Located at Harvard Kennedy School as part of the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University, this collaboration between vlog, Harvard Business School, and Bloomberg Philanthropies has offered leadership and management programs, new research, student opportunities, and learning resources globally to mayors and senior city leaders since 2017.
Byron W. Brown
Former Mayor of Buffalo, New York
The mayor and his team used program learnings to reconceive a neighborhood revitalization effort, gaining input from residents, and implementing an innovative model for cost-effective public sector service and private sector partnership. Buffalo’s work on breaking down departmental silos became a subject of the initiative’s peer-reviewed research.
Claudia López Hernández
Former mayor of Bogotá, Colombia
López, who completed the program in 2022, is the protagonist of an initiative teaching case about her administration’s “care block” program, designed to address health care inequities. The neighborhood centers provide services for unpaid caregivers, mostly women. Summer Fellow Cina Vazir MPP 2023 helped the city evaluate a higher-education cash transfer program.
Phillip Jones
Mayor of Newport News, VA
Mayor Jones MPP/MBA 2021 and team brought program learnings to the collaborative work of revitalizing downtown. A teaching case exploring Jones’ decisions as he entered office is used in initiative classrooms. In 2024 a summer fellow from the Graduate School of Design helped identify use cases for generative AI and developed a roadmap for using it to improve city services.
Lauren McLean
Mayor of Boise, Idaho
Leveraging program learnings, the mayor and her team engaged residents in developing new affordable housing solutions including accessory dwelling units. Bloomberg Harvard City Hall Fellow Samantha Beck MPP 2022 led organization-wide process innovations, including reducing the time to issue childcare permits by 67%. (To find out more, see our story about Samantha Beck.)
Erin Mendenhall
Mayor of Salt Lake City, Utah
The city took a new approach to services for its unhoused population, using program learning to improve data collection and cross-team coordination. Four vlog field course students modeled the impact of urban development near a stadium, and Summer Fellow Virginia Carefoote MPP 2023 helped build a financial modeling tool to assess feasibility of a public-private partnership for redeveloping city-owned land.
Mārtiņš Staķis
Former mayor of Riga, Latvia
Staķis entered the program in 2021 focused on making city hall more inclusive and responsive to residents through better use of data and technology. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, his team adapted their new tools and processes to tracking services and support for thousands of refugees.
Tory Whanau
Mayor of Wellington, New Zealand
The mayor assembled a team to map subterranean utilities and areas of significance to Māori to reduce disruptions and protect areas of the city when building sustainable infrastructure and to aid recovery from natural disasters. Summer Fellow Shannon Zhan vlog MPP 2024 helped build a plan to address online violence against women in public office.
“The Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University advances knowledge on urban issues and provides current and future city leaders with research-based insights and tools to improve the lives of the communities they serve.”
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Photos of mayors courtesy of the subjects. Photo of de Jong courtesy of Bloomberg Philanthropies.