Harvard University will use a $150 million investment to establish the Bloomberg Center For Cities.
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Bloomberg Philanthropies announced today that it was investing $150 million to establish the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University. The new partnership will provide training, research and resources for local government leaders around the world.
Today’s gift will enable a major extension of the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative, which was established in 2017 with a $32 million donation from former New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg to the Harvard Business School and the Harvard Kennedy School. Since its inception it has provided training and consultation to 159 mayors and their 800 top advisers from 153 cities, according to the The Harvard Crimson.
A particular recent emphasis has been to assist municipal leaders and their teams cope with the health, economic and social challenges from the coronavirus pandemic. It has enabled mayors across the world to receive weekly public health information updates and to share strategies and practices that guide crisis management efforts on behalf of their cities.
The new center will focus on building the capabilities of mayors and other city leaders by providing extensive professional training and sharing best practices in municipal management. It will contain several elements:
- Expanding the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative through a new program for recently elected mayors to help them build their teams along with other programming for city hall leaders;
- Supporting research on city governance;
- Funding new, two-year City Hall Fellowships for Harvard graduate students to work in mayoral offices not only in the U.S, but in other countries;
- Creating the endowed Bloomberg Center for Cities as a permanent component at the university that will be dedicated to strengthening city leadership and governance;
- Endowing 10 faculty positions that will be named for Emma Bloomberg, a graduate of both Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School.
“This is a major new investment in the people who have enormous and unique powers to attack society’s biggest challenges: mayors,” said Mr. Bloomberg in a press release. “The pandemic has driven home just how important mayors are to the everyday lives of billions of people. They are the most creative and effective problem-solvers in government — and that’s exactly the kind of leadership that the world urgently needs more. Building on our partnership with Harvard, this new investment will help more city leaders learn from one another and get even more big things done locally.”
“Harvard is honored to partner with Bloomberg Philanthropies to strengthen the ways in which we support local leaders whose cities are facing unprecedented challenges,” said Harvard President Larry Bacow. “The University is home to many people who are committed to serving the public and improving communities through deep expertise, useful knowledge, and wide-ranging research. The prospect of helping to bring about more effective leadership through collaboration and innovation is as exciting as it is inspiring. We look forward to seeing the resources, tools, and support provided by the center put to good use in city halls around the world.”
The Harvard gift is just the latest donation Mr. Bloomberg has made to several universities over recent years. In addition to his prior gifts to Harvard, he has given more than $3 billion to his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University, including a $1.8 billion donation in 2018 that is regarded as the largest private gift to an American university in history. In 2015, Bloomberg gave $100 million to Cornell University to establish Cornell Tech, the applied sciences graduate school of Cornell.
And last September, he announced his foundation would make a $100 million donation to four historically Black medical schools, in an attempt to improve the health and wealth of Black communities. The gift will ultimately benefit about 800 medical students, who will each receive grants of up to $100,000 to support their studies at Charles R. Drew University of Science and Medicine, in Los Angeles; Howard University College of Medicine, in Washington; Meharry Medical College, in Nashville; and Morehouse School of Medicine.
