The last year has seen a call to defund the Chicago police and reallocate funds to mental health and community services. And while that call has not been answered, it has placed the city’s budget under a magnifying glass. Residents want to have a say in where the money goes and participatory budgeting is a process that gives them that power.
Participatory budgeting began in Brazil in 1989, when residents of the city of Porto Alegre voted on how to spend the mayor’s budget to address community needs. Today over 3,000 PB projects exist globally, mostly at the municipal, county, and city levels. The United Nations has even promoted participatory budgeting “as a best practice of democratic governance.”
Last year at the end of August, after months of police clashing with protesters, the city’s Office of Budget and Management released a survey, which asked residents where they wanted to allocate funds in the 2021 budget. Out of the 38,000 respondents, 90 percent said they were in favor of reallocating funds from one part of the budget to another, and 87 percent of those respondents said they wanted them to come from CPD’s budget.
Idea collection can take place online, at community events, or through posted flyers—whatever encourages community members to put forth their ideas.
Step 4: Vote
Last year, Chicago United for Equity launched People’s Budget Chicago, which partnered with community organizations to educate residents on how the budget works and then asked them where they thought the money should go. In the fall, the group traveled to at least nine south and west side communities on a bus tour. Using the Childhood Opportunity Index to define areas that face the most disinvestment, they selected the neighborhoods that they believed would not be represented in the city’s survey (45 percent of the survey respondents were from the north side, 15 percent from the northwest side, and 10 percent from the Loop).
