Sterling Heights agrees to sister city status with Ankawa

STERLING HEIGHTS — The city of Sterling Heights has a new “sibling” more than 6,000 miles away.

During an Aug. 20 meeting, the Sterling Heights City Council unanimously approved via its consent agenda the establishment of a sister city relationship with Ankawa, a city in northern Iraq with a large Chaldean Christian population. According to a Sterling Heights city document, Ankawa’s population is around 65,000, and 90% of its residents are Chaldean.

According to Sterling Heights officials, the city already has sister city ties with Tetovo, North Macedonia; Legazpi City and Sorsogon City, Philippines; Sant’Elia Fiumerapido and Cassino, Italy; Shengjin, Albania; and Jaffna, Sri Lanka.

Sterling Heights Special Projects Coordinator Meghan Ahearn said the city has been busy working on the latest partnership, including three months involving online meetings between Ankawa and Sterling Heights officials, including Sterling Heights Mayor Michael Taylor and City Manager Mark Vanderpool.

“Up until now, the sister city partnerships forged with the city of Sterling Heights have been more ceremonial and have lacked follow-up conversations on either side,” Ahearn said.

“Going forward, these ceremonial partnerships will now be infused with continuous collaboration and education, setting a new model for sister partnerships in the future.”

Ahearn said the partnership will focus on three main types of stakeholders. According to her presentation, the first is culture, which particularly involves communities, youth, foundations and service providers. The second is education, pertaining to research, media and donors. And the last stakeholder category is commerce, involving businesses, trade unions, investors and more.

City intern Kirill Eydinov said the cultural exchange component of the partnership will include art, music and youth development. He said the city hopes to hold a digital art exchange with Ankawa, as well as an annual art contest held by both cities.

He also said the program would recognize “rising talent and emerging leaders” in each city. And he said there could be exchanges among the cities’ business communities as well as “thought leadership workshops” related to organizational management, cybersecurity and more.

According to a city timeline, Sterling Heights expects many of these programs, including the international art contest and the educational and business programs, to take place during the 2025 fiscal year.

The city said it hopes to accept a delegation from Ankawa and also hopes to send a Sterling Heights delegation over there. A delegation trip of city and CCF representatives is also planned for the 2025 fiscal year, followed by an Ankawa delegation visit in the 2026 fiscal year.

Eydinov said the city planned to submit an application for a federal grant program by the end of August to fund the initiative. The intern added that the program has support from Ankawa, the Kurdistan Regional Government, Macomb Community College and the Chaldean Community Foundation.

“We will continue to seek federal money and sustain and grow this program, but we also have a public-private partnership platform in mind if along the way we need financial stopgaps to complete our projects,” Eydinov said.

When City Council members responded to the presentation, Mayor Pro Tem Liz Sierawski said she is eager to see the program’s direction and welcomed the news that it would be “mostly outside funded,” adding that residents expect the city to be careful with money.

Taylor said he met Ankawa’s mayor, Ramy Noori Awdish, a few months ago when the latter was in town, adding that it was “a very productive meeting.” Taylor said he hopes to visit Ankawa someday, adding that he visited the Middle East earlier this year and “was absolutely blown away.”

“It’s long overdue that we have a sister city relationship with an Iraqi city,” Taylor said. “Iraqis make up, Chaldeans make up, probably the single largest ethnic group in the city of Sterling Heights, and they’re an incredibly important part of our community. … And it’s important, I think, that we don’t just make this sister city relationship like some of the others — that we really make it meaningful and learn from them and impart whatever we can on the city of Ankawa as well.”

Sterling Heights Community Relations Director Melanie Davis said after the meeting in a text message that the city has not at this point budgeted any funding toward the Ankawa partnership’s programming. She identified the potential federal grant as coming from the U.S. Embassy & Consulate in Iraq’s Public Diplomacy Small Grants Program and said the grant application is seeking $98,875.

CCF President Martin Manna told the Sentry after the meeting that the CCF has been “actively pursuing this relationship between the city of Sterling Heights and the city of Ankawa mainly because these two cities probably boast the largest concentrations of Chaldeans both in Iraq and the United States.” Manna said around 25% of Sterling Heights is Chaldean.

Manna explained that Ankawa can learn city administration practices from Sterling Heights, and Sterling Heights can learn from Ankawa the historical traditions and Chaldean culture. He also said he has personally visited Ankawa before.

“Ankawa is one of the fastest-growing cities in northern Iraq within the Kurdistan region,” he said. “I was pleasantly surprised at the open spaces, the park settings, the fact that this is one of a few cities in Iraq that has a flourishing Chaldean community.”

Learn more about the Chaldean Community Foundation by visiting chaldeanfoundation.org. Learn more about Sterling Heights by visiting sterlingheights.gov or by calling (586) 446-2489.