Just City Mayoral Fellowship: Holding the Line When It Mattered Most
When a primary federal funding stream shifted in 2025, the Just City Mayoral Fellowship—a proven national program connecting city leaders with tools and partnerships to advance equity through the built environment—faced a moment of real uncertainty. The United States Conference of Mayors refused to let it falter.
Trinity Simons Wagner, Executive Director of the Mayors’ Institute on City Design, said, “The challenge was not only to sustain the program, but to do so in a way that preserved its quality, relevance and ability to meet the moment for mayors across the country.”
Demand for the Fellowship remained strong. Across the country, mayors were grappling with the legacy of inequitable planning and development while navigating urgent pressures around housing, economic development and community trust. So the Conference of Mayors, alongside partners at the Just City Lab at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, committed to not just sustaining the program—but strengthening it.
That meant delivering the full Fellowship experience: convening mayors and senior staff for in-person workshops and virtual sessions, connecting them with leading practitioners and supporting priority projects in their cities.
“The challenge was not only to sustain the program, but to do so in a way that preserved its quality, relevance and ability to meet the moment for mayors across the country.”
Trinity Simons Wagner, Executive Director of the Mayors’ Institute on City Design
It also meant going deeper—helping participating teams apply design justice principles to real challenges, strengthening cohort connections, and beginning to capture lessons from across the program’s growing body of work. Harvard’s Just City Lab expanded engagement with students and Loeb Fellows, enriching the Fellowship’s intellectual foundation. A sixth cohort is now set to launch in 2026.
Had this work stalled, mayors actively seeking new approaches to serve all residents would have lost a critical space for reflection, learning, and action. A growing national network of leaders building shared knowledge about equitable city-building would have been disrupted at precisely the wrong moment.
Instead, the Fellowship held—and cities kept moving forward.
