enemy of the Northern Arapaho. With this move, the U.S. government was “hoping we would wipe each other out,” says Spoonhunter. 

But that didn’t happen. Today, relations between the two tribes are much friendlier. More than 9,800 Northern Arapaho and 4,200 Eastern Shoshone live on the reservation.

“Knowing that dark history, Longmont was very caring and respectful. They wanted to correct the wrongs of the past and build a good working relationship with us,” says Spoonhunter. “There are some very beautiful people in Longmont. We just want to thank the city of Longmont and all the people who live there for welcoming us back home, for knowing the history of the Northern Arapaho and building off that. Out of every bad thing, something good comes.”

Whenever Spoonhunter and other tribal members visit Longmont, he says he feels like “we’re home, and we’re among family.”

“It’s not very often that our people and our heritage and our ancestry are revered and respected,” he adds. “And so we appreciate that from the people of Longmont.”

Student Exchanges Build “Lifelong Friendships”

Today, Longmont primarily maintains its relationships with all three sister cities through annual student exchanges. At the end of every July, groups of Longmont-area students travel to each of the sister cities—accompanied by chaperones—to stay with host families for roughly a week. Each group consists of around eight students and two chaperones.

“Traveling to a different place and experiencing a different culture, different foods, different languages, that helps you see that all humans are so much more similar than we are different,” says Michelle. “We expose youth to a broader perspective.”

Then, during the first week of August, the groups return to Longmont, along with students and chaperones from each of the three sister cities. Once back in Colorado, students from Longmont, Japan, Mexico, and Wyoming spend 10 days together, participating in activities ranging from marching in the Boulder County Fair Parade to exploring Estes Park. The time in Colorado culminates with a festive event called the Friendship Dinner.

“It creates lifelong friendships, and it changes the hearts and minds of everybody who’s involved,” says Michelle. “It makes the students better global citizens and just better humans, better people, because it opens their minds to something they would not have otherwise experienced.”

For the Northern Arapaho, these student exchanges help expose the tribe’s youth to different ways of life, says Spoonhunter.

“In some instances, it’s hard for our children to have the opportunity to leave the reservation and see a bigger and broader world out there,” he says. “That was one of our initial goals, was for our youth to visit other places and see how other people live.”

In Longmont, any student who resides or attends school in the
St. Vrain Valley School District and is enrolled in eighth through 11th grade is eligible to apply to become a student ambassador.

Once selected, student ambassadors agree to attend various training sessions before their trips, help with fundraisers, and give presentations about the experience once they return. They are also required to pay their own travel costs, though the Longmont Sister Cities Association offers scholarships. (The association receives funding from the City of Longmont, and they also organize fundraising events and solicit donations.)

The students’ parents or guardians must also agree to participate in sister city activities, including hosting visiting students and chaperones at their homes.

“The home stays provide that deep, personal connection with family,” says Michelle. “Because you are in a person’s home, you get to see their daily routine, you get to eat home-cooked meals, you meet their siblings and their wider family. You make that deeper connection with real people living their lives, just like we do.

One Friendship Could “Change the Trajectory of the World” 

Fostering multinational and cross-cultural connections has always been important. But, in today’s divided world, the Sister Cities program has never been more critical, says Michelle.

“We do our small little part. It’s just one friendship at a time, but that could change the trajectory of the world,” she says. “My hope is that this program can counteract the individualism, the ethnocentrism, the nationalism, the us-versus-them dilemma that is in every human.”

That spirit is evident in Riddle’s future plans as she wraps up her senior year and prepares for life after high school. She hopes to attend college somewhere in the San Diego area so she can continue working on her Spanish-language skills. Inspired by her trip to Ciudad Guzmán, she also hopes to be able to study abroad. 

And she’s still in touch with her host brother, Erick, almost a year later. The two text nearly every single day, she says, often switching between Spanish and English.

“I’m always fitting Spanish into my everyday language,” she says. “It’s just a habit at this point, which I think is really good for me. I’m just practicing all the time. It’s been super cool.” IL

Molly Riddle and her host brother Erick. The St. Stephen’s Mission on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. Students visiting Longmont from Ciudad Guzmán, Mexico.