Our interview with Matt Harder
On Participatory Budgeting
Dear Friends,
I (Michael) had the opportunity to connect with Matt Harder through Praxis last month, and learned about his company, Civic Trust. As you’ll learn below, Matt’s company helps governments implement Participatory Budgeting (PB), which is a process through which citizens are able to speak into, and direct the use of, public money.
I’m particularly interested in PB, because I believe it has potential to not just boost civic trust and literacy, but also help address political sectarianism. I believe we should be looking at ways to utilize PB for just that purpose.
You can read more about PB from this 2016 Washington Post article and this 2018 Atlantic feature.
Hopefully, we’ve learned anew that democracy must be actively supported if it is to be sustained. PB is one way to go about strengthening democracy, and we’ll be looking at other avenues in the coming months. We’d love to hear your ideas and questions on this topic, so please do leave a comment or email us.
Yours,
Michael & Melissa
Michael: First, Matt, can you tell me a bit about Civic Trust? Why were you drawn to this work?
Matt: Civic Trust is a company I started to try and popularize Participatory Budgeting, first of all, and to try and popularize the idea of modernizing local government and how governments engage with their citizens more broadly. It's no secret that democracy is taking a beating, not only here in the US, but also all around the world. I spent years living abroad in Costa Rica and their democracy is suffering even worse than ours from corruption and a lack of competent or concerned leadership. I once asked an educated, upper class Costa Rican youth how they think they'll fix the corruption problems in their country. She replied to me in a totally calm and matter of fact tone that they'll never fix corruption in Costa Rica, it's just part of the country. And in my mind she was the exact demographic that should be optimistic! That moment changed the way I felt about American optimism. I realized that the fact that we're continually trying to fix and improve upon our government, and that we generally believe it's possible to create a more perfect union, is a major cultural strength that we need to hold on to. So I decided to get involved in work that affected people personally, at a local level. I wanted to establish a new point of contact between people and their governments that taught the governments more about their population's needs and wants, and also made the average member of the population feel heard, and like they have a role to play. I think the trust deficit that people are experiencing with the government can wind up creating some ugly problems for our culture, so I want to try to lean into repairing that trust at the point where people actually experience and can engage with democracy, and that's at a local level.
Michael: Where is Participatory Budgeting happening in the U.S., and what does it look like?
Matt: Participatory Budgeting (I'll abbreviate to PB) has taken place in dozens of US cities over the last decade or so. An organization called Participatory Budgeting Project keeps a pretty comprehensive map of where most US processes have taken place. It runs the gamut from major cities like New York where it's been active for over 12 years, to smaller cities like Durham, NC. There's also a version that's run in schools all over the U.S. as an interactive form of civic education. DeBlasio said he was going to do it in all of the high schools in New York, but I'm not sure of the status of that, since Covid may have messed up the implementation.
As far as what it looks like: It begins when someone with authority over a budget agrees to run a PB. For instance in Atlanta, I did a project with a city council member who got $1mm from the state for transportation upgrades. He could have spent it any way he wanted, but he decided to commit it to a PB, so that he could spend the budget in collaboration with his constituency. Once we have the budget, the process happens in three phases.
Phase 1 - Proposal Collection: First we go to the population and invite them to make proposals for local projects that we could implement with the money. It's an easy online process and usually takes about five minutes. People submit ideas for parks, school upgrades, art installations, transportation, homeless services, the list is endless. The only limit is the type and size of the budget we have access to. With the transport budget mentioned above, we got ideas on pedestrian streets, bike lanes, beautification, sidewalk widenings, sidewalk furniture, creative signage, I could go on. People are very creative with these things.
Phase 2 - Ballot Creation: We price out all of the proposals that followed the rules and fashion them into an interactive online ballot with pictures, descriptions, and maps.
Phase 3 - The Vote: People who live, work, or study where the PB is taking place are welcome to come vote for their favorite projects. We try and make this as satisfying as possible, using modern voting methods and working hard to make the process interactive, fun and smooth. We want people to walk away thinking "That was so fun and easy! I can't believe my government did that!"
Michael: Part of the value of this though, in my mind, is in all of the ways that it is not satisfying. I’m intrigued by the capacity of PB to help reduce polarization and increase civic education by inviting citizens into the governance process on decisions that are not all upside, but where they are confronted with the kinds of difficult decisions and conflict of various positive goals that public servants are navigating each and every day. Can you speak a bit to PB’s capacity to help shape better citizens?
Matt: Ah, you ask a great question! Here I'll come right out and say that there are different ways to practice PB, some of which emphasize what you're talking about - "shaping better citizens," some of which are a bit lighter, and more focused on simply getting good ideas for local projects and implementing them. I was part of both while working with the New York City Council on a couple of their PBs. At the time they had 35 different districts all running their own PBs out of their own offices in their own way. What was widely considered the gold standard was Brad Lander, Councilmember of District 39 (Park Slope). Not only did he do everything I mentioned above, but he also had committees of residents in charge of refining the projects and assembling the ballot. They were all organized in three committees: Parks & Environment, Education, and Transport. I co-facilitated Parks and Environment because I lived nearby and they tapped me for some assistance. We oversaw maybe a dozen and a half resident "delegates" who took responsibility over individual proposals, would track down information and clarification from those who submitted, and sometimes even communicate with the city departments who would be in charge of installing the projects.
This model of course had myriad benefits for making better citizens: The delegates learn to compromise with each other to squeeze projects onto a limited ballot. They learn how to interact with their city council offices and sometimes city departments. They experience the knock-on civic benefits of being in the same room with representatives from many local non-profit orgs and people from widely different backgrounds, all just there to lend a hand to improve their shared neighborhood. They learn that society takes a little sacrifice. We'd meet up at night from 7:30-9:30 or so, usually in the middle of the week. Although we were excited to talk about our neighborhood and improving it, we were also tired from the day, and showing up every few weeks was tough. But we stuck with it together and by the end our civic bonds were much stronger than before the process. It was a night and day difference.
My dream for PB's expansion in the US is to offer many more opportunities like this. I see it as the perfect on-ramp for expanded civic engagement.