Dive Brief: - Beyond dollars and cents, city budgets are moral documents that prioritize whose voices and needs are heard in a community, said Celina Su, a professor of political science at City University of New York, during a recent webinar hosted by Philadelphia-based nonprofit Next City. - Su, who served on New York City’s participatory budgeting steering committee for a decade, described a growing movement of city residents working together to influence how public funds are allocated. Over a dozen other cities, including Chicago, Boston and Greensboro, North Carolina, have used participatory budgeting, according to HUD Exchange. The Participatory Budgeting Project reported 56 city, county and district level PB processes in 2018. - Participatory budgeting is a way to engage young people, people of color and other historically marginalized communities, which can strengthen democracy and give local policymakers insight into what residents want to see funded, said Su, author of the 2025 book “Budget Justice: On Building Grassroots Politics and Solidarities.” Dive Insight: Participatory budgeting began in Brazil, Su said, and more than 11,000 communities around the world have implemented it over the last three decades. In the U.S., Su said, she began hearing the phrase “budget justice” during the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings. The message was that city budgets are “designed to be anti-democratic, to prevent public accountability,” she said. “People felt like their ideas were shut down in favor of projects considered technically feasible” by policymakers and lobbyists. But budgets can act as a type of community justice, prioritizing projects residents want — things like “diaper distribution hubs, self-defense workshops for Muslim women or funding for food coops, artist coops, worker coops, school and childcare coops, CSAs, community gardens,” Su said. New York City has the nation’s largest PB initiative, Su said. During the webinar and