Sedona hosted the 36th annual Arizona Sister Cities State Conference on Friday and Saturday, Nov. 15 and 16.

The conference began with the inaugural Mayor’s International Dinner on Thursday at the Hilton Sedona at Bell Rock before shifting to the Yavapai Community College campus in Sedona on Saturday. The dinner included a blessing by Havasupai elder James Uqualla, comments by Sedona Mayor Scott Jablow and Kennedy Kerbit, the director of an art school in Eldoret, Kenya, and a dance performance by the Lajkonik Polish Folk Ensemble.

“We have grown the membership of sister cities over 32% in the last 13 months, and we have been awarded a $2.4 million grant by the U.S. State Department to recruit, train and manage 88 youth ambassadors at the U.S. pavilion at the World Expo in Osaka, Japan in 2025,” Sister Cities International Executive Director Ricki Garrett said on Nov. 15.

The Sedona Sister Cities Association was formed in 2022 and is now working to establish sister city relationships with Canmore, Canada and Jasło, Poland.

“For me, it’s really gratifying to be here, because Sedona Sister Cities … started out with a just very small group of people that evolved into a board of directors and we wondered ‘would anybody want us? We’re a small little rural town,” SSCA board member Don Groves said during the event.

On May 19, 2023, Canmore Mayor Sean Krausert and Jablow signed a two-year friendship agreement between the two cities, which laid the foundation for a formal sister cities agreement.

“This Friendship Agreement holds the promise of uniting our communities through shared experiences, mutual learning and enduring partnerships,” Canmore-Sedona Friendship Committee Chairman Rob Seeley said. “We look forward to seeing the benefits unfold for residents in both Canmore and Sedona.”

SSCA President Chuck Marr said that he was optimistic that Canmore and Sedona will establish a formal sister city relationship before the two-year agreement sunsets, although it can be extended. Seeley said that since the friendship agreement was signed, private individuals in the two cities have been working on arts exchanges, school-to-school partnerships, youth exchanges between Rotary Clubs and collaborative library programs.

Arts Connection

“We’re hoping to use [the] Reflections Festival, which is an organization that was formed under the Sedona Ballet to celebrate the very best of the visual and performing arts in Sedona,” SSCA Treasurer Winifred Muench said. “We’re working with Canmore to bring some of the top young musicians from their area, and we’re bringing those top performers here to perform live, and then we’re going to send our very best to perform there. So it’s an arts exchange. We’re also going to do the same thing in dance, theatre and film. So we’re going to work on all the arts.”

SSCA is tentatively planning an October 2025 arts event at Verde Valley School.

“Discussions are underway for a March 2026 Rising Stars concert, featuring renowned emerging talent from the Canmore region of Canada,” Muench said. “This initiative includes a reciprocal opportunity for young artists from Northern Arizona to perform in Canmore.”

“We’re excited about this sister city partnership and I’ve got the luxury of being the easiest thing to do with Sister Cities, because film is a unifying medium. Everyone in the world, no matter what you do, no matter what your hobbies are, everybody watches films,” Sedona International Film Festival Executive Director Patrick Schweiss said to attendees. “Everybody participates in film in some way or another, and it causes dialog. It sparks conversation, it sparks unity.”

At the Mary D. Fisher Theatre on Sept. 13, SIFF, SSCA and Jasło representatives hosted a screening of “Raze to the Ground,” a documentary about Jasło’s destruction by the German army in 1944.

“We have all sorts of opportunities, too, because our film festival is nine days at the end of February,” Schweiss said. “We show films from about 26 different countries when the film festival happens. So there’s automatically an opportunity for us to partner with Sister Cities … and create that dialog and make events like that happen … We’re just at the beginning stages, but hopefully when we come back and reconvene ina year, we’ll be able to add to this.”

School Partnerships

SSCA has created an education committee that includes West Sedona School teachers Deb Sanders and Patty Falsetto, Verde Valley School head Ben Lee and Anne Walton in Canmore.

“I’ve been reaching out over the last year to schools in Canmore,” Sanders said. “I reached out to the principal of the Elizabeth Rummel School, Canmore. So first-grade teacher, Terri Williamson, and she said she wanted a partner. I arranged for her to partner with Falsetto, and then back in October, when we had our fall break, I traveled to Canmore and brought exchange items from Falsetto’s first grade class to Terri’s class.”

“With Janet Krausert, the Canmore mayor’s wife, looking on, the students and I took a Google Earth tour of the West Sedona School campus pointing our the unique features of the area,” Sanders wrote about her trip. “I read ‘The Three Little Javelinas’ to the class which highlights the unique Arizona flora and fauna within the context of ‘Three Little Pigs.’ We toured the school, met with the principal, Brian Witishyn, and heard about a whole school community wellness program called Right from the Start, a mindfulness program that helps adults and children settle their mind and feelings before beginning work.”

Sanders said that she plans to present to the Sedona-Oak Creek School District Governing Board in January about her work with SSCA and that she wants to involve middle and high school groups as well as the second grade from Our Lady of the Snows Catholic Church in Canmore. Sanders said she noted Canmore schools have a student wellness committee that she was looking to incorporate in Sedona.

The Sedona Village Rotary Club plans to create nine-day student exchange programs for three graduates of the annual Rotary Youth Leadership Awards, a leadership camp for high school students offered during the winter, beginning in summer 2026.

Rotary Club of Sedona Village Youth Exchange Officer Jennette Bill said the program should see three local graduates of RYLA exchanged for three Canmore students.

“When the students go to Canmore, Canada, they have a Rotary educational program that they are putting together that our students would be a part of,” Bill said. ”It has to do with learning more about the mountains, about climate change and what it’s done to the glaciers, about reintroduction of the bison and the geology of the area.”

The Canmore students will have a similar experience in Sedona and at Grand Canyon National Park.
The Sedona Public Library has assigned librarian assistant Patrica Kelly to collaborate with her Canadian counterpart to share exhibits.

“If we do an art display, our art goes into Canmore and Canmore’s comes here,” SPL director Judy Poe said. “We’re going to make sure that it’s interactive the whole way around.”