The Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative is at the center of more than 10 years of work led by Bloomberg Philanthropies through its Government Innovation program to strengthen mayoral leadership and local government across the globe. Today, it is where the world’s mayors come to learn—and to lead.

Established with Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School, and housed at the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard, the Initiative has served 447 mayors—including eight in ten of America’s big-city mayors and nine of England’s mayoral strategic authorities—alongside over 3,000 municipal chiefs.

Through the program, mayors and top local government officials learn to organize teams around outcomes, ground decisions in evidence, and collaborate across departments and sectors—applying lessons directly to the issues at home, from housing and affordability to economic growth, public safety, and emergency response.

The Initiative has helped participants make headway across challenges: Philadelphia, PA is reforming zoning appeals by 85% to unlock 30,000 new homes, while San Diego, CA now turns around building permits that once took 120 days in eight to 11. In South Yorkshire, UK, city hall’s Beds for Babies has given 1,900 children and counting a safe place to sleep. Boston, MA steered $151 million in municipal contracts to smaller firms—a 133% jump since 2020—after local government redesigned how it purchases. Shreveport Mayor Tom Arceneaux took back 11 neighborhoods from blight: 810 tons of debris cleared, more than 3,000 abandoned tires gone, blocks worth investing in again. And through these leadership programs, localities enter Bloomberg Philanthropies’ broader community of practice, tens of thousands of mayors and municipal officials strong, who draw on each other’s work to better the lives of the hundreds of millions of residents they collectively serve.