The Participatory Budgeting Project

For 10 years, the Participatory Budgeting Project (PBP) has empowered people to participate in democracy through revolutionary civics in action. Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic process in which community members directly decide how to spend part of a public budget. It gives people real power over the money that affects their lives. We create and support PB processes in cities, schools, and public agencies across the United States and Canada to address deep community needs, develop new community leaders, and make public budgets more equitable and effective. Through our work with partners in over 30 cities, we have engaged over 534,000 people in deciding how to spend $337 million.

PBP is at an exciting moment of transition, growth, and change. We are growing our staff capacity to create an organizational culture that celebrates accomplishments and cultivates a caring and supportive environment. We are transitioning to a Co-Leadership model to share and develop leadership across all areas to build a leaderful organization. And we are implementing a new organizational and decision-making structure based on sociocracy that builds on creative thinking and trust in oneself and others within a collaborative and distributed leadership structure. In this new phase of PBP, we will build on past successes to create a new strategic vision and an organization that prioritizes our team and community alongside participatory democracy.