Participatory Budgeting

In early 2011 the Home Office gave Safer Communities Torbay (SCT) £15,000 to make available to local individuals or groups to run their own projects. The aim of the projects had to be to tackle domestic abuse.

In Torbay it was decided that the funding should be used to try and prevent young people from becoming victims of domestic abuse in the future.

The funding had to be spent using a process called Participatory Budgeting. With Participatory Budgeting lots of different people and groups are asked to put forward their ideas for projects along with how much it would cost to deliver. Everyone is then invited to a ‘voting event’ and because there is only a limited pot of funding, all those present vote for which projects should receive some of the money.

Sometimes with participatory budgeting groups don’t receive the money that they’ve requested, but the point is that the everyone is involved in the decision making process which makes it open and fair. As well as being a good way of spending money and making decisions, participatory budgeting can also be a lot of fun.

SCT ran a voting day in March 2011 and 9 local groups walked away with funding to run their own projects.

At SCT we were impressed with not only the standard of applications for the participatory budgeting project but the enthusiasm and dedication of each group to tackle domestic abuse in Torbay.

We’re hoping that all of the projects will be completed by the end of 2011 so later in the year we’ll update our website with further information about who received funding and what they did with it.