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