Community Voices Heard (CVH), one of the organizations behind the recent participatory budgeting process in New York City, hosted a briefing last month to share a few project updates and additional background materials.
On page 12 of his presentation, Josh Lerner (PB Project) shared this interesting map of emerging efforts from across North America to establish participatory budgeting:
The map doesn’t show what stage each project is currently at, but at least one of them recently made a significant step forward when the City of Vallejo, CA, approved the first city-wide participatory budgeting process in the US, to begin later this summer.
Several of the projects shown on the map (from Louisiana, North Carolina, Massachusetts) were present at the recent PB Conference. Based on conversations, it may be a while until they reach their goals. Nonetheless, it looks like momentum for this form of public participation continues to build here in the US.
I must have missed this when it was announced earlier last month, but New America Foundation just launched the California Civic Innovation Project (CCIP), a new two-year initiative focused on community engagement in California.
From the website:
The California Civic Innovation Project promotes innovations in technology, policy and practice that deepen engagement between government and communities throughout the state. Through research and information-sharing, CCIP builds communities of practice within California’s local governments and identifies best practices to improving service delivery, opening new channels for public voices, and bridging the state’s digital divides.
The intersection of technology, policy and civic engagement is increasingly central to making local governments work for everyone. There are information and innovation gaps between municipalities throughout the state, and a goal of CCIP is to bridge those gaps by providing opportunities for governments to learn from one another and share innovative technologies that have real impact in their communities.
On a call today hosted by NCDD, CCIP Director Alissa Black stated that the initiative is half research, half experimentation and outlined three main objectives:
- To identify ways to diffuse innovation and innovative technologies across all of California,
- to establish knowledge sharing networks for local government, and
- to run experiments in three different California cities focused on creating coalitions that involve local government, the community and private or university partners with the goal of developing models for innovation that could be replicated and scaled.
Ultimately, according to Black, the goal is to spread innovation to increase local community engagement.
