Students in Sustainable Futures joined forces with a Community and Regional Planning class led by Professor Jennifer Tucker and the community organization People's Budget to explore what participatory budgeting could look like in Albuquerque. Participatory budgeting is a democratic process in which community members directly design and decide how a portion of public funds will be spent — bringing voices often left out of budget decisions into the room where those decisions are made.

Our Sustainable Futures students designed three implementation pathways, grounded in research on participatory governance around the world and in participatory action research with community members here in Albuquerque. They brought their pathways to District 6 City Councilor Nichole Rogers, who adopted the process and committed her full $1.5 million discretionary budget to it.

Over the following year, students worked alongside residents to bring the process to life — facilitating neighborhood assemblies, translating materials, conducting door-to-door outreach, and analyzing community priorities. Several students even served on the PB Steering Committee. When residents voted to fund a community growers market, students shepherded the project from idea to groundbreaking in July 2025. To date, approximately $4 million has been mobilized through this student-designed process — and the work continues, with other Councilors preparing to implement this student designed process.

At a moment when democratic norms face serious threats, these students practiced democracy — learning firsthand that governance can be participatory, responsive, and rooted in community knowledge.

As participatory budgeting deepened trust between the University, the City, and the District 6 community, another priority came into view: food access. Residents were facing interconnected barriers — cost, transportation, education, policy obstacles, and social isolation — that no single agency or organization could address alone. Through a participatory action research group convened under UNM's NSF-funded Transformation Network, we brought together stakeholders from city agencies, community organizations, neighborhood leaders, and UNM faculty across disciplines. Out of that collective analysis came the District 6 Food Policy Council.

The following semester, students in Sustainable Futures partnered directly with Councilor Nichole Rogers and City Council policy staff to develop recommendations for the new Council. Students researched food systems and food policy rigorously, studying best practices from cities and regions around the world and testing them against the specific conditions of Albuquerque. They presented fifteen proposals to the Councilor, the City's Lead Policymaker, and members of the Food Policy Council. Many of those proposals are now being implemented — including mobile farmers markets, Double Up Food Bucks programs, and changes to zoning regulations that expand where and how food can be grown, sold, and shared in the city.

The Food Policy Council has said that one of the greatest gifts of working with students was how their proposals expanded the Council's imagination of what was possible. Three students now serve on the twenty-person Food Policy Council. And building on what began in District 6, Mayor Tim Keller is scaling this student-inspired process citywide with the launch of an Albuquerque Food Policy Council — the first of its kind in the city's history.

In 2024, when the New Mexico Climate Bureau reached out seeking support for the State's Comprehensive Climate Plan, students in Sustainable Futures took on something few undergraduates are trusted to do: design and facilitate a statewide convening at the intersection of government, Indigenous leadership, university research, and community organizing. They conceived the process, shaped the agenda, and led the room.

The Climate Vision Roundtable, held at Mountain Cloud Zen Center in Santa Fe in April 2024, brought together the Climate Bureau staff alongside allies from state agencies, specialists from across UNM, and community leaders — including representatives from the Governor's office, tribal authorities, municipalities, and grassroots organizations.

Students grounded the day in an insight from systems thinker Donella Meadows: "Vision is the most vital step in the policy process... yet vision is missing almost entirely from policy discussions." Rather than beginning with fears and constraints, students created conditions where participants could envision a livable, just climate future for New Mexico — and then work backward toward the policies, partnerships, and practices that could bring it into being.

Along the way, students learned event design, facilitation, and the art of holding space for diverse stakeholders to think together generatively. They navigated the complexities of convening across power differences — state officials, Indigenous leaders, academic specialists, frontline organizers — with care and precision. The roundtable contributed directly to the state's Comprehensive Climate Plan and established ongoing relationships between the Climate Bureau and UNM researchers that continue to shape climate work in New Mexico today.

Students understood this work as cultivating a "center of gravity" for climate action at UNM — not a centralized authority, but a living network of relationships where university knowledge serves public need.