In a new blog featured on the Shared Future CIC’s website Alan Budge connects PB and climate change. We feature some highlights below.
Participatory Budgeting(PB) enables people to make their community better, starting with issues that concern us all. The biggest concern we face as a society is climate change.
In August 2018, Greta Thunberg, a fifteen year old Swedish schoolgirl, went on strike. She sat herself down outside the Swedish Parliament building and began a one-person ‘climate strike’. Just over six months later, schools around the world are now ‘striking for the climate’ on a regular basis. On March 15th, thousands of children across the UK as well as strikers in over 100 other countries skipped school in order to protest.
I was at a Participatory Budgeting (PB) voting event, where people vote directly on spending money in their communities, in North Yorkshire a few years ago; one of the participants there, a boy about the same age as Greta, said to me about the PB voting day, his face glowing with enthusiasm, “This has got to be better than general elections or any of that other stuff. It’s brilliant.”
We know that a local PB event can attract literally hundreds of participants (often many new to political engagement). That is why we are interested in developing a programme of PB events, developed within the many Local Authority areas (58 and counting at the time of writing) to have declared a ‘climate emergency’ since December 2018. We want to call this programme Our Money, Our Planet.
- Read the full blog here
Alan Budge is one of the PB Partners, a team of passionate PB experts, coordinated by Shared Future CIC