I do believe democracy can be functional. I ended up working in local government for almost 15 years. It really turned me into a facilitator.īy the time I was 14, I had a summer job at the mayor’s office. By the time I was 11, I was teaching the class - I had all kinds of students all across Boston. Karate forces you to ask questions about yourself, your surroundings and what’s possible. My inroads to understanding community care really started after I stumbled into a community martial arts program when I was 9. We get amazing answers: What if the whole idea of a villain was flipped, and the Joker starts putting on quarterly arts concerts? Suddenly they’re imagining this new world, and no one’s talking about police and jails and prisons anymore. With Tracey Corder, I’ve been giving these workshops at youth conferences, placing everyone into a world they’re familiar with - Gotham - in order to envision a new one. You build relationships with the community over time, you have conversations, you track ideas, you score them, you vet them. But second, there’s an involved process we follow. Often I’m asked, “What if people make bad decisions? What if all the kids in this school decide they want a taco truck?” First, if that many young people are voting for a taco truck, I might want to look into why. Because of P.B., they not only had a chance to find historic artifacts in their own city, but there’s now a park in Boston that’s far more accessible than it was before. Many were criminal-justice-system-impacted young people. We put out a call and soon were enlisting regular people to be archaeologists. I said, “Can we engage community members to protect the site? You seem like you don’t have a lot of staff!” And it worked. They said we had to stop because of a site there. But right before we broke ground on one, I got a call from the city’s archaeologist. That included money to make parks more accessible. In Boston, I launched the country’s first youth-focused P.B. The vote will happen this spring, but already the community has built an understanding of what alternatives to policing look like.
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We’re going to take the $1.2 million from that contract and go through a participatory budgeting process where students, parents, guardians and teachers get to define what safety is and how to invest in those things. In Arizona, the Phoenix Union High School District decided to get rid of armed officers in schools.
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Using P.B., they got a self-defense class on the ballot. In New York, it came up that Muslim women in a certain Brooklyn district needed resources to feel safer in their neighborhoods. Studies have found young people are more likely to vote in local and national elections after they were involved in P.B., more likely to walk into a city-owned building, more likely to consider going into politics, more likely to speak to a public official, more likely to volunteer and more confident in their skills. It’s that their engagement is inauthentic.
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People then get disillusioned, and eventually we see this narrative that they’re apathetic. Community spending priorities don’t get heard. It’s not going into dedicated programming for Black, brown and trans youth.
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Where it’s not going is social services, or expanded opportunities for social work, or mutual aid spaces. The money generally goes to big police budgets, or to a narrow view of what our schools need, or what education support looks like. How are budgets typically made? A guy or a group of guys makes some guesses based on last year’s budget, and that’s it - that’s the budget. What’s the problem participatory budgeting solves? (The following interview has been condensed and edited.) An Obama Foundation fellowship came after, then a TED Talk and now an Emerson Collective fellowship, which they’ll use to create a visual guide to participatory budgeting. They honed their organizing chops as a preteen teaching martial arts, then led Boston’s Department of Youth Engagement and Employment. After the city’s decision to slash its police budget in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, residents will soon direct some $30 million toward a new vision of public safety.ĭavis’s path to the realm of line items and capital projects arguably began in childhood. A current example: After a year’s delay, Seattleites will engage in one of the biggest instances of participatory budgeting to date. Since its first application in Brazil in the late 1980s, the participatory budgeting movement has spread to more than 7,000 cities around the world, including 29 in the United States, where ordinary citizens already have allocated $386 million.