Somerville Mayor Jake Wilson has been selected to take part in the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative.

By The Times Staff

Somerville Mayor Jake Wilson has been selected to join the tenth class of the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative. Mayor Wilson is one of just 46 mayors chosen from 15 countries to participate in this nine-month program.

Established with Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School, and housed at the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard, the Initiative is designed to help city leaders strengthen local government and better address residents’ top priorities. With the tenth class, 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 chiefs.

As part of the program, Mayor Wilson and senior officials from Somerville will learn from Harvard faculty, policy experts, and fellow mayors to tackle pressing challenges such as affordable housing. The program kicks off this week with an in-person convening in New York City.

Mayor Wilson is one of just 46 mayors chosen from 15 countries to participate in the 10th class of the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative.

Through the nine-month professional management program, Mayor Wilson, alongside two top Somerville officials who will begin in August, will gain strategies to improve how local government works and moves residents’ chief priorities forward.

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. Mayor Wilson will join them.

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 chiefs.

“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, Mayor Wilson will work alongside Harvard faculty, policy experts, veteran managers, and fellow mayors – 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, Somerville 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.

Through the program, Somerville is seeking to make it easier for residents, businesses, and developers to navigate city services.

Alumni of the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative include Pete Buttigieg, former U.S. Secretary of Transportation and mayor of South Bend, IN; Keisha Lance Bottoms, former Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement and mayor of Atlanta, GA; Mayor Muriel Bowser of the District of Columbia; Andy Burnham, Member of Parliament for Makerfield and former Mayor of Greater Manchester, UK; Mayor Misty Buscher of Springfield, IL; Mayor William Cogswell of Charleston, SC; Uruguay Vice President Carolina Cosse and former mayor of Montevideo, Uruguay; Mayor Patrick Farrell of Huntington, WV; John Giles, former mayor of Mesa, AZ; Claudia López, former mayor of Bogotá, Colombia; Mayor Tiffany O’Donnell of Cedar Rapids, IA; Mayor Brandon Scott of Baltimore, MD; and Mayor Paul TenHaken of Sioux Falls, SD.

Through these leadership programs, Somerville enters Bloomberg Philanthropies’ broader Government Innovation portfolio and global community of practice, tens of thousands of mayors and municipal officials strong, who draw on each other’s work to better the lives of the hundreds of millions of residents they collectively serve.

The Bloomberg Philanthropies Government Innovation program was built around a fundamental question: not what local governments should do, but whether they have the ability to do it. Michael R. Bloomberg spent three terms as mayor of New York City. He knew what the job demands, the opportunity to improve lives it holds, and what the system fails to provide. The philanthropic bet on Government Innovation he wagered was not on policy. It was on capacity.

These Government Innovation efforts provide municipalities with issue-agnostic capacity-building: strong leadership and management training, organizational muscle to produce results, investment in new ideas, peers to learn from, and the science to evidence-back their work. Today, that includes a deliberate range: executive development for mayors and the senior officials who run city hall’s core; stronger data, digital, and AI capabilities to improve how government serves; innovation talent and teams working across sectors and departments; capital and technical support to develop, test, implement, scale, and spread bold ideas and organizational practices that work; and the peer learning network and field of research that underpins it all.