The Boston People's Budget Coalition

Welcome to the People’s budget! We are a coalition that is committed to creating a mock city budget, through a community input process, using the framework of participatory budgeting. Throughout the course of Boston’s history, neighborhoods, such as Roxbury and Mattapan, have been marginalized and underserved. This mock budget will highlight the disparities between community and government priorities, as well as providing a general resource for community members to use for their purposes. This process will be led by the Boston People's Budget Coalition.

In order to create a mock budget that is truly representative of the people, we would need to reach community members to gather data and create a sufficient budget that grasps community priorities. That is why the main goal of this project is to receive around 10,000 responses from people on our survey forms. These forms serve as another portion of committing to being as accessible as possible to those who can not attend our community forums. We also place prioritization on neighborhoods and groups that have been given little resources and have been marginalized by the city budget.

Currently, we are in the midst of our idea collection phase, as we have been brainstorming ways we can best mobilize around the community and collect data for our mock budget. Seeing as there are approximately 700,000 Bostonians, we are reaching out to organizations that meet our values for assistance on data collection with the bases they have built within their communities. Partnering with other organizations ensures that we are accessible as possible to the people who we are uplifting in this process. The People’s Budget has listed out a few tactics that can be used to collect input. We keep in mind that the variation in these tactics are made in order to meet people’s different accessibilities. As a coalition member we ask that you do one or more of the following:

• Send an email with a link to our survey to your members or neighbors
• Text blast the link to our survey to your network 
• Door knock in your neighborhood to hand out info about the People’s Budget
• Sponsor a “Drop off box” in your area where people pick up and drop off surveys
• Hold a small and safe in-person gathering with your members or neighbors about the People’s Budget (we’ll provide the agenda and materials)  
• Facilitate virtual community forums with your members or neighbors about the people’s budget (we’ll provide the agenda and materials) 
• Translate documents in various languages (Spanish, Haitian Creole, Mandarin Chinese, etc.)

CLICK HERE TO JOIN OUR COALITION

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