CEO Letter on Philanthropy
Patricia E. Harris
“Across all our areas of work, we look for unmet needs, rely on data, and invest in organizations and people with bold ideas and big ambitions — including the next generation of leaders.”
As Mike often says, our highest responsibility is to build a better world for our children and future generations. That belief guides every decision we make at Bloomberg Philanthropies as we work to fulfill our mission of saving and improving the greatest number of lives.
One of the most important ways we do this is by investing in the next generation of leaders. We recently had the opportunity to hear directly from one, Darren Baine, who joined a meeting of the full Bloomberg Philanthropies team to talk about a project he organized through our Youth Climate Action Fund. A talented young entrepreneur, Darren brought together more than 60 young people for a hackathon in Ontario, Canada, to come up with ways to protect people from local flooding. His leadership, combined with our funding, spurred the development of two new apps that have the potential to save lives: one to alert residents to where floods are occurring, and another to guide the community through what to do in an emergency.
Darren’s work in Ontario offers a glimpse into how the Youth Climate Action Fund has empowered young people to pursue projects that address the causes of climate change and the threats it poses to communities. Over the past two years, we have supported nearly 3,000 projects across 98 cities, and more than 100,000 young people have taken part. At the COP30 Local Leaders Forum we hosted in Brazil, we committed to a major expansion of this work — tripling the number of cities where we’ll support projects led by young people. In Madrid, during CityLab, our annual gathering of local leaders, we announced a new group of cities where we will help young changemakers tackle climate challenges directly affecting their communities.
As we empower more young people to take on climate change, we’re also helping young public health leaders turn their passion into policy change. For instance, through our longstanding partnership with the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, we helped convene a Global Young Ambassadors Summit in Nairobi, Kenya, where up-and-coming public health champions came together for workshops and trainings designed to sharpen their organizing and communication skills. We know that 90 percent of adult smokers begin smoking before the age of 18 — and that young people can be the most influential advocates with their peers.
The next generation of public health leaders came together in November 2025 at the Global Young Ambassadors Summit, hosted by our partner, the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.
Our largest investments in young people go toward improving public education and opening doors to opportunity. In 2025, we hit a major milestone in that work and surpassed our goal of adding 150,000 high-quality public charter school seats in the United States. We are also providing students with new career pathways. For example, our healthcare-focused high school initiative is preparing students to graduate ready to work in well-paying healthcare jobs that offer opportunities for growth — a model that has the potential to be adopted in other industries, too. And our arts internship program is making it possible for thousands of students to earn money while working at more than 430 cultural organizations, helping them gain real-world experience. Today’s intern could be tomorrow’s museum executive, curator, or creative director.
As we’ve worked to expand educational opportunities for young people, we’ve seen that one of the biggest barriers to learning is also one of the simplest to fix: poor vision. After all, when children can’t see the board, they are far more likely to fall behind in class. Through our new global Vision Initiative, we are helping restore sight for people of all ages by expanding access to free vision screenings, cataract surgeries, and eyeglasses for millions of people in low- and middle-income countries and the United States.
Our Vision Initiative is expanding access to free vision screenings and eyeglasses for millions of people, including students in four U.S. cities.
Each of these interventions can make a world of difference, as Mike and I saw last fall when we visited an elementary school in Baltimore where students received vision screenings and tried on new glasses, which brought tears to their eyes, and to ours.
Across all our areas of work, we look for unmet needs, rely on data, and invest in organizations and people with bold ideas and big ambitions — including the next generation of leaders. As I hope you will see in this report, we are tireless in finding new and powerful ways of doing that.
Sincerely,
Patricia E. Harris
CEO
Bloomberg Philanthropies
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