We’re seeding participatory budgeting across California!
As part of the growing movement for people power, we are excited to deepen our efforts to grow PB across California with our new PB Seeds California program. The PB Seeds California program connects and equips leaders and advocates across California with knowledge, tools, and networks in order to advocate for PB in their communities.
Are you ready to grow PB in yours? Find more information about the program and complete the training cohort application on our PB Seeds California webpage.
At this program kickoff event, we shared more about the upcoming training cohort and heard from three exceptional community leaders about their experiences leading PB and the importance of growing participatory democracy across California. They highlighted the history of community organizing for economic justice and spoke on how participatory budgeting (PB) embodies the state’s core values of collaboration, transparency, inclusivity, and racial justice.
We were excited to host Miss Carrie Broadus from CRRSLA/LAM, Jamillah Jordan, Equity Director at the County of Marin, and Esther Hernánez Médina from Pomona College as our speakers for this rich discussion.
Miss Carrie Broadus highlighted the importance of ensuring transparency, accountability, and community power when tackling generational, institutional racism:
“If we are going to be accountable to institutional racism and bias and equity, we have to move away from transactional program specific, meaning – ‘I scratch your back and you scratch mine. Let me cut a deal with you in the back room.’ – to really taking time to incubate fresh ideas [together].”
Esther Hernánez Médina emphasized the importance treating democracy as an everyday practice beyond elections and voting:
“The beauty of PB is that it reminds us, because we forget, right? There’s a point where we thing democracy is just going to vote. No! There’s a lot of democracy that happens between the vote. Democracy is something we build every since time, every single day.”
And Jamillah Jordan spoke on reducing barriers to participation and the ideas communities came up with when given the opportunity to dream together:
“We wanted to hear from people who we may not traditionally hear from. Everyone can’t make it out to a board of supervisors meeting at 6 on a Tuesday to make their voice heard, but they can come out to a PB voting event. So we wanted to reduce barriers to participation.”
…Participatory budgeting really gives people the opportunity to dream, to live into how they want their communities to be. And so they dreamt of solutions that were rooted in abundance, that we rooted in self-determination, and ultimately that were rooted in community wisdom.”
Watch the replay above and share with your networks! We look forward to growing democracy with you across California.
