We have a winner!
Each year, the Participatory Budgeting Project invites our partners, supporters, and donors to decide how a portion of our budget is spent – it’s our own participatory budgeting process, called PB².
Our vote phase concluded earlier this year, and we are excited to share the winning project: Trainings for Young PB Leaders. A big congratulations to supporters of this project!
We had over 100 people vote to choose their favorite project between four proposals. This cycle, the four PBP community generated proposals on the ballot included Tools to Help Understand PB Readiness, Trainings For Young PB Leaders, Art For Democracy Scholarships: Creating Youth Visions With PB, and Your Dollars, Your Decisions: PB Story Contest. Our staff loved all the proposed projects and will keep them in mind as we keep working collaboratively to build democracy.
The winning project will create a training “fund” for graphic design, filmmaking or community organizing trainings (or similar) for young people connected to or advocating for a PB process. Young people connected to PB process advocacy who are looking to participate in skill building will be able to apply to the “fund” for resources to learn new skills related to bringing PB to their community.
Participating youth will be invited to apply these skills to support ongoing on the ground efforts where they are. This project will enhance the reach and effectiveness of local PB processes while building up the skills of local leaders. This will also grow the field by investing in professional skill building for people engaged in PB advocacy/developing materials.
The PB² process is guided by a Steering Committee made up of PBP staff members. Everyone at PBP wants to extend a HUGE thank you to all of our supporters, donors, and community members who played a role in the 2023 process by coming to one of our ideation workshops, submitting ideas, volunteering as budgeting delegates to help develop proposals, and voting!
We also want to offer a special thanks to our budget delegates, who showed up with us over several months to transform community ideas into ready to vote on proposals. It was amazing to get the chance to practice PB with you and mold our community’s fantastic ideas turn into proposals and now a winning project that we will use to advance participatory democracy and build community power.
Our staff looks forward to implementing the winning project and building the skills of young leaders during future PB processes. We have reserved $20,000 of our organizational budget for this project.
Next, we plan to take some time to reflect on and review this year’s PB² process before we start a new cycle. Stay tuned for updates on our PB² webpage!
