Youth Making Choices for Seattle
From the City of Seattle via Catherine Weatbrook who sits on the steering committee for Youth Voice, Youth Choice.
The first event is January 28th is at Meridian Center of Health, 10521 Meridian Ave N
No
RSVP required. Entire youth groups are encouraged to attend. Please -
help spread the word about this amazing opportunities, and remember,
it’s the 11-25 year olds that must be the ones at the table here!
What would youth 11-25 do with $700,000 of the City's budget?
Youth
Voice, Youth Choice is a new Participatory Budgeting (PB) Initiative
from the City of Seattle. PB is a democratic process where community
members directly decide how to spend part of a public budget that
focuses on engaging people who have not historically been involved in
government, budget processes, or represent underserved communities.
A
new project from the City of Seattle called Youth Voice, Youth Choice,
empowers youth ages 11 to 25 to share their ideas at one of six upcoming
idea assemblies. From those assemblies, project delegates will be
selected from the youth in attendance, and those youth all be coached
into creating a high level project descriptions. City-wide, those
project ideas will be voted on by the youth in our city. The top vote-getters will then be developed by the youth and various departments and
other technical resources, into fully scoped and budgeted projects.
Those projects will then be put forward in round two of voting! The top
$700,000 of projects ranging in size from $25,000 to just over $250,000
will then be funded out of budget money already allocated for this
project.
Beyond
the opportunity to have youth decide on youth-focused projects in our
city, this process engages youth, offers many opportunities for
leadership roles, and experience developing project proposals with
budgets.
February 3 from 3 – 5 p.m. at UW Ethnic Cultural Center, Unity Room
February 4 from 4 – 6 p.m. at Greenwood Library
February 9 from 3:30 – 5:30 p.m. at Douglass Truth Library
February 10 from 4 – 6 p.m. at Youngstown Cultural Arts Center
February 18 from 3:30 – 5:30 p.m. at New Holly Gathering Hall
And one more TBD.
On
a personal note, I’m excited for this opportunity to bring a new
generation into being active in our city. The City Neighborhood Council,
which I co-chair, worked with CM Licata’s office and many others to
help make this opportunity possible. Mayor Murray put the funds into the
2016 budget, and the council approved it.
I
am proud to serve on the steering committee helping launch this
opportunity in Seattle. Participatory budgeting isn’t new, but it is
new to Seattle. Seattle becomes only the second city in the United
States to focus this process on youth. More about Participatory
Budgeting can be learned here: http://www.participatorybudgeting.org/about-participatory-budgeting/what-is-pb/
Going
forward, I’m hopeful that this process, which is being designed to be
more approachable, equitable, cost effective, and flexible than many of
Seattle’s existing grant processes, and can serve as a model for
rethinking many parts of our budgeting and granting activities in
Seattle.
If you have questions, feel free to contact me at catherine.weatbrook@gmail.com, or Rahwa.Habte@seattle.gov
If you have questions, feel free to contact me at catherine.weatbrook@gmail.com, or Rahwa.Habte@seattle.gov
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