Openly musing today on wondering what it might look like for participatory budgeting to be deployed for an Aboriginal governance authority responsible for child and family services.

The work we are doing on Vancouver Island is about building the capacity of the community to be the owners of the child and family services in their communities. We are about to do an Art of Hosting training here with 40 or so community members to build the leadership capacity of the local communities, but I was thinking today, after having dinner last night with my friend Donna Morton, who knows much about these things, that participatory budgeting might be a cool thing to try.

Participatory budgeting is a deeply democratic process of having citizens use deliberative dialogue to set budgets for the ervices that affect them. It has it’s deepes community of practice in Brazil, where the cities of Porto Alegre and Sao Paolo have pioneered the use of the process. It has since spread to many places around the world.

I know there is a small movement of people here in British Columbia interested in the process, and one councillor on my island, Lisa Barrett, tried to introduce t as a practice on Bowen Island. She was met with too much reticence to pursue it at the time, although it sems like at some level and over some longer period of time democratizing public budgeting may be an inevitable move especially in municipal governments.

So I’m looking for some expertise among people near and far who have used this process especially in the non-profit world, or even better, in the quasi-governmental world of school board, health authorities and the like.

My main inquiry at this point is around how you have the conversation with the people that control the purse strings in a way that invites them to share power. I was talking to my friend Tuesday Ryan-Hart this morning as well, who works in the social services sector in Columbus Ohio and she gifted me with a great question to use to invite a conversation about this process. She was talking about how easy it is to talk a good line about sharing power – and in still-semocratic North America, there are many places where people are able to participate. Many of these forums however are shallow if they don’t tie the exercise of that shared power to shared responsibility and benefit. Tuesday’s insight was that it makes sense to talk to people who are already open and who already believe that sharing is the right thing to do and then ask “Where can we share power that results also in shared benefits?” That is a way to talk about how to include the voices of clients for example in the structuring of the budgets that affect their lives and it helps us get at what Tuesday called “what we don’t know we don’t know.” It’s a brilliant little question.

So, friends, where can you point me for people that have had experiences using participatory budgeting in the social services sectors anywhere in the world?

PS. Here are some links I uncovered about participatory budgeting in a quick scan around the web:

Porto Alegre Participatory budgeting virtual library
Articles and books in English, Spanish and Portugese

Participatory Budgeting Project — Resources
This page contains papers, links, and other information about research and other projects related to participatory budgeting that are being developed throughout the world.

participatorybudgeting.org
ParticipatoryBudgeting.org is a companion site to the book, Militants and Citizens, and a general resource site on participatory budgeting.

Participatory budgeting tag at del.icio.us

[tags]participatory+budgeting, democracy[/tags]