John,

As another year comes to a close, Mike and Patti wanted to share a quick message with you.

Take a moment to watch their short video — it's less than two minutes long — to hear about the impact Bloomberg Philanthropies' people and partners had in 2025.

Despite the challenges this year, we recommitted to seeking out and addressing unmet needs, mobilizing innovative solutions, and making a meaningful difference in the lives of millions of people.

At a critical moment for public health around the world, we joined a global coalition to protect 370 million children from polio each year and bring the world closer to eradicating the disease.

We also teamed up with Warby Parker and other partners to tackle a health condition that creates school and career obstacles for people all over the world: poor vision. Our new Vision Initiative is expanding access to screenings, cataract surgeries, and eyeglasses for millions of people in the United States and low- and middle-income countries.

In the lead up to this year's COP30 in Brazil, Mike joined local leaders to kick off the next era of local climate leadership and collaboration with new investments and a focus on multi-level partnerships.

To reduce methane emissions that have 80-times the warming power of carbon, we announced an end-to-end effort to track methane leaks from space and deploy teams to quickly cap them on the ground.

And in 2025, after years of international negotiations and with support from the Bloomberg Philanthropies Ocean Initiative, 73 countries ratified the UN High Seas Treaty — crossing a threshold for the treaty to enter into force and unlocking the process to build new protections for ocean waters, marine biodiversity, and the communities that depend on them. In Newsweek, Patti wrote that it "may have been the biggest moment for ocean conservation in history."

This year our healthcare-focused high schools initiative continued to expand, and is now preparing thousands of students for in-demand jobs in 10 communities, with schools in two additional communities slated to open in 2026.

For the fourth year in a row Summer Boost, which provides summer learning and enrichment courses for more than 35,000 rising 1st through 9th grade students at over 450 schools, helped accelerate student learning and support sustained academic growth.

We also launched a first-of-its-kind effort with City Fund to create new public charter schools in partnership with historically Black colleges and universities, forging a stronger pipeline to college for thousands of students.

In 2025, we provided more than 400 high school and college students with internships at over 150 cultural institutions, and helped communities transform over 70,000 square feet of asphalt into street-safety improving art.

Our Public Art Challenge winners supported projects that addressed pressing civic challenges — such as Phoenix, Arizona's ¡Sombra!: Experiments in Shade, which helped residents cope with extreme heat through installations that provided shade and were found to reduce triple-digit temperatures by nearly 50 degrees.

This year we also celebrated the 20th anniversary of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's The Gates in New York City’s Central Park by bringing the landmark public art installation back to life with an augmented reality experience on our free Bloomberg Connects app. As of 2025, Bloomberg Connects' collection of digital guides and content now includes more than 1,200 museums and cultural institutions.

We named 50 global finalists in our latest Mayors Challenge, highlighting bold ideas to improve lives by bolstering essential municipal services, and our international City Data Alliance expanded to 15 new municipalities across the Americas, helping them modernize through advanced analytics, digital technology, and AI.

In Europe we partnered with the London School of Economics to create the European City Leadership Initiative, the region's first-ever mayoral leadership program, and we launched an effort to support mayors in the UK as they take on new responsibilities and powers under the devolution agenda.

Finally, we matched your generous donations to Vision to Learn, Helen Keller Intl, and the Mutual Aid Sudan Coalition, nonprofits that were chosen by two-time Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times columnist Nick Kristof for his annual Holiday Impact Prize. You can still donate today and make double the impact on a host of critical challenges.

It's been a year full of progress. We hope you'll take a moment to watch Mike and Patti's message reflecting on 2025, and looking ahead to more bold action in 2026:

https://www.bloomberg.org/videos/mike-bloomberg-patti-harris-on-the-milestones-reached-in-2025-and-a-look-towards-2026/

Happy holidays!

— Bloomberg Philanthropies