We are delighted to announce the results of our 2020-2021 PB², PBP’s internal participatory budgeting process. PB² is a practice that helps us live our values as an organization, by inviting our community to become decision makers in the work PBP does.
Here’s a refresher on our PB² process, which follows the same steps as the other participatory budgeting processes PBP advocates for and supports:
- A steering committee made up of PBP staff designed the process-set the schedule, wrote the rulebook for this year’s iteration, and brainstormed outreach.
- We launched idea collection and asked all of YOU to submit your ideas to make participatory democracy more equitable, accessible, and significant. (Bravo!)
- A dedicated group of budget delegates ushered ideas through a collaborative proposal development phase. Delegates worked with PBP staff to vet each proposed project for feasibility, cost, and impact. (THANK YOU for sharing your time and enthusiasm with us, budget delegates!)
- Next, we VOTED! Our entire community was invited to make their voices heard by voting for their top 3 favorite projects. We partnered with Stanford PB Platform to create a digital ballot in both English and Spanish. Over 100 people voted in PB2!
And that brings us to the moment we’ve all been waiting for: the results!
The three winning projects of PBP’s 2020 – 2021 PB² cycle are:
- Participatory budgeting, participatory democracy, and an opportunity to transform the justice system: This research project will develop case studies and a landscape analysis to help communities imagine the role of participatory practice in putting in place new policies and approaches for policing, criminal justice, and more.
- Youth PB leaders: Our Time is Now: This project will convene youth from across the country to train them in PB so they can bring it back to their schools and communities.
- PBP Team “Treat YoSelf” 2021: This initiative will resource the amazing PBP staff team in building a healthy, thriving, and supportive remote office culture.
We hope you’ll take a moment to pop a bottle of virtual apple cider with us and celebrate this moment of coming together as a community. These three projects represent a vision for the future that no single staff member, board member, or supporter could have created on their own.
But once we’re done sipping, the PBP team is going to jump right back into the work, because we know PB doesn’t end with voting!
- As a team, we will work collectively to fund and implement the winning projects. Stay tuned for updates on how this work progresses over the next year, and into 2022.
- We’ll also be working to evaluate how this year’s cycle went, in order to plan for improvements to next year’s cycle. That will include debriefing as a team and looking at the feedback we received from voters.
Finally, if all of this has you in the mood to keep celebrating, you don’t have to wait until next year’s PB² cycle.
Donate today to support PBP’s work, and you’ll be investing in making real community-led decisionmaking a reality. Through this deep collaboration, we know we’re getting closer to centering a vision of participatory democracy that is equitable, accessible, and significant-and lived in the experience of our internal organizational culture, too.