Participatory budgeting shifts budgets and builds people power. But can we also use it to redesign our relationships to capital, social justice movements, and one another? During this candid and insightful webinar, our guest speaker Jasmine Rashid taught us about financial activism.
Financial activism is how everyday people and organizations radically reimagine money as a tool for widespread well-being, instead of a weapon of absurdly increasing inequality.
During this interactive 90 minute workshop with activist and author Jasmine Rashid, we discussed the core concepts from her book, “The Financial Activist Playbook: 8 Strategies for Everyday People to Reclaim Wealth and Collective Well-Being.” She laid out the eight strategies (PB is one!) and led us through her five step method for taking action as a financial activist.
She galvanized us to overcome confusion, fear, awkwardness, or overwhelm around money to step into our power over the resources we control/steward:
“How do we move away from greed to generosity? How do we away from this idea of money as something that we need to grind for, right? To money as something that we get to flow in and out of our lives, with the explicit purpose of collective wellbeing…Financial activism for me is about everyday decisions that we get to make in both really low stakes ways and much bigger ways so that we build the muscle of reclaiming agency around money decisions.”
PBP staff members also gave an explanation of how participatory budgeting works, why budget justice is essential in these times, and shared examples of PB in action across North America. Together, we learned how all forms of capital we have access to can be used to collectively divest from harm and oppression, reclaim wealth, and invest in the economy of care, abundance, and democracy we deserve.
