By Benjamin Solotaire
INTRODUCTION
In September 2022 New York City residents were introduced to The People’s Money, the first citywide participatory budgeting process. The People’s Money1 allows every New Yorker to have a say in how to spend a part of the city budget. It is a process built on many years of participatory budgeting in NYC and in communities across the U.S. But it is also a process that had never been done before citywide. How could we create a program that allowed all New Yorkers to have their voices heard and have a meaningful say in how to spend part of the city budget?
BACKGROUND
Participatory budgeting in the U.S. was first introduced in Chicago in 2009 in the 49th Ward. The alderman for the district, Joe Moore, was the first elected official in the U.S. to adopt it. Alderman Moore collaborated with the Participatory Budgeting Project (PBP) to introduce it to his constituents. PBP then introduced the practice to four NYC council members and worked with them to bring it to their districts. Those council members worked with PBP and Harlem-based advocacy organization Community Voices Heard to form a PB Steering Committee consisting of local non-profits, individuals, and representatives of the elected officials. Together they wrote the first rule book for the NYC process, or PBNYC as it came to be known. PBNYC officially became part of the City Council’s Speaker’s Office in 2017. That came with a small, dedicated staff and funding to help coordinate and maintain the integrity of the process. While the process grew, it never expanded beyond 33 of the council’s 51 members due to it being an opt-in process.
The desire to allow all New Yorkers to have their voices heard in how part of the city budget is spent led advocates to come together in 2017-2018 to fight for participatory budgeting to be brought citywide through a local charter revision. This resulted in over a million people voting to create the Civic Engagement Commission (CEC)2, with the mandate of restoring trust in government and increasing civic participation through several programs, one of which was a citywide PB process. In this article, we will focus on that process and how we brought the practice of sortition and deliberative democracy into the participatory practices long-established in New York City’s participatory budgeting.
DESIGNING THE PROCESS
In mid-2022, after a pandemic-caused delay that involved running two smaller pilot programs, the CEC received an allocation from the New York City Office of the Mayor of five million dollars for programs and services to be selected through the citywide participatory budgeting process.3 Staff was brought on to design and operationalize something that had never been done before. Starting with design suggestions by the CEC’s Participatory Budgeting Advisory Committee (PBAC), the process, soon named The People’s Money, was modeled after the council process consisting of the following phases: 1) first, several weeks of collecting ideas from residents of New York, regardless of immigration status or language with a focus on disenfranchised communities, 2) followed by community members deciding which of those ideas should be on their borough ballot, and then 3) a citywide vote with anyone 11 years old or older being eligible.4
In August 2022, as the September launch was being planned, two senior staff at the CEC, Dr. Sarah Sayeed, Chair and Executive Director, and Wendy Trull, then Senior Advisor, attended a conference on citizen assemblies organized by Philip Lindsay of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. As a result of what they learned, they proposed adopting the deliberative practices of citizen assemblies5 into the idea selection process of The People’s Money. In PBNYC, and many PB processes, the ideas for the final ballot are selected by volunteers called budget delegates. This group often consists of people connected to the elected officials as well as active community members. The delegates meet with staff from the electeds’ offices and relevant city agencies, and work through the ideas with them. It has been the least transparent part of the process, often leading to a feeling of disenfranchisement in those who had given their time and ideas in the earlier part of the process.
The idea of using the civic assembly model as a guide for ballot creation was quickly adopted by the staff at the CEC. It was clear that The People’s Money had to be familiar to the residents of the city but also innovative enough to let them know this was not the “same old” PB. We wanted the process to be even more equitable and inclusive. The process for people to submit ideas on how to spend part of the city budget to The People’s Money needed to be simple and easy-to-access. To achieve that we would bring in community-based partners from across the city to hold idea generation workshops designed by CEC staff. Various voting methods were also discussed. NYC had just adopted ranked choice voting for municipal elections and there was a concern that adopting a process like knapsack voting or plus/minus voting would add a layer of unfamiliarity. We decided to go with a simple majority wins ballot. However, rethinking the deliberative process, and giving power to the people of NYC to decide what ideas to put on the ballot supported our focus on restoring trust in government.
Forrest Sparks, Co-founder of The Assembly Project and democratic design practitioner, was brought on, and we worked with him to take the model and bring it into participatory budgeting. First, we talked about sortition. We looked at what it would take to do the type of mass mailing that sortition usually requires, but that was beyond our means. The CEC is a small office with a small budget. However, we were about to invite thousands of people from across the city to idea generation sessions. We decided that inviting people already involved in the process to apply to be on our newly named Borough Assembly Committees was our best option for recruitment. This is sometimes called a volunteer lottery due to its single-stage random selection versus two-stages6 of random selection in a civic lottery typically used in citizens’ assemblies. The focus of our outreach for those sessions was to be to historically disenfranchised populations in the city, so we would also be strengthening our equity focus in the idea selection process. We decided to focus on five main demographic factors: age, race, income, Hispanic / non-Hispanic, and level of education. Forrest brought in the Sortition Foundation, a recognized leader in the field, to help with the selection of 20 people per borough. As incentives, we offered a stipend of $300 plus food and MetroCards.
Once we knew how we were going to get people to participate, we had to determine what they would be doing. A key question for us was how long people would be willing to spend discussing and deliberating over these ideas. The staff proposals ranged from 4 hours in one day to 24 hours over several weeks. There were strong feelings that New Yorkers were busy people who couldn’t spend hours talking with people they hadn’t met about ideas other than their own. Some stood by the need for real deliberation, which takes time. We ended with a consensus of 12-14 hours spread over four or five weeks. Each borough would determine its schedule, including weeknights and weekends, given some basic guidelines. Spoiler alert: in year three we are now at 20 hours over six sessions over seven weeks because members kept telling us they needed more time.
The other key design element was giving members the information they needed to make these crucial decisions about what ideas people would get to vote on. This is where our process differs the most from the citizen assembly model. We aren’t tackling one policy issue such as electoral reform, climate change, or marriage equality. The ideas given by New Yorkers range over the spectrum of social services from job training to English language classes for new immigrants, to financial literacy for young and old, and more after-school programs for students. We knew that the assembly members had the lived experience necessary to make decisions, but we had to figure out how to provide them with the expert opinion and data they could use. Our solution for year one was to give them a chance to review the ideas and write down any questions they came up with. The CEC staff would then spend two weeks researching those questions and providing answers for the members to review at the next session. Another spoiler alert: we didn’t do that process again after year one. The members had a lot of questions, and the staff were not experts on the number of topics being considered. We provided a lot of information, but not in the depth that the members wanted or needed. In future years, we would have to find other solutions.
With the major design elements in place, we began writing facilitation guides, trained our staff in facilitation techniques with the help of Public Agenda, secured libraries in schools in each borough to host the sessions, and recruited high school students to serve as table facilitators. And on January 9, 2023, the first Borough Assembly Committee of The People’s Money was held. Year one is well documented in this article7, but as of March 2, 2025, we have completed the third year of these assemblies, so let’s review what we have learned and how we have changed.
WHAT IS HAPPENING NOW
The framework of the process is still the same. We have continued the sortition process in much the same way, though we increased the number of assembly members to 25, and we removed the question about income after realizing that many people didn’t like to answer it. We use education as a proxy for that question. The number of applicants has increased to over 1,300 from 500 the first year. While our initial pool of applicants has been demographically diverse it has been difficult to maintain that diversity as we confirm the final list of members. We have typically called or emailed up to three times the goal of 25 members to replace those people that couldn’t commit for one reason or another. The result is a slight dilution of the demographics.
As indicated earlier, the knowledge transfer has been the most challenging. Our method in Year 1, with the CEC staff trying to answer questions the members came up with, was inadequate for the staff or the members as we do not have all the answers. In Year 2 we decided to utilize our community organization partners to help with this. An important part of the work we do at the CEC involves working with organizations based in what NYC calls the TRIE neighborhoods, TRIE stands for the Task Force for Racial Inclusion and Equity,8 a group of historically disenfranchised neighborhoods. Our partners were large and small community-based non-profits who provide services in their communities. We asked them to present their view of what programs and services were needed in their neighborhoods.9 We dedicated two sessions for this process. They spent one session presenting their organization’s work and the following session answering questions from the members. This was a big step in providing real on-the-ground information and helped the members feel they were getting valuable insights. The drawback was that we hadn’t selected the organizations with the intention of them covering all the types of services we had ideas for, so some areas were left uncovered. It is also hard to manage what each group said despite our instructions, so the messaging varied from group to group. While the members felt like they had more valid information to work with, we know we still have some changes to make.
SUMMARY
We held the last session of this year’s process on March 2nd, 2025. The members went through 90 ideas in each borough and, following the assembly journey as laid out in the graphic below, deliberated to end up with ten ideas per borough10 that NYC residents will be voting on in May and June. As mentioned earlier, we modified the knowledge-sharing aspect again. This year we took a three-pronged approach and began the knowledge transfer in session two.
Queens Borough Assembly
We partnered with Columbia World Projects to host high-level presentations from six city agencies for all our borough members. The agencies presented their programs and objectives and answered questions openly. In session three, we provided our members with data sheets presenting statistics on equity, health, and other social indicators on a community district level, along with written needs statements and neighborhood resource maps provided by our TRIE partners. The members spent the session reading and discussing this trove of data. Finally, in session four we brought back the TRIE partners in person and had them talk to our members in a round-robin format about the data they had provided in session three. Our members welcomed these three sessions, finding them informative and interactive. In the last two sessions, the members were asked to consider all they had learned along with their lived experiences to determine which ten ideas to put on their borough’s ballot. Was this the solution to the knowledge transfer problem? We took a big step in the right direction, but we have some reflection still to do and will be asking the members directly what they found useful.
When I wrote this article, the last session for Year 3 had just ended. The work of preparing for the vote period is in full swing, as is the process of evaluating the assembly sessions that we just completed. Along with our entry and exit surveys this year, we brought researchers provided by Columbia University to observe the sessions in three of the boroughs, and they are finalizing their reports. We will also conduct in-depth interviews with selected assembly members to get more feedback on their experience. And several researchers from other institutions that observed one or two sessions will be giving us their point-in-time observations. We’re sure this research will help us continue to make this democratic experiment better for the members, and ultimately for the residents of NYC. In the meantime, we can offer the following pieces of insight.
First, these two responses below are from the exit survey we asked people to fill out. When asked how trustworthy the CEC was, the number of members who agreed or strongly agreed went from 43 to 66. And when asked if direct democracy was important, the number that strongly agreed went from 30 to 57.
And anecdotally, at the last session in all the boroughs, people were exchanging numbers, thanking each other and vowing to stay in touch with newfound friends. Many of them also asked to stay in touch with the CEC and how they could be involved in future programs.
As for answering the question posed at the top of this article—does Mixing Civic Assemblies and Participatory Budgeting Make Either Process Better?— I will leave that to the reader and future researchers. But if the number of people who apply to be part of the process continues to increase and the members participating continue to ask for more time to do the work, we feel we are on the right track.
We at the Civic Engagement Commission look forward to continuing to improve ways for all New Yorkers to be directly involved in the decisions made by our government on all levels through both deliberative and participatory processes. Sharing our learnings, and learning from others, will always be crucial to our work,
Benjamin Solotaire is Senior Advisor for New York City’s Civic Engagement Commission
