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Content about Budgets

August 2, 2012
Urban Planning Games: Fun Format Connects to Real Change Making Potential

In 2005, passersby in the Albanian city of Tirana noticed something unusual: millions of white Lego blocks gracing neatly-arranged tables on a busy street. Everybody was fascinated with the unassuming white blocks. Parents with young children, elderly residents, teenagers, and every demographic imaginable intently built all sorts of structures from buildings to bridges and everything in between.

In 2005, passersby in the Albanian city of Tirana noticed something unusual: millions of white Lego blocks gracing neatly-arranged tables on a busy street. Everybody was fascinated with the unassuming white blocks. Parents with young children, elderly residents, teenagers, and every demographic imaginable intently built all sorts of structures from buildings to bridges and everything in between.

July 13, 2012
Springfield Institute: Participatory Budgeting

May 25, 2012
Participatory Budgeting - Springfield, 2011

Intro to participatory budgeting by the Springfield Institute, leaders in Community-based, participatory agenda-setting and civic engagement. How to produce forward energy in a community, and get people to believe in their communities again by participating in the process of change and accountability. 

April 30, 2012
Take Back Your Taxes: Bring Participatory Budgeting to Your City

Tax day has come and gone. You’ve paid your dues. And you probably have very little say over how those federal dollars are going to be spent. But at the local level, an increasing number of cities and towns are turning to their residents to propose projects and make important budget decisions.

April 23, 2012
Delivering Denver’s Future - A Participatory Budgeting Process

Several weeks ago, the office of Denver’s Mayor Michael Hancock launched a two-part community engagement strategy to gather public input on important financial issues facing the City of Denver.  A series of public forums put keypad polling devices in the hands of city employees and Denver residents to test the best   ideas for how to address the City’s financial challenges.  The Mayor also unveiled a new participatory budgeting tool encouraging public feedback on key topics relative to fixing Denver’s budget gap. The new interactive tool, Delivering Denver’s Future, gives residents a unique opportunity to weigh in on how to fix the city’s broken budget.

March 16, 2012
South Kivu Participatory Budgeting

August 24, 2011
Online Participatory Budgeting Engages Citizens to Build Better Communities

Social media and new technologies can bring new ways for communities to interact. Yet the growth in online technologies is a fast moving picture with potentially good and bad outcomes. In recent riots in the UK social media was blamed for facilitating bad behaviour by the social underclass. 

May 24, 2011
Participatory Budgeting Processes Taking Hold in the U.S.

First implemented in the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1990,  Participatory Budgeting (PB) is a planning process which allows citizens to decide directly how to allocate all or part of a public budget, typically through a series of meetings, work by community “delegates” or representatives, and ultimately through a final vote. While the process has been widely utilized worldwide, especially in Europe over the past two decades, only recently has it been implemented in a few U.S. cities — including Chicago.