$25 million, matched: Mike Bloomberg’s effort to teach a new generation about 9/11

Former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg, who now chairs the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, has pledged to match every donation to the museum’s Never Forget Fund dollar for dollar, up to $25 million.

It’s the centerpiece of a $75 million campaign the museum launched ahead of the 25th anniversary of September 11, and organizers say the first $25 million has already come in from early donors, meaning Bloomberg’s match could push the fund well past the halfway mark toward its goal.

“A generation of young Americans has no memory of 9/11,” Bloomberg said in announcing the gift. “It’s up to all of us to pass down the stories of the people we lost—and the courage and heroism so many showed.”

He’s framing the money as more than nostalgia. Roughly 100 million Americans alive today are either too young to remember the attacks or weren’t yet born, and the museum’s leadership has been blunt about what that means for an institution built on shared memory.

Beth Hillman, the museum’s president and CEO, put it simply: the goal is to make sure that even people with no living memory of that day can still feel its meaning.

“The ongoing importance of remembering 9/11 is to remind people that they can come together even in the face of incredible loss,” she said. She wants the story told not as tragedy alone but as one “of service, of hope, of resilience, of coming together.”

The money funds real things.

A new exhibition called “In Their Honor” just opened, tracing how ordinary people turned grief into action after 9/11—chefs who cooked for first responders, theater crews who lit up dark streets near Ground Zero, and families who built volunteer organizations in memory of people they lost.

There’s also a free digital learning program for students and teachers everywhere, plus new investment in teacher training so that classrooms without a single adult who remembers 2001 can still teach it well.

Since the Never Forget Fund started in 2021, it’s already reached 5.5 million students, teachers, and community members; the new push aims for 20 million students and 100,000 trained educators.

The offer is simple: give to the Never Forget Fund, and for now, Bloomberg doubles it.