How Communities (and a Participatory Budget Pilot) are Nurturing Public Health in Rhode Island
Here’s a compelling tale of system change in action: An article in the Boston Globe digs into how Rhode Island’s nascent participatory budgeting process dovetailed with the state’s Health Equity Zones (which have a long history of support from LISC) to fund programs and neighborhood assets that residents (as young as age 13) determined their communities needed.
The excerpt below was originally published:
R.I. asked ordinary people how to spend over $1m on their neighborhoods. Here’s how that process could be the future.
By Alexa Gagosz, Boston Globe
Last summer, residents of three Rhode Island cities were asked to figure out how to spend nearly $1.4 million.
Teenagers as young as 13 were asked to participate, all the way up to to adults well into their 70s. Some live not far from the neighborhood they grew up in. Others immigrated to the United States from Central America and Haiti. These communities — Central Falls, Pawtucket, and two zip codes in central Providence — also include undocumented immigrants who have never voted in a US election.
The participating communities are predominantly people of color, have historically been underinvested in, and are locations where COVID-19 and unemployment wreaked havoc.
The $1 million set aside for central Providence and the $385,000 for Pawtucket and Central Falls to share seemed like a ginormous amount of money that could solve a lot of problems — from rising housing costs to unpaid debt. On the other hand, these official federal dollars didn’t seem like enough to address their neighborhoods’ most blatant dilemmas to the extent that ordinary people — like themselves — would be affected.
But why residents to figure out solutions, instead of staffers at city hall? Becki Marcus calls it “direct democracy in action.”
“We’re creating a platform for residents to directly decide how they want to invest funds in their communities,” said Marcus, an assistant program officer at the Local Initiatives Support Corporation [LISC]. On a microcosm level, “This is exactly how democracy is supposed to work.”