Rental assistance and anti-eviction programs, a mobile street medicine service, an urban farming and produce distribution service: these are just a few of the 19 winning projects funded across nine neighborhoods through the City of Los Angeles’s 2022-2024 L.A. REPAIR Participatory Budgeting Program.

These projects bear little resemblance to the projects funded through the first wave of U.S. PB programs. From Chicago’s 49th Ward to New York City’s council-district program and Vallejo’s city-wide PB process, early experiments in bringing PB to the U.S. all drew from funds ear-marked for capital (or infrastructure) projects like potholes, sidewalk repairs, playgrounds, and other improvements to the built environment. 

There were, and still are, plenty of reasons to focus PB on capital funds and projects. But other budgets and types of projects are important, too. More and more, we are seeing municipalities (and schools) fund program and service projects in particular through PB. If you can spend it, you can do PB with it.

The early years: PB for capital projects

Most U.S. cities distinguish between capital and operating funds in their budgets. While the latter are tied to staffing levels and particular programs or services, capital funds—sourced from bond measures or restricted revenue sources like special taxes—are more flexible. They can be more easily appropriated without impacting labor costs, existing city services, or other programmatic commitments. Capital projects also only require one-time funding. As long as maintenance costs are built into department budgets, funding doesn’t need to be renewed year after year. The PB vote – the decision to allocate one-time funding to one or multiple capital projects – is decisive and lasting.

On top of long term impact, capital projects are also highly visible and tangible for those who use them. A basketball court or bike lane can provide a daily reminder for those who use it that they are benefiting from a PB project – a project their neighbors chose to build for one another. 

These factors made the pitch for running PB with capital funds quite compelling— and perhaps a safer bet—at a time when PB was new, untested in the U.S., and seen as a relatively risky use of public funds. 

But community advocates quickly realized that the power of PB didn’t have to be confined to capital projects. By 2015, PB was being used to allocate non-capital budgets in the U.S., too. That was the year that the City of Seattle’s Department of Neighborhoods launched a youth-led PB process that opened the door to non-capital projects, created and voted on by youth.

How did PB jump the gap from construction to innovative social programs?

Adapting the model

As with most pilot programs, PB was introduced and nurtured under safer, more controlled conditions (smaller pots of capital funds) until the proof of concept could be sufficiently demonstrated. 

But it’s difficult to hold up potholes, year after year, as the product of a transformative program. If voters repeatedly ask for the same capital improvements, they should probably just be repackaged into recurring policies, capital projects, or funding streams. 

Tried and tested, a second wave of PB could then be pushed into more experimental territory. With these lessons learned, after a few cycles of these pioneering capital-focused cycles, PB was ready to be adapted and expanded in scope. 

Allocating funds for program and service projects represented a natural evolution for PB in the U.S.—a way to expand the pool of contexts (and funds) communities could use it for. In what I call the “second wave” of U.S.-based municipal PB programs, in the period spanning 2014 to 2019,  cities began to experiment with the model adapted for its early adopters with the debut of:

• Youth-led PB: in Boston (2014) and Seattle (2015) 
• Priority areas or topics: poverty alleviation in Rochester (2018)
• And the mobilization of non-capital funds: Seattle (2015),  

It was during this period that we saw municipalities first open the scope of PB funding to program and service projects. This evolution wasn’t inevitable: A program like PB doesn’t move progressively, or organically. Its trajectory depends on the goals, choices, and compromises made by officials and participants across the diverse set of communities that decide to take up the project of democratic decision-making. 

Put another way, the course PB takes—like any process—ultimately depends on the values advanced and infused in it by the communities that use it. Those values may even conflict with one another as they change over time and vary by jurisdiction.

We could easily have seen PB remain within the confines of the comfortable and politically expedient, sticking—or reverting—to funding capital projects. 

But those championing PB (public officials and community advocates alike) developed greater ambitions for the scope of community-led decision making. Seeing PB as a vehicle for more than discrete construction projects, communities have increasingly adopted a transformative vision of PB as a tool for advancing racial justice and economic democracy. 

But for PB to have such system-level impacts, it would have to evolve to fund a greater range of projects. Communities would need the ability to propose and select the kinds of programs and service capable of addressing the most direct consequences of racism and inequality: housing assistance, homelessness services, mental health services, youth programming, workforce development, and alternatives to public safety and emergency response systems—to name a few. 

PB and movements for racial and economic justice

Since emerging in Brazil in 1989 the PB movement—here in the U.S. and globally—has been infused with the values of racial and economic justice. These values are in the DNA of participatory budgeting, an innovation developed as an antidote to extreme inequality and decades of authoritarianism. But the extent to which it will serve as a vehicle for this same project here in the U.S. is still an open question. The compromises that made piloting PB in the U.S. possible, it has been argued, required watering down its egalitarian and redistributive edge. 

And then came 2020, and the summer of COVID lockdowns and the George Floyd uprisings. Suddenly, these values—and the values reflected in our public budgets more broadly—were under widespread scrutiny, at a national scale.

Massive protests against police brutality and systemic racism forced a debate about whether or not status quo budgeting —funneling more and more money to police budgets and carceral systems—is not only just, but necessary in the first place. Meanwhile, cities were beginning to get their feet out from under them and developing programs to address the traumatic first wave of COVID infections, deaths, lockdowns, and school closures.

The specific demands racial justice activists made during this summer—to defund police departments, reinvest in alternative approaches to public safety, and to give people and communities direct decision-making power over budgetary decisions—were explicitly channeled into calls for local governments to use participatory budgeting as a tool for racial justice and repair in a number of cities. And under-pressure electeds had new and flexible revenue streams, like American Rescue Plan Act dollars, to fund them. 

A well-organized Black Lives Matter mobilization moved Mayor Durkan and the City of Seattle to reappropriate $30 million (some of which came from cuts to the City’s police department) for a PB process that would give Black, Indigenous, and communities of color the power to decide how reinvest that money into Black communities and toward community-led health and safety systems.

In 2021, after years of local advocacy for decarceration and participatory budgeting, the City of Los Angeles appropriated $10 million for the L.A. REPAIR (Reforms for Equity and Public Acknowledgment of Institutional Racism) PB program to enable marginalized and historically disempowered groups to decide on investment priorities for their communities. The process focused on nine neighborhoods, “some of the lowest income and highest need areas in the country resulting from years of structural and institutional racism” and disproportionately impacted by COVID-19. 

This third, racial justice-oriented wave of participatory budgeting processes ushered in yet another wave of innovation in U.S.-based PB.[1] These programs not only moved the needle towards program and service projects, they began allocating resources and responsibility for implementing program and service projects to community-based organizations.

For example, the stipulation that projects funded via the Seattle PB process be “community-led” had direct implications for the kinds of projects this program would fund. Not only would Seattle’s program be focused on programs and services, but on ones implemented by the community, not the City. 

The City of L.A, meanwhile, not only acknowledged but openly and strategically advertised the innovative decision to fund community-run programs and services projects through its 2022-2024 pilot L.A. REPAIR PB program as a break from past practice:

“Unlike the majority of Participatory Budgeting programs implemented by other government entities, L.A. REPAIR is geared towards providing dollars for programming versus capital projects. Programs created by community-based nonprofit organizations will be funded to direct the most impactful services based on ideas from underserved communities.”

When paired with equity-based or reparative frameworks, funding community-led projects through PB represents a notable paradigm-shift in PB by:

• Directing resources directly back into the communities most impacted by long-term disinvestment (in some cases through PB cycles focused in specific neighborhoods, rather than city-wide).
• Investing in and building capacity for local service delivery (giving those that have relationships with and those that are trusted by the communities they serve to increase staffing, expand access to, and further develop their programming)
• Giving communities even more control over the form of winning projects – by handing over the responsibility for their implementation to those communities themselves

In the City and now the County of L.A., (thanks to Supervisor Holly Mitchell’s pilot Community Budgeting process), community members who live alongside, work with, and serve their neighbors are providing services those same neighbors advocated for and chose themselves. 

There will be bumps in the road and learning curves for local governments as they figure out how best to support the organizations implementing winning projects: disbursement schedules, reporting requirements, accountability measures, will all have to be experimented with and adjusted over the course of subsequent cycles. And these organizations will need hands-on support and the full backing of the city and county officials who have handed over the responsibility for project implementation. 

How representatives and government staff show up during the implementation phase will be a major factor in determining whether or not residents feel their representatives are earnestly committed to transforming and repairing their relationship with the communities these PB processes were designed to serve.

Conclusion

By proving that PB can be a unique tool for pursuing structural, material, and community-led forms of racial justice and repair, programs like L.A. REPAIR implicitly re-opened the question of what “good” or “impactful” PB is, does, and looks like. Is it a program for:

• Restoring trust and government and providing large-scale outlets for community input and feedback to improve vital infrastructure? 

OR

• Repairing racial injustice, addressing inequality, and resourcing grassroots organizations?

These goals are not mutually exclusive, by any means. But articulating which takes priority can impact key decisions about PB process planning, design, implementation, and messaging. 

While the move to fund programs and services through PB can be seen as a minor technical tweak on the one hand, taken in context, this shift may represent a more foundational evolution in the purpose PB is serving for communities across the U.S. 

It’s true—we have come a long way: potholes seem a long way back in the rear-view mirror. But we still have a long road ahead. 

Those early capital-focused PB processes paved the way for the third wave. They provided lessons, legitimacy, and encouragement for others to experiment with and adapt this process. And in some places, like New York City, they created ecosystems in which PB can be used simultaneously for both capital as well as program and service projects. Many other cities are still running capital-focused cycles more than 10 years later. 

“Budgets are moral documents”[2]—they reflect our values and priorities. The more we open up new sources of and outlets for public funding to community participation and decision-making, the more opportunities our communities—and practitioners in our field—will have to question, scrutinize, and update our assumptions about who and what participatory budgeting is for.