In the three months since Bloomberg Philanthropies launched its $40 million COVID-19 Global Response Initiative, with partner Resolve to Save Lives, an initiative of Vital Strategies, 31 countries in Africa have been able to deepen and expand their public health efforts to minimize the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic.

College Bridge, an innovative program that helps New York City public high schoolers overcome the “summer melt” and make a successful transition to college, will expand this year to reach every 2020 graduating senior as a direct result of a $877,000 grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies. An additional $250,000 grant from The Carroll and Milton Petrie Foundation will provide support for the program’s summer and fall terms.

“We lost one of the true visionary artists of our time, my friend Christo. Along with his partner Jeanne-Claude, Christo conceived of projects that seemed unimaginable, and together they redefined what’s possible. His public works brought so many people together to experience them, including ‘The Gates’ in Central Park, which our administration strongly supported, helping Christo realize a vision he had conceived decades before. Christo inspired us with his brilliance and originality, and his works will continue to do so for decades to come.”

Bloomberg Philanthropies and World Central Kitchen announced that together they have served more than one million meals over the past six weeks to 30,000 healthcare workers on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City. Since this partnership launched with a $6 million gift from Mike Bloomberg on April 15th, workers at 16 facilities of NYC Health + Hospitals, the largest public health care system in the country, were served fresh, daily meals.

The story of Greenwood is not just one of the ugliest chapters in American history. It’s part of a 400 year history of racial oppression that systematically robbed generations of Black Americans of their labor and wealth and denied them an equal opportunity to pursue the American dream. That history, like the massacre at Greenwood, has been buried for far too long, and that needs to change.

Mike Bloomberg announced a new set of supports for cities to aid COVID-19 as part of Bloomberg Philanthropies COVID-19 Local Response Initiative.

More than 300 participants from 200 cities around the world, including mayors, local leaders, and members of response teams, joined Bloomberg Philanthropies’ 10th virtual COVID-19 Local Response Initiative convening where Dr. Anthony Fauci, MD, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Michael Bloomberg addressed some of the challenges associated with the pandemic and the path forward to reopening cities.

More than 350 participants from over 220 cities around the world, including mayors, local leaders, and members of response teams, joined Bloomberg Philanthropies’ ninth virtual COVID-19 Local Response Initiative convening where Vice President Joe Biden and Michael Bloomberg addressed some of the challenges associated with the pandemic.

The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, with Bloomberg Philanthropies, launched a free online course to help train a new cadre of contact tracers to reach and assist people exposed to the virus. Taking and passing this course will be a requirement for thousands of contact tracers being hired by the state of New York to fight the pandemic.

States that are reopening their economies even as cases of Covid-19 are still rising are threatening their own residents and the whole country. But they are also running into two challenges that all states will face: Employees don’t want to return to work if they fear exposure to coronavirus on the job, and employers don’t want to get sued if their workers or customers end up sick. Both concerns are reasonable, and both could further cripple the economy unless Congress steps in.