Spotlight: Participatory Budgeting Project
As a researcher, former community organizer, and someone quite passionate about social justice, I am always intrigued by organizations that are doing powerful and amazing work that is reshaping the way people invest in communities. I want to shed a spotlight on one of these organizations – the Participatory Budgeting Project.
What is the Participatory Budgeting Project?
The Participatory Budgeting Project empowers people to decide together how to spend public money. The organization creates and supports participatory budgeting processes that deepen democracy, build stronger communities, and make public budgets more equitable and effective.
Participatory Budgeting (PB) is a democratic process in which community members directly decide how to spend part of a public budget. It gives ordinary people real power over real money, letting them work with government to make the budget decisions that affect their lives.
The idea for PBP began when scholars Josh Lerner, Michael Menser, and Gianpaolo Baiocchi met at the 2005 World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil—the very place where participatory budgeting was first launched in 1989. All three of them had been researching, writing about, and/or working with international communities to do participatory budgeting.
In 2009 Josh and Gianpaolo officially launched PBP to formalize their work supporting the first PB process in the US, in Chicago’s 49th ward, and leading a participatory evaluation of PB in Toronto.
In 2011, PBP incorporated as a 501(c)3 nonprofit, with Josh as Executive Director and Mike as Board President. PBP launched an ambitious new PB process in four NYC districts. PBNYC has since become the largest PB process in the United States.
How is it being used?
The City of Oakland is utilizing the participatory budgeting process in their communities. Currently, it is being used to give Oakland residents of City Council Districts 1 and 2 the power to set priorities for how federal Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) funds should be spent to improve low-to-moderate income communities in their district.
Over 1,200 community members voted in PB Oakland to help decide how to spend $784,678 over 2 years to benefit low-and moderate-income residents in Oakland Council Districts 1 and 2.
If you would like to learn more about this work, click here.
