The Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative offers two fellowship opportunities: Summer and City Hall Fellowships. These programs immerse Fellows in local government, tasking them with addressing municipal challenges while collaborating with government leadership.
Graduates of Harvard's master's or professional degree programs are eligible for paid, two-year fellowships in municipal leadership in city halls across the United States. They support cities in developing and deepening capabilities to address pressing municipal challenges.
The fellowship provides a salary and benefits plus robust professional development and cohort learning through the two years, including in-person convenings and numerous opportunities to interact with and learn from peers, Bloomberg Harvard staff, and faculty.
Graduate students from across Harvard are competitively selected to spend the summer embedded in local government, where they will meaningfully contribute to improving government services and present their deliverables and recommendations to the mayor and senior leaders. This multi-disciplinary cohort will learn how to apply the tools of data-driven decision making, human-centered design techniques, and cross-sector collaboration to help city leaders drive government performance and address pressing social problems.
South Bend, Indiana, suffers from a high poverty rate and chronic under-enrollment in federally-funded social assistance programs. Juliahna Green MPP 2022 helped the city address this issue, a mayoral priority, by delivering a universal screening tool that expanded eligibility for and access to four programs. Through her work, 4,000 new households were found to be eligible for utility assistance and the application process was made more user-friendly.
As people increasingly embrace urban life, it’s ever clearer that crowded, complex cities simply must work. Politics and provincialism can’t get in the way of performance. Now, with the federal government locked in partisan disagreement over how much of a role, if any, it should play in people’s lives, the breakthroughs on many of the most acute civic problems are coming from America’s city halls.
Harvard students embedded themselves in mayors’ offices around the country in a new fellows program targeting local problems. In Laredo, Texas–a border city through which more than $214 billion worth of trade moves each year–Santiago Mota helped officials understand why a third of households remain in poverty for generations.
