https://www.participatorybudgeting.org/about/
Since 2009, PBP has collaborated with grassroots and government partners to launch PB processes in over 40 cities, empowering more than 739,000 people to directly decide how to spend over $400 million in public funds.
The Participatory Budgeting Project (PBP) believes that another way of governance is possible and essential, which is why PBP collaboratively transforms democracy to center community power. We do this by collaborating with local partners on participatory processes that put real power over real budgets, policies, and decisions in the hands of the communities they impact
https://www.participatorybudgeting.org/15-years-lesson-3-trust-is-key/
In the spring, PBP Research Fellow Gina Hakim had the opportunity to sit down with Gary Hytrek, a member of the North American PB Research Board, and reflect on the ten-year anniversary of PB in Long Beach, California. First initiated in Districts 1, 3, and 9, PB in Long Beach today is a dynamic, youth-centered process. This year, the city announced the third year of the Youth Power PB Long Beach program, the first citywide youth-run PB process, which funds projects focusing on community care, housing, health and wellness, planning for the future, and transportation.
Gary is a professor of social geography at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) and the director the M.A. program in geography. He is a community-based researcher whose research focuses on movement building and the potential to generate meaningful spaces of participation and self-determination. Gary has 25 years of experience conducting community-based research in Costa Rica, South Georgia, and in Los Angeles County.
In 2013, Gary brought PB to Long Beach. He served on The California Endowment’s Planning Committee that established the Building Healthy Communities Initiative (BHC) in Long Beach, and later as The Endowment’s Evaluation and Learning Specialist, and co-founded the Long Beach Coalition for Good Jobs and a Healthy Community, now Long Beach for a Just Economy.
A full recording of the conversation is available here.
To start off, could you tell us a bit about your background and how you came to be interested in participatory budgeting?
I was doing my dissertation work largely in Costa Rica and I was working with a member of the urban planning program at the National University in Costa Rica. He had been working with Clodomir Santos de Morais, who was not only a friend but a cellmate of Paulo Freire, and he developed this idea of entrepreneurial literacy. In Brazil, farmers were forced off the land in small communities and driven into the city with very little capacity to survive. This was a model to train folks in what he called massive capacity building to gain the skills to create small businesses themselves, but largely cooperatives.
And so Miguel Sobrado, who I was working with in Costa Rica, was working on those kinds of projects. I was interested in doing some research on agrarian reform in Costa Rica and we started working together. These projects are set up very similarly to participatory budgeting. Folks come together, they throw out ideas about what kind of co-op or businesses they would like to create, a steering committee selects the most viable ideas, and then they set up trainings to help folks transition into those positions and establish a co-op. It was also Miguel that introduced me to participatory budgeting in the late 1990s.
Fast forward to 2012-2013, I attended a conference on PB in Chicago that PBP had organized. I met Marti Brown at the time, who was a council member in Vallejo, and she was instrumental in starting PB in Vallejo after their transition out of bankruptcy. I also met Josh Learner and Joe Moore and the core of PBP at the time. The rest is history. I brought it back to Long Beach and started conversations in spring of 2013 with council members and their staff. That fall, Josh Lerner and Joe Moore came to do a presentation in Long Beach to the full city council. We launched the next year.
Can you share a little bit about those early years of getting PB off the ground in Long Beach?
A number of us had just started organizing around trying to build a broader social justice movement in Long Beach and one of the programs that we initiated in spring of 2013 was a series of power analysis workshops, or PAWS, to bring folks together to learn more about the sites of power in Long Beach – the city council, the mayor, the school board. One of those was around the budget, and so I encouraged the folks I was working with to not just focus on the budget, but to talk about participatory budgeting.
Marti Brown came to Long Beach and helped organize one meeting with council members and their staff. Eventually I met with every council member individually. Rex Richardson, who’s now mayor of Long Beach, had just been elected to his council district in North Long Beach, a historically black community and now a Latino and Cambodian community. Rex in particular was really interested in using PB to launch his new administration.
The other council members were sympathetic. Not all of them were open. A lot of them felt that they had very little discretionary funds to use and that they had already earmarked. But two other council members were interested. Susie Price had just been elected in the wealthier, white part of Long Beach and she ran a small youth PB process in 2015. Lena Gonzalez, who’s now the senate majority leader in California, ran two processes, one in 2015, and one in 2016. For all of them, there was real concern about connecting with the community in ways that they hadn’t been able to before and creating a much more inclusive district.
In this respect youth were always a big part of both their campaigns and had always been at the core of PB in Long Beach.
Can you share a little bit more about these early processes, who was eligible and what projects came out of them?
Throughout the country, it seems that the conversations are the same. Adults often have an impression that youth don’t really know what they need. In Long Beach, we’ve been successful in convincing folks that 13 is not too young for youth to be involved in PB and it has been the bottom line in terms of eligibility for voting.
The other challenge we’ve had with electeds is they often have an impression that people, particularly youth, are going to vote for silly things. And in our experience, that’s not been the case. In CD 3, where the youth-run process took place in 2015, there’s a park that the community uses which included some tennis courts that were not used. And the youth voted to convert it into a multi-purpose space where they could play basketball, volleyball, soccer. It became a space not only for youth, but that could be used by more people in the community and it’s an example of how youth, if given the opportunity, aren’t narrowly focused on their own individual interests but the interest of the community.
How have you seen this affect the ways that young people participate in their community?
We recently had a presentation by the youth around their current projects and as youth become more engaged, they are more willing to speak at council. They go on delegations to council members around issues that they feel are important or missing in part of the conversation. There’s just a lot more proactiveness on the part of youth in Long Beach around questions like, how do we reframe this idea of public safety? How do we reframe what we mean by positive youth development? What should be the role of the city and city government?
This is something that other cities in the world, like Vienna, Austria, take very seriously. They engage residents around this idea that policy should be child friendly and they put youth at the core of what we’re doing. That sentiment is resonating really well with the youth in Long Beach. They’re really interested in creating a city that nurtures youth, that doesn’t look at youth as dangerous or indifferent, a city where they can sit on their front step and not be fearful of the police. And they’re much more vocal because they’re gaining the leadership skills, the capacity, the ways to analyze the situation, and figure out some positive solutions.
Can you speak a little bit more about what the funding support for PB has looked like in Long Beach?
Typically the first implementations were just discretionary funds that the council had. The first project in Rex’s district was roughly $300,000.
As I mentioned, there’s always been an interest in creating a space for youth to lead this work and we felt that we needed to create an office of youth development if we’re really going to seriously engage youth in the process of making the city in their image. In 2017, the Invest in Youth Coalition, which is a coalition of about six youth-serving organizations in Long Beach, trained a number of youth to go out and collect community surveys on what the city should prioritize in terms of the budget. They collected 750 completed surveys. The youth helped analyze that data and presented it to the City Council. They convinced the council to provide another $200,000 to create a working group to develop a strategic plan, and out of that the council agreed to create an office of youth development.
In many cities, entities or departments are created but they’re not funded. So the next stage was creating funding for it. We got Measure US on the ballot, which would carve out a certain percentage of oil revenue in Long Beach and require that a certain amount of that go to youth funding. Once that was in place, the youth began to lobby the mayor and the city council to provide funding specifically for participatory budgeting. Long Beach is winding down oil production and so we’re working on another funding source until we get to the point where there’s structural funding.
Did the pandemic have an effect on the viability of PB in Long Beach?
If you would have asked any of us in the Invest in Youth Coalition whether online organizing is an effective way to organize, all of us would have said no. Then the pandemic hit and we had to change methods. Long Beach for a Just Economy, an organization that works on workers’ rights, received some funding to train community organizations, among them some of the organizations that are part of the Invest in Youth Coalition, on how to effectively apply Zoom, Instagram, and other platforms in their organizing efforts.
That dovetailed in 2019-2020 when we launched a PB process with Best Start, which is part of First Five California. In the middle of that, we had to pivot to online proposal development and online voting. We were able to utilize the Stanford Participatory Budgeting Platform. We are at a point now where we realize that these digital resources can be effective in the work.
What are some of the other challenges that you faced in expanding and continuing PB in Long Beach?
The classic ones – funding and staffing. We held processes until 2017 and then the funding wasn’t available from the council and we didn’t have any PB for 2 years. We launched again in 2019 with Best Start Central Long Beach residents, an initiative of First 5 LA, who really see this as an important mechanism for them to engage power structures and to be effective in creating programs and projects that reflect their and their community’s needs. The introduction of PB in Best Start was driven by the families that were part of the program. The youth processes that we’re engaged in right now were driven by the youth and they have been really instrumental in engaging the Long Beach Unified School District, where we have programs this year.
One of the most interesting things that always strikes my undergrad and graduate students who are involved in PB processes as facilitators and observers is that residents get really intensely engaged around how to spend their money but they walk out of those meetings and they’re friendly. It helps students learn how to compromise and how to be civically engaged, and that’s even more important in this age of polarization.
What issues are being prioritized out of these conversations, especially among young people?
Really basic ones. The one I like to always mention is driver’s education programs, which used to be part of high school curriculums. In Los Angeles and in Long Beach, we don’t have a very extensive mass transit system and it’s inconvenient for students who are trying to work and go to school at the same time. To get a driver’s license, you have to complete a costly training and youth consistently have voted for free driver’s training programs.
Another popular issue is music and art funding programs for youth in the summer as well as gardening programs and community gardens. These are programs that are being excluded in schools because there’s lack of funding. Many people wouldn’t expect youth to be interested in these kinds of things but these are really meaningful programs that enrich lives beyond this view that you go to school just to get training to get a job. Youth are pushing back and arguing that there’s more to life than simply working. They want to have arts and music, and to get their hands in the dirt and grow things. All of this makes me incredibly optimistic because a whole new generation is teaching each other and teaching us about what they see as important in life and in making life worth living.
And through this, adults are being challenged in their perspectives of what youth care about as well as what it means to go to school and what it means to orient yourself to life-fulfilling goals, like arts and music. Are there spaces for that kind of intergenerational learning and collaboration between youth and adults in Long Beach?
That’s one of our challenges. We’ve moved away from having a lot of adult involvement, with the exception of the budget delegate phase. In the idea collection spaces, all the ideas come from the youth and then we match those ideas with community organizations that are working on similar things, and then youth and adults engage in the proposal development process. Through trainings, we’ve worked to minimize adultism in those spaces so youth are more engaged and less reluctant to engage with the process, and adults are more supportive of youth voices.
We need to have those intergenerational conversations, because adults have a lot of experiences and lessons to share with youth and youth have the energy and new ideas that can come together in really innovative ways. One of the challenges is that we’ve had a youth process and a separate adult process, but we want to get to the place where we can have a general process for the city with money from the general fund so we can have engagement across generation, race, class, and geography in the city.
We focused a lot on participatory budgeting, but looking into the future, do you see opportunities for the expansion more broadly of participatory processes beyond participatory budgeting in Long Beach?
For me, the natural next step is participatory planning. I just got back from a conference in Vienna with a number of city officials and other activists, where they have very active participatory processes. Since we came back, we’ve been having conservations around how we can engage residents not only around spending, but around policies that affect their community. For example, development projects do require some level of participation but in many places, that is very formalized and there really isn’t meaningful participation, and that’s why residents don’t participate at the level that they should.
So we’re interested in creating really robust, inclusive processes where residents can come together and engage each other around these ideas.
This year marks the ten year anniversary of PB in Long Beach. What would you like to see in the next ten years?
We had a modest goal when we started organizing – when we hear electeds using our words back at us, we know we’ve accomplished something. We have a much bigger vision now. We want to be able to come back in 10 years and have everyone around the country look at Long Beach and say, Long Beach is a child-friendly city.
What’s significant about Long Beach is it’s big enough to pass policies which will have a ripple effect across the country. We passed Hero Pay during the pandemic that became a policy in many cities. But Long Beach is also small enough that we can have these effective personal relationships with our elected officials and city staff. We’re uniquely positioned as a mid-sized city to be able to set that vision, create policies, and then other cities around the country can look at that and say they can do it too.
This work is never easy. It goes in fits and starts and we’ve had a lot of challenges but we’ve been really strategic in engaging and challenging each other. We’ve never given up and we trusted the process. That’s a scary thing, because you’re going into the unknown, but if you trust the process and you trust each other a lot can happen. I think Long Beach has shown that when you do that, it’s possible to create a city that works.
