Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative — Peer Learning and Executive Education for Mayors

Since 2017, Bloomberg Philanthropies has funded a nine-month executive-education and peer-learning programme for sitting mayors, delivered jointly by the Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School.

Build sitting mayors' professional-management capacity through in-person convenings, virtual sessions, fieldwork and up to two years of continued support via embedded Bloomberg Harvard City Hall Fellows.

Ten annual classes have been run since 2017; the initiative also funds an associated research programme whose findings are published in peer-reviewed outlets and packaged into practitioner-facing guidance for participating mayors.

447 mayors and more than 3,000 senior municipal officials have taken part across 35+ countries; the 2026 class alone brought together 46 mayors from 15 countries across five continents, collectively serving over 22 million residents, and the programme now reaches eight in ten of America's big-city mayors and nine of England's mayoral strategic authorities.

Reach and institutional continuity are well documented, but no independent, causal evaluation of the leadership programme's own effect on city-level performance or resident outcomes has been published — the evidence base is participation scale, curriculum design and satisfaction-oriented reporting rather than a controlled before/after assessment.