Turku selected as a winner of the Bloomberg Philanthropies 2025 – 2026 Mayors Challenge

The Mayor of Turku, Piia Elo, announced today that Turku has been named one of the 24 winners of the Bloomberg Philanthropies 2025 – 2026 Mayors Challenge, a competition to spur local government innovation that improves lives in cities around the world. The sixth Challenge awards municipalities that have proposed and tested the best breakthrough ideas to bolster essential services at scale. 

As a winner, the City of Turku will receive $1 million as well as operational support and additional funding for dedicated staff to reform the city's food aid, combining digital solutions, community meals, and diverse support services into a seamless whole. 

According to Mayor Piia Elo, far too many people are struggling with their problems in silence.

“This idea matters to me personally, because I want Turku to be a city where no one is left behind. Where every person is treated with dignity, and where the community stands together to solve not just the symptoms of poverty, but its root causes,” says Piia Elo. 

The 24 winning city halls represent 20 countries  

Selected from more than 630 applications, and the prototypes developed by 50 cities during the finalist phase, when each pressure-tested core hypotheses with residents, the winners were chosen for their ideas’ novelty, potential impact, and strength of implementation plans. 

“The most effective city halls are bold, creative, and proactive in solving problems and meeting residents’ needs – and we launched the Mayors Challenge to help more of them succeed,” said Michael R. Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg Philanthropies and Bloomberg L.P., and three-term mayor of New York City. “We look forward to supporting this year’s 24 winners as they bring their innovative projects to life – and to seeing their ideas spread to more cities around the world.”

Now, Turku will have the resources to execute and expand its Mayors Challenge-winning program called Food First. Over the coming weeks and months, Turku will begin work to link food aid with other services and residents’ reception to the digital platform.

“The next step is to test full integration with warehouse management and logistics, including how to ensure food safety and maintain cold chains throughout the distribution process. We also need to understand how service referrals work in practice: how many residents follow up, what barriers they face, and what staff capacity is needed,” says Program Director Niina Haukioja.

The 2025 – 2026 Mayors Challenge was launched by Mike Bloomberg in October 2024 at Bloomberg CityLab in Mexico City. More than 630 cities applied. In July 2025, 200 municipal chiefs from the 50 finalist cities — including top officials from Turku— gathered at Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Ideas Camp in Bogotá to hone their concepts with experts and peers. As a finalist, Turku received $50,000 and technical guidance to prototype its idea locally. This enabled city officials to gain valuable resident feedback and fine-tune the proposal based on what worked.

During the finalist phase, Turku prototyped both the service model and the digital platform. Service advisors joined food distributions to test conversations with residents, while residents reviewed early platform layouts and shared feedback on clarity and usability. As part of the ongoing Mayors Challenge program, Turku will continue to use these innovation practices to implement the Bloomberg Philanthropies-supported intervention.