New York, New York (July 13, 2026)—This week, together with Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative welcomed its tenth class, bringing together 46 mayors from 15 countries who collectively serve more than 22 million residents. Through the nine-month professional management program, the mayors—alongside two top officials from each of their city halls who will begin in August—will gain strategies to improve how local government works and move residents’ chief priorities forward.

“Leading a city is among the hardest jobs in public service anywhere as the demands on mayors—and the complex challenges they face—continue to grow,” said Jorrit de Jong, Director of the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University and Emma Bloomberg Senior Lecturer in Public Policy and Management at Harvard Kennedy School. “Meeting those challenges requires city halls to continually strengthen how they work, and with Michael R. Bloomberg’s unwavering backing, we built the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative to help them do just that—and every mayor teaches us in return. With a decade of those insights informing our research and teaching, we are excited to welcome this tenth class and learn alongside them as they strengthen their cities.”

The flagship 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 will have now 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 officials.

“Mayors sit at the first and last mile of every major problem we face, and we built the Government Innovation program to ensure they have the capacity required to lead,” said James Anderson, who leads the Government Innovation program at Bloomberg Philanthropies. “The Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative is at its center, and in a moment that demands more from public leadership than ever, this class will have that world of support behind them. We look forward to these mayors putting it to work, and all that their city halls will do.”

Through the Initiative, the mayors will work alongside Harvard faculty, policy experts, veteran managers, and fellow mayors—periodically in classrooms, virtual sessions, and in the field—beginning with a multi-day convening in New York City this week. Participants 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. Once the coursework ends, each participating local government remains eligible for more: professional education for senior officials in economic development, human resources, procurement, and civic engagement; a Bloomberg Harvard City Hall Fellow, placed for up to two years on a priority the mayor sets; and research and instructional material developed across the program’s first decade.

The tenth class of mayors represents 28 U.S. and 18 international cities, home to more than 22 million residents.