After forging a "sibling city" partnership and enjoying a honeymoon period full of tours and festivities, Palo Alto and Bloomington, Indiana, are now setting the stage for some tougher conversations.

In the coming months, residents and elected leaders from the two cities will join forces for civic events focused on some of the most complex and contentious issues of the moment, including America's political divides, climate change and social justice.

The goal of the sibling city program is to have residents from different regions learn about one another and overcome their assumptions about other parts of the country, said Vicki Veenker, who founded the nonprofit Sibling City USA before getting elected to the Palo Alto City Council last year.

The idea is not so much about finding consensus as about finding a way to reasonably disagree while still remaining reasonably agreeable.

"In this country, we're sort of founded on principles of free speech and public discourse, and we kind of lost our ability to do that well because we put our position out there and we don't really listen to why there might be disagreements with that position," Veenker said in an interview.

The season of civic events will kick off on Sept. 7, when Palo Alto participates in an author talk that will take place in Bloomington featuring physicist and cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, who graduated from Stanford University before spending decades as professor in Indiana University. The event will be simulcast in both cities, City Manager Ed Shikada said last week.

Palo Alto residents would be able to catch it at 4 p.m. at Rinconada Library, according to Shikada.

The author talk will be followed by a series of Town Hall events featuring residents and civic leaders from both cities. The events "aim to renew our public square and offer opportunities to discuss tough issues with fellow Americans distant from us," according to the joint announcement by the two cities.

So far, the event calendar includes a Sept. 17 conversation titled "Bridging National Divides," an Oct. 4 meeting focused on climate action and a Nov. 12 event on race and belonging.

In Palo Alto, all three Sunday events will be held at 1 p.m. at the Mitchell Park Library.

The series highlights both the similarities and the major differences between the city's new sibling partnership and its eight existing ones.

Between 1964 and 2018, Palo Alto accumulated an octet of "sister cities": Palo Leyte, Philippines; Oaxaca, Mexico; Enschede, The Netherlands; Linkoping, Sweden; Albi, France; Tsuchiura, Japan; Heidelberg, Germany; and the Yangpu District, Shanghai, China.

Not all sisters, however, are treated equally. The city's partnerships with Hedelberg and Yangpu District, for example, center on business and sustainability, while Oaxaca and Tsuchiura are more focused on cultural exchanges.

Palo Alto's elected leaders occasionally take diplomatic missions abroad to visit the sister cities and schmooze with their elected counterparts. Palo Alto also regularly sends used firetrucks to Oaxaca and fit residents to Tsuchiura, where they get to partake in the Kasumigaura Marathon.

The Bloomington partnership has similarly involved relationship building through sightseeing and handshaking, with each city sending a delegation to the other.

In May 2022, a Palo Alto group went to Bloomington to tour City Hall, visit Dimension Mill and the nonprofit Teacher's Warehouse, take in a concert by students from Jacobs School of Music, gather with the Bloomington Rotary Club and have lunch with local business leaders at the Indiana University's Gayle Karch Cook Center for Public Arts and Humanities.

Bloomington's city leaders returned the favor in November, when they came over for a lunch hosted by Neighbors Abroad, a dinner hosted by the Rotary Club, tours of downtown and Stanford University, and an economic roundtable at City Hall.

They attended a climate summit at Gunn High School, organized by local students and elected leaders, featuring state Sen. Josh Becker and U.S. Department of Energy Assistant Secretary Ali Nouri, among others.

The two cities have also held virtual events, including a "Civil Discourse Launch" with 40 attendees and two keynote speakers: former Stanford University dean and Indiana University President Tom Ehrlich and Joan Blades, co-founder of Living Room Conversations, a nonprofit focused on bridging civic divides.

A new report from Shikada highlighted the Bloomington partnership's distinction from the sister cities: Its additional goal of promoting a free and civil exchange of ideas between red and blue America. (This despite the fact that Bloomington, while in a red state, is fairly liberal. "We sometimes call ourselves a blueberry in tomato soup," Bloomington Mayor John Hamilton quipped at a Palo Alto climate summit last year.).

Veenker said that the "sibling city" program is founded upon three pillars: community, commerce and civil discourse. It's the third one that the forthcoming series of Town Hall meetings is focused on.

"This is an effort to let everyone be heard and figure out why we disagree," she said. "This is not a consensus-building effort."

Veenker, who is herself a Hoosier, sees many links between her native state and her current one. There's Tara VanDerveer, who played basketball at Indiana University before becoming a coaching legend at Stanford. There's David Starr Jordan, who taught zoology at Indiana University Bloomington before becoming the founding president of Stanford University. There's Hofstadter.

Just last week, Palo Alto native Molly Tuttle, a Grammy-winning bluegrass artist, performed in Bloomington, where she received a mayoral proclamation that mentioned the sibling city relationship, Veenker said. New connections are being discovered all the time, she said.

She hopes that the Palo Alto and Bloomington relationship will serve as a blueprint for other cities to follow. Since founding her nonprofit, Veenker said she has heard from city officials from all over the country, including Michigan, Texas, Florida, Washington State and Ohio. Many have expressed interest in forging similar partnerships.

Veenker hopes that someday cities all over the country will have civic siblings in a state with a different political shade.

At the moment, however, Sibling Cities USA doesn't have the staffing or the funding to assist with further partnerships, Veenker said. She hopes at some point the organization will get a grant that would allow an expansion. In the meantime, her priority is to make the first such partnership a success.

"We really want to do well so we can learn from it," Veenker said.