School Participatory Budgeting and Racial Justice: The GRACE model in Rhode Island

• In Event: Civic Education and Democratic Renewal: The Possibilities and Limits of School Participatory Budgeting

Abstract

Participatory Budgeting (PB) is a widely used practice for generating mass public participation to improve the quality of public goods and services. In this paper we assess the capacity of School Participatory Budgeting (School PB), which focuses on schools and public education, as a tool for fostering racial equity and justice. Our hypothesis was that School PB is a democratic innovation that can be very useful in the quest for racial equity and justice, and that it can be more effective under the conditions that we outline in the GRACE model. To test our model, we undertook an evaluation of a School PB initiative in a mostly Latino immigrant community. Overall, we found that School PB in a community of color leads to increases in attitudes of empowerment as well as more civic participation and representative decision-making.

For this to occur, there must be a substantive level of investment from local public officials and bureaucrats, or what we call government capacity. There also needs to be resiliency support that inoculates the public from the political interests of public officials. While fostering the resiliency support that creates autonomy, the PB process also needs to be accessible in a way that enables people in communities of color to participate on terms that are convenient for them or at least cost-effective. Lastly, opportunities for participation need to bring stakeholders into spaces that foster community building. Alignment with our full model, we argue, creates the conditions for community empowerment. The Voces con Poder School PB initiative in Central Falls, Rhode Island, provides evidence that supports our model. The school district and city leadership allocated $100,000 and used the PB process in the school setting as a tool to generate mass public participation around how to foster school improvement during the COVID-19 pandemic.

We found that School PB delegates expressed a higher propensity for performing civic behaviors after the delegate experience. They also showed more horizontal views of local power. Post-process interviews show empowerment growth occurring through an increased comfort with speaking out towards advancing policy change. We also found evidence of the PB process fostering democratic alignment, as the public’s preferences aligned with the final decisions reached through the PB process. We also found evidence that the voters in the PB process largely match the community’s demographics. While more standard forms of democratic engagement struggle with racial imbalances in representation and responsiveness, we found that the VCP initiative was a democratic process more aligned with the identities and ideas of the Central Falls community.

Author

• Jonathan E. Collins, Teachers College, Columbia University