Participatory budgeting in non-profits
Openly musing today on wondering what it might look like for participatory budgeting to be deployed for an Aboriginal governance authority responsible for child and family services.
The work we are doing on Vancouver Island is about building the capacity of the community to be the owners of the child and family services in their communities. We are about to do an Art of Hosting training here with 40 or so community members to build the leadership capacity of the local communities, but I was thinking today, after having dinner last night with my friend Donna Morton, who knows much about these things, that participatory budgeting might be a cool thing to try.
Participatory budgeting is a deeply democratic process of having citizens use deliberative dialogue to set budgets for the ervices that affect them. It has it’s deepes community of practice in Brazil, where the cities of Porto Alegre and Sao Paolo have pioneered the use of the process. It has since spread to many places around the world.
I know there is a small movement of people here in British Columbia interested in the process, and one councillor on my island, Lisa Barrett, tried to introduce t as a practice on Bowen Island. She was met with too much reticence to pursue it at the time, although it sems like at some level and over some longer period of time democratizing public budgeting may be an inevitable move especially in municipal governments.
So I’m looking for some expertise among people near and far who have used this process especially in the non-profit world, or even better, in the quasi-governmental world of school board, health authorities and the like.
My main inquiry at this point is around how you have the conversation with the people that control the purse strings in a way that invites them to share power. I was talking to my friend Tuesday Ryan-Hart this morning as well, who works in the social services sector in Columbus Ohio and she gifted me with a great question to use to invite a conversation about this process. She was talking about how easy it is to talk a good line about sharing power – and in still-semocratic North America, there are many places where people are able to participate. Many of these forums however are shallow if they don’t tie the exercise of that shared power to shared responsibility and benefit. Tuesday’s insight was that it makes sense to talk to people who are already open and who already believe that sharing is the right thing to do and then ask “Where can we share power that results also in shared benefits?” That is a way to talk about how to include the voices of clients for example in the structuring of the budgets that affect their lives and it helps us get at what Tuesday called “what we don’t know we don’t know.” It’s a brilliant little question.
So, friends, where can you point me for people that have had experiences using participatory budgeting in the social services sectors anywhere in the world?
PS. Here are some links I uncovered about participatory budgeting in a quick scan around the web:
Porto Alegre Participatory budgeting virtual library
Articles and books in English, Spanish and Portugese
Participatory Budgeting Project — Resources
This page contains papers, links, and other information about research and other projects related to participatory budgeting that are being developed throughout the world.
participatorybudgeting.org
ParticipatoryBudgeting.org is a companion site to the book, Militants and Citizens, and a general resource site on participatory budgeting.
Participatory budgeting tag at del.icio.us
[tags]participatory+budgeting, democracy[/tags]
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I think this might be “thin”, but I am wondering if you could consider as partial participatory budgeting the process all United Ways use ?
Typically they grant annual tranches of operating funds to a roster of not-for profit social service-oriented agencies in a given conurbation. These agencies are often managed by a small professional staff but I believe that most of the budgeting is done in collaboration with (and certainly final approval is held by) the member-and-community-representative populated directors on the respective BoDs.
And the committees at any given UW that decide on the annual funding tranches are volunteers drawn from the community. It is a more considered process than many realize (I used to be the UW staff dude who organized and facilitated the process for the UW of Edmonton in the early ’80’s, about a hundred careers ago 😉
Some of the policy people at the national level of UW or with the larger UWs might be able to point you to some expertise. I imagine that some form or other of this issue has come up in their realm of activity.
Thinking a bit further on it, in the mid-80’s the UWs moved pretty much wholesale into funding programs in member agencies .. and often the program budgets were developed by agency staff members and program volunteers in collaboration.
Like I said above, maybe thin. I don’t know to where the program funding processes generally will have evolved since then, though as mentioned there may be some expertise in the UW somewhere.
This is interesting. I am intrigued to learn more, especially with the kind of work I do.
Thanks Jon…like I say I’m totally blue sky-ing right now, but if anything, I think the partial budgeting approach is probably most realistic, at least in the medium term. But I’m mostly thinking about how this might fit patterns that people already know, and so I really appreciate the pointer to the United Way process.
Hi Chris. I have been “noodling” on our conversation a bit and have talked to a few friends who have done a lot of grassroots organizing. Their responses have been very similar and go something like, “Wow! What a great idea! It’s intriguing, but I’ve never heard about any group using it.”
These conversations have led to some great discussions about money and power – and how often at first “getting money” has really energized social movements, but then those movements have used money in the same old way and gotten the same old results. It’s sort of a “the master’s tools will not tear down the master’s house” kind of thing.
Which made me think about the question – How do you use money creatively and constructively? (and without corruption) – and participatory budgeting might be one tool to do this.
My thoughts are half-formed, but I did want to suggest talking to Mike Green about whether any of the places he’d used Asset Based Community Development had some type of citizen participation with budgeting.
Cheers!
Great stuff Tuesday…perhaps that inquiry will still be rich enough that we can noodle on it while we are together in Columbus next month.