A few weeks ago we announced what I think is a game changer for Sister Cities International – a $7.5 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. We will launch a major three-year program working in urban African communities. The Sister Cities network will provide city-to-city technical assistance focusing on water, sanitation, and health.
This Gates grant represents the largest grant in the history of Sister Cities International.
Here’s my cut on why this is our game changer: For over five decades our members have made a name for the organization in the cultural understanding business. Starting with countries then known as our “former enemies” (Japan, Germany, etc), U.S. citizens worked to share their community and American culture in far away cities and in turn opened their minds and homes to visitors from abroad to learn about other cultures and traditions. Now, we are in 135 countries on six continents. People-to-people exchanges – it worked then, it works now, and it will continue to work. But over time the citizens realized there was more about the community that they could share beyond a visiting choir or a student group. What about trade and commerce? What about humanitarian assistance? What about our technical expertise? So…quietly for years, U.S. cities have been going well beyond cultural understanding – wells in Timbuktu, a medical clinic in the Congo, solar panels for rural farmers in Tibet. What is more fundamentally important than water, health, and food?
Enter our new program, funded by the Gates Foundation, where we will draw on this experience and scale up our work in Africa and on these types of international development projects in a way that’s only possible with exceptional funding. You thought we did a pretty good job on the cultural understanding stuff – wait until you see what’s next.
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