I recently had a meeting that took me back to the beginning of one of our longest-running and most successful initiatives, and it left me feeling incredibly inspired about the future.

Back in 2011, U.S. coal production was hovering around its all-time peak. Opposition to coal was a third rail across the political spectrum, but the science was growing increasingly clear: Burning coal was the greatest obstacle to progress in the climate fight, both in the United States and globally, and it was a deadly threat to public health.

Here in the United States, a cap-and-trade bill had recently failed to pass Congress, leaving the prospects of any action on climate in doubt. So, when we learned that the Sierra Club was making progress on an effort called Beyond Coal, which aimed to stop the construction of new U.S. coal-fired plants, we knew we had to act. Together with the Sierra Club, we built a groundbreaking national campaign that involved the first comprehensive effort to map and gather data on every coal plant across the country, along with critical information on their economic performance and pollution levels, allowing us to develop a powerful plant-by-plant strategy. And we set a concrete goal: closing one-third of the country’s existing coal plants by 2020.

In the years that followed, we won fight after fight, quickly beating our original goal. We also ran into new challenges: The construction of new gas-fired power plants began to undercut our progress, and the development of clean energy lagged far behind. In response, we expanded our ambitions by launching the Beyond Carbon campaign in 2019 to build on our coal efforts, block planned gas plants, and support clean energy policies at the state level. We also funded workforce development programs in regions long dependent on fossil fuels.

In April 2023, we convened our partners in this work at Bloomberg Philanthropies for the first time since before the pandemic. It was a chance for Mike and me to sit down with the leaders we’ve collaborated with from the very start, and review just how far we’ve come.

We’ve now helped retire more than 70% of all U.S. coal plants, and we’re aiming to close the remaining 30% by the end of the decade. That success led us to expand our work globally, first to Europe in 2017 and now across 32 additional countries, including 25 developing countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Meanwhile, Beyond Carbon has helped block nearly one-third of all planned U.S. gas capacity and ensured that 20 states and territories now have 100% clean energy laws in place.

As the UN’s COP26 approached in the fall, the first major climate summit since the 2015 Paris Agreement, we saw a unique opportunity to elevate our partners and their work.

Media attention focused on what new commitments national governments might make, and while that was certainly important, commitments are only as good as the actions taken to support them. Developing, adopting, and implementing national policies take time, which we don’t have a lot of, as well as political capital, and even the most deliberate efforts don’t always become law. The leaders we’ve long supported – like mayors, scientists, activists, business and philanthropic leaders, and local advocates – can act much faster. And so in the two months leading up to the summit, we decided to pull them all together in a push to build momentum, by taking 60 actions in 60 days.

For example: With partners like C40 Cities and the Global Covenant of Mayors, we rallied more than 1,000 cities to pledge to reach net zero emissions by 2030, decades earlier than many national governments have committed to doing. We worked with the mayors of London and Brussels to roll out localized air quality sensors and better manage the threat of toxic air pollution. And we collaborated with our colleagues at Bloomberg L.P., who are leading vitally important work to analyze the economic impacts of climate change and give companies and investors the data they need.

The response from our partners was overwhelmingly positive, and in just 60 days we took 85 concrete and meaningful actions to advance the climate fight. It was a testament to the power of strong partnerships, which lie at the heart of our approach to philanthropy. Working for Mike Bloomberg, whether in the public, private, or nonprofit sector, has always meant building partnerships that have the potential to make the greatest difference in people’s lives – an idea that informs everything we do at Bloomberg Philanthropies.

Over the past year, as COVID-19 continued turning the world upside down, we focused on strengthening and deepening our partnerships in ways that would allow us to respond to urgent needs quickly and decisively. The pandemic pushed those needs to new heights across all of our program areas, especially since much of our work focuses on the places it hit hardest: cities.

In working closely with U.S. mayors and local leaders, we realized they were having trouble navigating the complex process to access new funding available to them through the American Rescue Plan. To help, we teamed up with the U.S. Conference of Mayors to launch a COVID-19 Federal Assistance e311 program that provides cities with guidance and answers, including online resources and in-depth workshops led by emergency management experts. The program is now helping city leaders develop their pandemic recovery efforts and address other long-term challenges.

Given the global nature of the pandemic, we launched our first-ever Global Mayors Challenge, which built on previous competitions we had run in the United States, Europe, and Latin America and the Caribbean. Out of more than 600 city applications that proposed innovative solutions to their most pressing issues, we provided 50 finalists with extensive technical assistance and support to test and strengthen their proposals. We’re now working with 15 winning cities to implement their exciting ideas and to help spread their successes to other cities worldwide. More than 250 cities are already replicating effective ideas from earlier editions of the Mayors Challenge.

As the pandemic dragged on, arts organizations recognized they could not afford to wait for audiences to return. Survival meant strengthening and expanding their digital strategies to engage audiences beyond their physical walls and in-person programs. Those strategies, however, require new investments and expertise in technology and design, at a time when many organizations have seen their revenue streams dry up. To respond to their needs, we launched an effort with more than 40 cultural partners in the United States and the United Kingdom to help them create new digital initiatives and use technology effectively. These investments will long outlast the pandemic and help them emerge from it stronger than ever.

Podcast

Hear from Mike Bloomberg and Patti Harris on how Bloomberg Philanthropies will continue to tackle challenges and advance opportunities