Don’t Tell Me Your Values, Show Me Your Budget and I’ll Tell You What You Value

Don’t Tell Me Your Values, Show Me Your Budget and I’ll Tell You What You Value

• 1.
  Advancing Social Justicethrough Democratic Engagement in the Budget Process “Don’t tell me your values, show me your budget and I’ll tell you what you value”
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  Problem: How DoWe Accomplish… Problem: How Do We Accomplish…
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  Things Dexter Horne Values •Living a healthy lifestyle (exercise and meditation through writing) • Funding progressive causes • Doing what I can to preserve our shared environment • Creating new laughs and remembering past laughs with friends
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  Things Dexter HorneSpends Money On… 36% 14% 30% 5% 15% 0% 0% DISCRETIONARY Entertainment (movies, bowling, cigars, etc.) Alcohol Food (restaurants and such) Travel Coffee Charity Gym Membership *Soda
• 5.
  “Budgets are the quantitative representationof what’s important” - The National Association of Colleges and Universities Budgets
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  What to expectfrom this presentation • A new paradigm: to further social justice you have to do more than change hearts, you have to change the allocation of our public resources • Why? Because that allocation is a 1:1 reflection of our priorities • How? By engaging in our election systems at all levels, and by advocating for participatory budgeting at more local levels. This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-ND
• 7.
  What’s Important to You?
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  Activity
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  Imagine that we’vejust combined the budgets of all your schools, and that you and your peers now have the opportunity to improve your respective school-communities by deciding how this pooled budget is spent.
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  Step 1: Brainstorm Individually,think of two project ideas that you think could benefit the following communities in your school: • Classmates, professors, classrooms • Whole school • Projects that would benefit future students and professors (5 years out) • Place ideas on the appropriate chart paper
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  Step 2: Brainstorming sub- categories Divide intoteams of three (sound off 1,2,3) In your groups, further divide the project ideas of your team into 3 subcategories. For example: School beautification Recreation Environment and Sustainability
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  Step 3: Design Teams •Further divide into Design Teams, one for each of the subcategories. • Each Design Team select a note-taker, then discuss and organize the project suggestions using the prompts on Page 1 of Student Handout A: What’s the Big Idea?
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  Step 4: Selectand Explore • Each Design Team must now select a project to explore and use Student Handout A: What's the Big Idea?, Page 2 to describe and evaluate the benefit of this plan. • Design Teams rejoin their groups and take turns presenting their project ideas using the Rapid Feedback process from Student Handout B: Rapid Feedback. • When making presentations, use stopwatch app to keep each team honest on time
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  Step 5: Reconvene What surprisedyou most during the activity? What questions and suggestions were most helpful? What changes would you make to your project and/or pitch based on the feedback your team received? What project(s) are you most enthusiastic about? Why? If you wanted to implement one or more of these school improvement projects, how could you fund them?
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  New York’s Participatory BudgetingProject • Public Money: https://www.amdoc.org/watch/publicmone y/
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  Post-video • Initial thoughts? •In your opinion, what difference does it make to have individual residents make budget decisions? • How could Participatory Budgeting improve your community’s relationship with your student government, your college or university, your city government? • What challenges might you face when trying to implement a process like this in your school or hometown? Do you think you could do it?
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  Take-Aways: Getting Involvedin the Budget Process Federal and State Government (representative democracy) • Show up to townhalls and meetings with your reps. • Vote for reps. with interests most closely aligned with your own • Run for office yourself! Local Government, Colleges, Universities (direct democracy) • Show up to meetings and lobby for what is important to you • Be aware that the budget process is year- long and most of the important agenda setting starts early • ADVOCATE FOR PARTICIPATORY BUDGETING
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  Sources • Image ofMichael Scott: someone named Jodie Cheever’s pinterest account. URL: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/28288303883468182/ • Pie chart of Federal government’s 2017 discretionary spending from the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at Brookings. Retrievable online at https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2018/12/13/the-hutchins- center-explains-federal-budget-basics/ • Pie chart on the state of Kentucky’s budgeted general fund expenditures from 2016-2018 from the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy’s (KCEP) Our Commonwealth: A Primer on Kentucky State Budget. Retrievable online at https://kypolicy.org/dash/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Ky-Budget-Primer-2018-edition-1-8-17.pdf • Pie chart on the city of Louisville Metro’s approved executive budget for fiscal year 2017-2018 from Louisville Metro Government’s Building Momentum: Approved Executive Budget for 2017-2018. Retrievable online at https://louisvilleky.gov/sites/default/files/management_budget/fy18_approved_executive_budget_book_8.2.17.p df • Participatory Budgeting image is the property of the Participatory Budgeting Project • Participatory Budgeting activity and accompanying discussion questions come from Allison Milewski of PBS. Her full curriculum, including activities not used in this workshop, can be retrieved online at http://archive.pov.org/publicmoney/lesson-plan/#resources