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In contrast to traditional national or local elections, participatory budgeting votes reduce barriers. In this framework, people that live, work, or play in an area are eligible to engage in deciding how funds are spent in that space. This is revolutionary in terms of access, community building, how decisions are informed, and how a community can show up in relationship to the outcomes of those decisions.
Today's guest is Shari Davis, Co-Executive Director at Participatory Budgeting Project, a nonprofit organization that empowers people to decide together how to spend public money, primarily in the US and Canada. Our conversation with Shari starts with her journey into the work that she does with Participatory Budgeting Project and its beginnings in the culture of community responsibility found in martial arts. We discuss what participatory budgeting is and how it works toward making decision-making for budgeting more democratic and equitable by involving communities in the process of design, proposal development, and ideation.
In today’s show, we also discuss what true participatory democracy means and the work it involves as far as recognizing injustices and putting the perspectives of the community first. Shari talks about how worthwhile the hard work that it takes is because of how much of a better system for decision-making it enables. She gets into the history of participatory budgeting and shares many examples of how it is being implemented on a large scale in the US in the present. We also cover the sociocratic framework that the Participatory Budgeting Project operates within, the work being done by Democracy Beyond Elections, and hear Shari’s thoughts on how to start practicing participatory democracy in your organization or collective today.
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Key Points From This Episode:
Lessons about creating systems of change from Shari’s background in martial arts.
What participatory budgeting is and why it is so powerful for driving change.
The process of participatory budgeting and how it includes the needs of the community in decisions.
The need to acknowledge the injustices faced by community members while including them in decision making.
Concrete examples of projects that involved participatory budgeting processes.
Why the hard work of participatory decision-making is difficult but well worth the struggle.
Setting up people in government to make good decisions by implementing participatory policymaking.
How people can get involved in participatory budgeting.
An explanation of the work being done by the Democracy Beyond Elections coalition.
The Sociocratic framework that The Participatory Budgeting Project works within.
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Tweetables:
“In that tradition of martial arts that I grew up in there was so much community responsibility. There was so much that you were supposed to think about or honor in shared space together and that was my foundation of thinking about public service.” — @Shari_Davis1
“Participatory budgeting is a framework or practice in making decisions together about public dollars, a process where community comes together to decide how public money is spent.” — @Shari_Davis1
“You can’t answer questions about what the community really needs unless they are involved in the design, the proposal development, the ideation, the decisions, and then evaluating that process, and that is what participatory budgeting offers.” — @Shari_Davis1
“In the United States alone, we’ve seen something like 300 million dollars be decided on by over 400 000 community members and that is an example of collective decision making, being able to mobilize funds in that way.” — @Shari_Davis1
“I don’t think we have scratched the surface of what participatory democracy allows in terms of innovation. I think we have a pretty good picture of what closed-door democracy allows. If we build capacity towards something else a much more vibrant relationship between us and the decisions we make in government can emerge.” — @Shari_Davis1
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Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
Shari Davis on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/shari-davis/
Shari Davis on Twitter — https://twitter.com/Shari_Davis1
The Participatory Budgeting Project — https://www.participatorybudgeting.org/
Democracy Beyond Elections — https://www.democracybeyondelections.org/
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