On May 13th, 2025 the cities of Fort Worth, Texas and Bandung, Indonesia will celebrate the 35th anniversary of their sister cities partnership, the first-ever between a US and Indonesian city. Since its initial signing in 1990, the partnership has transcended geographic and cultural boundaries to create new connections rooted in mutual understanding and deep friendship.
To celebrate the anniversary, Fort Worth will host a special reception on May 13th that will not only commemorate its relationship with Bandung but will also celebrate Indonesian culture with live music, food, and crafts. Later this summer, a local delegation will travel to Indonesia to commemorate the anniversary in person and explore new areas of collaboration with Bandung city officials. With the Fort Worth-Bandung relationship focused primarily on youth exchange, this visit will be the first adult delegation from Fort Worth to Bandung in over ten years.
The idea for a Fort Worth-Bandung sister relationship was conceived after Indonesia sought to purchase aircraft from American aerospace company Lockheed Martin, which operates a manufacturing plant in Fort Worth. At the time, Lockheed Martin was also looking to expand its sales of military aircraft in the Indo-Pacific. This mutual economic interest led to the establishment of a new sister cities partnership, which the two cities’ respective chambers of commerce accomplished in 1990. While the relationship was founded on economic ties and security cooperation, the Fort Worth-Bandung partnership has since evolved to emphasize cultural exchanges, people-to-people ties, and international cooperation.
In the three and a half decades since its inception, Fort Worth and Bandung have launched several initiatives focused on engaging their communities across a variety of sectors and topics. One of the main pillars of the Fort Worth-Bandung relationship is educational exchange, with a particular emphasis on youth dialogue. Beth Weibel, Director of Exchanges and Outreach at Fort Worth Sister Cities International, shared in an interview with Young Professionals Lois Ramilo and Tommis Meyer that Fort Worth has held youth exchanges with Bandung as soon as the sister cities agreement was signed. Fort Worth offers a variety of educational exchanges, including biannual student delegations to Indonesia and its flagship Global Leadership Academy, which gathers student participants from all nine of Fort Worth’s sister cities for a youth conference. Visiting students spend the first week learning with and from one another and their second week in community engagement through visits to community centers and working with younger children. Fort Worth also offers an Ambassador School Program that allows Indonesian students to attend Fort Worth schools while living with local host families. "I’ve seen lifelong friendships be formed [through these programs],” Weibel shared. These friendships have formed the basis for expanded programs such as the 2023 Bandung-Fort Worth Youth Summit, which focused on bullying prevention and brought together over 200 attendees in a virtual exchange. Weibel also added that many of these initiatives are volunteer led by members of the local Fort Worth community who have experienced the transformative impact of the partnership.
Disaster prevention has been another major area of cooperation between the cities. According to Weibel, after Fort Worth sister cities won a US State Department grant for emergency preparedness, a delegation of Fort Worth professionals traveled to Bandung in 2003 and 2004. This group included an epidemiologist, a water treatment engineer, and an emergency room director at a county hospital. They traveled to Bandung to share knowledge and organize training simulations for disaster evacuation, which won Fort Worth the national award for Innovation in Public Safety. This achievement was recognized not just for its direct outcomes, but also for facilitating valuable diplomacy and exchange between American and Muslim communities, especially powerful in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. In 2011, Bandung sent a delegation of firefighters to learn from Fort Worth and bring back valuable lessons to their home, where just two fire stations serve a population of over 2 million people.
As one of six sister city partnerships with Indonesia—and the first among them—Fort Worth’s active relationship with Bandung serves as a more local representation of what the US-Indonesia relationship has grown to be. As the third largest global democracy and the largest economy in Southeast Asia, Indonesia has been a crucial regional partner to the United States. In 2024, bilateral trade between the two countries was valued at an estimated $38.4 billion, with Indonesia becoming a major importer of US agricultural products such as soybeans. In terms of cultural exchanges, around 14,700 Indonesians are alumni of US government-funded programs and about 7,500 Indonesians are currently pursuing their studies at American universities. Despite this impressive partnership at the national level, for Weibel, it is the individual connections and lifelong friendships that not only define the US-Indonesia partnership but push it forward. “The [alumni of the Fort Worth-Bandung exchanges], they just care about each other...they believe in the mission, they want to continue it, and they want to see it continue. They want that legacy [of cultural exchange] to keep going.”
The Sister Cities Series covers notable Sister City Partnerships with Asia across the United States, highlighting cooperation and exchange serving as a foundation to improve relations and understanding between peoples and localities in the United States and the Indo-Pacific.
Tommis Meyer is a Spring 2025 Young Professional Intern at the East-West Center in Washington. Tommis is also in his final semester pursuing an undergraduate degree in Global International Relations at American University under its Joint Degree Program with Ritsumeikan University in Japan.
Lois Ramilo is a Spring Young Professional at the East West Center in Washington. She is a recent graduate from the University of California, San Diego where she majored in international relations.