What if Public Funds Were Controlled by the Public?

Shari Davis has civic brokenness and systemic inequality on the brain. Also: Batman.

What if Gotham didn’t solve its problems via masked vigilante? What if Bruce Wayne’s fortune was redistributed among the community, and the community decided how to spend it? Davis, 34, has been offering such prompts to young people around the country. The questions are an avenue into a larger point these days: Our democracy needs not just repair but wholesale reimagining.

But where issues like voter suppression, gerrymandering and disinformation campaigns might occupy other reformers, Davis has built a career around a more humble target: the public budget, that joyless document that causes eyes to glaze over while quietly affecting our day-to-day lives at the deepest levels.

Since 2018, Davis has led (and now coleads) the Participatory Budgeting Project, an Oakland, Calif.-based national nonprofit with a bold proposition behind its unsexy name: Democracy shouldn’t be confined to the ballot box. Davis, whose pronouns are they and she, and their colleagues hope that getting regular people’s hands on municipal funds will result in a broad redistribution of power and a cascade of greater democratic engagement.

Since its first application in Brazil in the late 1980s, the participatory budgeting movement has spread to more than 7,000 cities around the world, including 29 in the United States, where ordinary citizens already have allocated $386 million. A current example: After a year’s delay, Seattleites will engage in one of the biggest instances of participatory budgeting to date. After the city’s decision to slash its police budget in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, residents will soon direct some $30 million toward a new vision of public safety.

Davis’s path to the realm of line items and capital projects arguably began in childhood. They honed their organizing chops as a preteen teaching martial arts, then led Boston’s Department of Youth Engagement and Employment. An Obama Foundation fellowship came after, then a TED Talk and now an Emerson Collective fellowship, which they’ll use to create a visual guide to participatory budgeting. (The following interview has been condensed and edited.)

What’s the problem participatory budgeting solves?

How are budgets typically made? A guy or a group of guys makes some guesses based on last year’s budget, and that’s it — that’s the budget. The money generally goes to big police budgets, or to a narrow view of what our schools need, or what education support looks like. Where it’s not going is social services, or expanded opportunities for social work, or mutual aid spaces. It’s not going into dedicated programming for Black, brown and trans youth.

That’s not a good or inclusive process. Community spending priorities don’t get heard. People then get disillusioned, and eventually we see this narrative that they’re apathetic. That’s not it at all. It’s that their engagement is inauthentic.

Studies have found young people are more likely to vote in local and national elections after they were involved in P.B., more likely to walk into a city-owned building, more likely to consider going into politics, more likely to speak to a public official, more likely to volunteer and more confident in their skills.

Any favorite examples of P.B. in action?

In New York, it came up that Muslim women in a certain Brooklyn district needed resources to feel safer in their neighborhoods. Using P.B., they got a self-defense class on the ballot.

In Arizona, the Phoenix Union High School District decided to get rid of armed officers in schools. We’re going to take the $1.2 million from that contract and go through a participatory budgeting process where students, parents, guardians and teachers get to define what safety is and how to invest in those things. The vote will happen this spring, but already the community has built an understanding of what alternatives to policing look like.

In Boston, I launched the country’s first youth-focused P.B. effort, with $1 million of city funds. That included money to make parks more accessible. But right before we broke ground on one, I got a call from the city’s archaeologist. They said we had to stop because of a site there.

I said, “Can we engage community members to protect the site? You seem like you don’t have a lot of staff!” And it worked. We put out a call and soon were enlisting regular people to be archaeologists. Many were criminal-justice-system-impacted young people. Because of P.B., they not only had a chance to find historic artifacts in their own city, but there’s now a park in Boston that’s far more accessible than it was before.

What if the community chooses wrong?

Often I’m asked, “What if people make bad decisions? What if all the kids in this school decide they want a taco truck?” First, if that many young people are voting for a taco truck, I might want to look into why. But second, there’s an involved process we follow. You build relationships with the community over time, you have conversations, you track ideas, you score them, you vet them.

How does defunding Batman fit into this?

With Tracey Corder [of the Action Center on Race and the Economy, which focuses on racial justice and Wall Street accountability], I’ve been giving these workshops at youth conferences, placing everyone into a world they’re familiar with — Gotham — in order to envision a new one. We get amazing answers: What if the whole idea of a villain was flipped, and the Joker starts putting on quarterly arts concerts? Suddenly they’re imagining this new world, and no one’s talking about police and jails and prisons anymore.

Imagining new futures is essential as new spaces emerge. Take Oakland, right here. We’re seeing so many Black and brown folks, low-income people, all pushed further out from the center. So newer Black cities start emerging, like Stockton, Concord, Hayward, Fremont. History has taught us that these cities will experience the same barriers unless we disrupt the cycle. So this is about envisioning a new world, divested from systems of harm.

How did your consciousness around these issues form?

That started with my parents. My father was born in Mobile, [Ala.], experienced the military, was a Black Panther, was incarcerated, is an artist and an educator. He’d tell me what it looked like growing up with segregated bathrooms, while my mother, a Black and Indigenous woman, talked about busing and having rocks thrown at her bus. So our dinner table conversations were about how we practice safety as a family, how we can show up for each other, how we create systems of care.

Then came karate.

Right. My inroads to understanding community care really started after I stumbled into a community martial arts program when I was 9. Karate forces you to ask questions about yourself, your surroundings and what’s possible. By the time I was 11, I was teaching the class — I had all kinds of students all across Boston. It really turned me into a facilitator.

By the time I was 14, I had a summer job at the mayor’s office. I ended up working in local government for almost 15 years. I do believe democracy can be functional. It can be equitable. But government has to change. One of the cruxes of this work is building power, and that requires healing first.

How so?

The system of government that we’ve experienced for hundreds of years is embedded with white supremacy and with a way of doing things that’s incredibly exclusive. A lot of acknowledgment, listening and healing has to happen. If broken people are trying to fix a broken democracy, I have a concern that it will stay broken. But if the folks working to repair it are themselves on a healing journey, I have hope.