PB ABQ
2024

For my Sustainability Studies Capstone, I worked with community members and City Councilor Nichole Rogers of Albuquerque’s District 6 to deepen democracy in the district through Participatory Budgeting (PB).

Photo: PB ABQ
For my Sustainability Studies Capstone, I worked with community members and City Councilor Nichole Rogers of Albuquerque’s District 6 to deepen democracy in the district through Participatory Budgeting (PB), a democratic way of allocating public funds that allows the public to both come up with and vote on the projects they want to see in their community. Starting in late 2023, community members began to organize towards launching Albuquerque’s first ever PB process and eventually formed PBABQ, a group of volunteers dedicated to carrying out and expanding PB in Albuquerque. In April of 2024, this group partnered with Councilor Rogers who secured $1.5 million to fund a PB process in District 6. Over the summer, PBABQ worked to grow its capacity culminating in the launch of the District 6 PB Steering Committee, an elected body of community members tasked with carrying out the PB process. Starting in October of 2024, PBABQ launched the first phase of PB, project idea collection, and has been hard at work collecting the ideas of District 6 community members for how to spend $1.5 million dollars in the district, with over 150 ideas so far!