Participatory Budgeting with Josh Lerner

Josh Lerner directs The Participatory Budgeting Project (participatorybudgeting.org), an organization that works with elected officials, public agencies, and community groups to develop participatory budgeting (PB) processes in the US and Canada. PB refers to the international practice first developed in Porto Alegre, Brazil (and now used in over 1,000 cities around the world), in which community members directly decide how to spend part of a public budget. We launched the first PB process in the US two years ago in Chicago, and a month ago we started a larger process in NYC (pbnyc.org), in which thousands of residents of four city districts are deciding how to spend around $6 million.