They were given $1 million and told to spend it improving the health of their community.
That’s how a committee of residents from nine of Providence’s poorest neighborhoods — none of whom had been elected to public office before — began the city’s inaugural experiment with participatory budgeting, a style of government where voters, rather than politicians, decide how a public budget gets spent.
They went on to build new bus stops and park bathrooms, plant a fruit orchard, and distribute lead water-filters to over 2,000 Providence households, among other projects.
Despite a promising start, Providence’s foray into participatory budgeting came to a bitter end this winter, as the nonprofit staff that designed and hoped to replicate the process on a larger scale was abruptly laid off.
The decision could prevent participatory budgeting from ever catching on in Providence, despite strong interest from local city councilors and a growing track record of success in other progressive American cities.
A neighborhood election
This year, civilians decided among themselves how to spend portions of the municipal budgets in Boston ($2 million), New York City ($23 million) and Seattle ($27 million). Since an initial experiment in Chicago in 2009, over 60 American cities have tried participatory budgeting in some form, allocating over $400 million in total, according to the Center for Participatory Budgeting.
In Providence, the inaugural $1 million participatory budget was a mix of public money from the R.I. Department of Health ($450,000) and the philanthropic group Blue Meridian Partners ($550,000).
Central Providence Unidos, a division within the larger nonprofit One Neighborhood Builders, led the process. Central Providence Unidos organized a committee of residents from nine Providence neighborhoods to gather ideas for how to allocate the $1 million, which they dubbed the “Nine Neighborhood Fund.”
Anusha Venkataraman, Central Providence Unidos’ former director, said the committee canvassed their own communities, speaking to people from diverse racial and economic backgrounds, including some as young as 14.
“We had heard from some students at Mount Pleasant High School that they would be waiting at the bus stop across the street from their school after dark,” Venkataraman said, “and the bus driver would just drive by because they couldn’t see that there was a person waiting there.”
The committee ultimately collected 347 ideas and whittled those down to a shortlist of 20. Central Providence Unidos then organized an election to decide which ideas would get public funding. The Rhode Island Secretary of State provided official ballots and voting machines.
“Anyone who lived in those nine neighborhoods who was (over age 13) could vote,” Venkataraman said. “Really exciting, especially for folks that may not be able to vote in traditional elections.”
More than 1,300 people cast ballots, and eight of the 20 projects on the shortlist received enough votes to get funding.
For the next step, Central Providence Unidos organized voters into subcommittees to select the contractors for each project.
The process took three years from start to finish, but by the end, Venkataraman said Central Providence Unidos had fine-tuned a system for doing participatory budgeting with a diverse, multilingual population.
“The Nine Neighborhood Fund was always envisioned as a pilot that would happen once, but would create the interest, the capacity, and the infrastructure to be able to advocate for it to happen at the city or state level in the future,” Venkataraman said.
Providence city councilors immediately expressed interest. Council President Rachel Miller came to a meeting where Central Providence Unidos presented their participatory budgeting work.
“There is a profound difference in decisions that are made by all of the humans that are impacted by those decisions,” Miller said in a speech.
For years, she said, she’d wanted to devote part of Providence’s municipal budget to participatory budgeting, specifically the infrastructure funding earmarked for her ward. But until that moment, she’d considered the process too difficult to start on her own.
“I mean, there’s literally a road map for how to do this now,” Miller said.
The initiative completely fell apart the very next day. Venkataraman and six other staff members at the nonprofit were laid off.
Project stopped in its tracks
One Neighborhood Builders, the larger nonprofit and fiscal sponsor for Central Providence Unidos, had run into a troubled financial situation, said the nonprofit’s CEO, Peter Chapman.
The influx of federal funding that flowed during the pandemic had dried up, Chapman said, as had other once-reliable sources of federal funding.
Facing a budget deficit, Chapman said One Neighborhood Builders needed to refocus on the nonprofit’s original goal: building and maintaining affordable housing. Central Providence Unidos’ work on public health and participatory budgeting, he said, wasn’t as central to the mission.
“So that was why we decided through an exhaustive process, a painful process — board and staff — to implement a reduction in force of the Central Providence Unidos staff,” Chapman said.
One Neighborhood Builders backed out of its partnership with RIDOH and returned hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants. Since the layoffs, several board members have quit.
The staff who set up a model for participatory budgeting in Providence have since scattered to the winds. Venkataraman said she’s hoping another nonprofit will step in to keep the team together.
“If we’re able to move quickly, I think we can still take advantage of the lessons learned and the staff capacity that had been built, the know-how within the community, while it’s still fresh,” Venkataraman said.
