Participatory Budgeting Teach-in Transcript January 14

This is the transcript from the January 14, 2021 Participatory Budgeting Teach-in. The full recording is here:

Part 1

LéTania Severe 0:02
Sweet. Yes. If everyone would mute your mic, that’d be super awesome. Shaun, I’m gonna put you in charge of the wait room for now. Angélica, if you have a message I’m gonna ask you to send it on the phone because I can’t keep up with the chat.

LéTania Severe 0:15
Welcome, everyone, we’re gonna try and move through this so that we can get all the information out. Again, my name is LéTania Severe. And today we’re gonna be talking about PB [Participatory Budgeting]. We are recording so folks who weren’t able to be here can listen in. I’m going to have Angélica, introduce herself, and then start us off with a little bit of how did we get here.

Angélica Chazaro 0:41
Hi, everybody. Thank you so much for being here. This is so exciting to see so much interest in participatory budgeting. My name is Angelica Chazaro. And I organize with Decriminalise Seattle. And I’m also part of the Solidarity Budget efforts. So I want to just ground us in the fact that none of this would be happening without the uprising in defense of Black lives that so many of us were part of this past summer and fall without the 1000s of folks who took to the streets, in some cases every single day and night for months and months and who continue to do so we would not be here right now. This also would not be happening without the reckoning of the role of policing in our lives in our city, which moved into the budget fight — into the virtual halls of city council this summer and fall. And that included the work of Solidarity Budget where many different orgs. And people came together to try to make sure that we could stop playing these like budgeting Hunger Games — where I’m fighting for my money, and good luck with your fight. Instead, we are all coming together to say, we want to see the police defunded. We want that funding to go to Participatory Budgeting. But we also want to make sure housing is funded, transit is funded, the green new deal is funded — all of these things that we know help us to create the world where we have actual safety and help us render police obsolete. And so we pushed for PB specifically as part of the defund police strategy, because it wasn’t enough to defund the police. We needed a mechanism to make sure that as we start to move towards community control of our budget, we never return to the previous status quo, which was at least a quarter of our city’s general fund every year going to policing and police pensions rather than to all the things we know can create safety. So participatory budgeting is one mechanism, again, to get community control of funds, particularly of funds that went previously to police and a big part of the pot for this year’s participatory budgeting is money that in any other year would have just gone to fund police salaries. So that’s one thing. And then we also want to start funding the kinds of projects that help us build a city where again, we can create public safety without racist violent policing. And so this is part of the diverse defund police strategy on one side, and on the other side, the sort of invest and rebuild the kind of city where many communities, especially black communities will finally experience safety for the first time. So I’ll leave it there. And I’m very excited to be part of this.

LéTania Severe 3:01
Thank you. A couple things, for those of you who didn’t hear me earlier, since we don’t have time to do introductions. PB is very much about networking and making sure that as many people who want to be involved can be involved, so please throw your any affiliations that you are coming here with or that you organize with — if your organization wants to be involved in PB, or if they sent you to this teach-in, please put that in the chat so that we can know the different groups that are here and so that other folks know who’s here and you all can start to work together and create some groups that can get the information out about PB. The other thing is I dropped the agenda in the chat so that it’s right there for you. Our goal is to jump into some breakout groups later. But 100 people’s a lot of people to organize in breakout rooms, but we’ll see — we’ll make that work. And there’s some areas at the bottom of the agenda for you all to take notes on your conversations in those rooms so that we can share that out with everyone. I will jump in — Shaun and I are like the same person, so I’ll start talking and then Shaun will finish my sentence — we will get you all up to speed on what PB is all about. So the first thing what is PB so I’m going to go ahead and share my screen — visuals! We’ve done this a few times and we know that people like to look at things. So let’s share that. Here’s a little bit of info on PB. There’s a design process steering committee that represents the community, creates the rules of engagement, and a plan. We’ll brainstorm some ideas, develop some proposals (the development of proposals — anyone can do that). We’ll talk some about the steering committee and some work groups that will help guide the process in a few minutes, we’ll talk about that. But the proposal development section, any and everybody who has some kind of affiliation — either you live, work, play, worship, have connections, grew up in Seattle can participate — doesn’t matter. Your immigration status doesn’t matter, if you’re formerly incarcerated and you can’t vote in the elections we had in November, you can vote in PB and you can write proposals. And so we’ll have the proposal process and then we’ll vote and then funds will will be awarded to the winning projects. We’ll share this out. There’s a link in the notes for this. Let’s go back to this — I’m gonna be going back and forth, y’all. This is multitasking — it’s really hard. So who makes the decisions and what are their responsibilities? As I mentioned, in my introduction, I’m one of the research leads and Shaun’s the other research lead — kind of the brain child of that whole thing — that’s Shaun’s big idea. The Black Brilliance Research Project was funded by council with $3 million to answer three questions: What creates true community safety? What creates true community health? And what do folks need to thrive? And so we have over 100 researchers who are in community asking those questions, and the Black Brilliance research project has preliminary findings that have been turned into Council and will be made public very soon, probably next week, or the week after. And in those findings, there are five areas of priorities where folks need those things to feel safe and healthy and to be thriving. Those buckets — let’s share my screen again with you all. Just a second.

LéTania Severe 6:58
All right. So these are our five buckets. Can we all see those? So housing and physical space, mental health, youth and children, economic development, and crisis and wellness. (We can probably share out these sheets as well, just so you have that with a little more information.) These areas are what’s been highlighted in the preliminary findings of the Black Brilliance Research, and those will be the priorities that folks can write up proposals for during the PB process. The mayor ultimately has the decision about what city departments will be involved in PB. So this is a community-led process, but there will be city involvement. Most community points out that no city department does great in this but there are some that do better that we want to see involved in PB. The city has done PB in the past, and that’s typically in the Department of Neighborhoods, but a lot of folks are talking about the Office of Planning and Community Development — particularly the EDI group — as being a group that has good engagement with the community and a group that folks would like to see leading this work with the support of the Office of Civil Rights and the Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs. I’ll take a pause there. Any questions? If you’re putting questions in the chat, I’m not gonna lie, I’m probably not gonna see them — too many chats, too many comments. You can come off mute as you have a question. Anyone? Throw out a question. Alright, we’ll keep going.

LéTania Severe 8:40
Some of the community roles for this work: as I mentioned before, there are some workgroups, and there’s a steering committee. The steering committee sets the rules for the work and will help foster the work along, but there’ll also be some work groups — outreach work group, some budget delegates, and process facilitators who will help consolidate information, particularly for making sure that PB is on track to do what we want it to do. An accountability workgroup will help monitor and receive feedback about the decision making processes that are happening. Lived experience workgroup as well as the restorative and proactive safety workgroup. What’s really important here is that in every PB group, it is important that those who are most likely to be harmed or killed by systemic racism and violence are represented. This is and this includes Black women who are trans, Indigenous women, people with disabilities, among other groups. And so those folks will be prioritized and kind of leading this work. These are typically groups of people who don’t get to lead work like this. And so a lot of the work will be focused in on making sure those individuals have positions that help set the scope for this work. Any other questions? Anything I missed Shaun?

Shaun Glaze 10:19
Are there workgroups picked yet? Is the steering committee picked yet?

LéTania Severe 10:24
Common Questions? Yeah. So a lot of times people are just like, so who’s on the steering committee? No one’s on the steering committee. The research literally is creating a roadmap. So just finding out what community thinks are important — characteristics for a steering committee and for workgroups. That leads me right to the next thing I should show you. Here are some of the criteria that folks have been talking about for steering committee members.

Shaun Glaze 10:56
Can you can you make that much bigger? It’s very unreadable on my screen.

LéTania Severe 11:02
How’s that? Better? Yeah.

Shaun Glaze 11:05
Yeah.

LéTania Severe 11:06
All right, there we go. Shaun and I have been talking to folks since what seems like the last 10 years, but I think it’s actually since June or July. And so we’ve talked to a lot of people, our researchers have been talking to a lot of people just trying to get information about like, who should be prioritized on the steering committee. And here are those criteria that have come out of that work. Again, this is preliminary findings. These pages come directly from the preliminary findings for the research that was turned in to Council a couple weeks ago and will hopefully be approved soon. We were requested to put in some more information and got that back to them on Tuesday. And so hopefully, they will move that through their approval process pretty quickly. Once they approve it, then there’s a whole process to make it a public document, and then we can share it out with you more broadly. But you also will probably see in the media. The media has been very excited about this work. I’ll use the word excited, because that’s the best I can do. So these are the criteria. Any questions? Anything that feels off? One thing that we also do — we’re still collecting data — as we show you information, maybe you see something missing, maybe you see something that you want to talk more about, and you can throw that in the chat. We may not get to all the chat stuff right now, but we save the chat and we’ll typically go through that before we send out our follow up email so that we can answer any questions that weren’t answered. Anything else? Any questions? I know one question that we hear also is what’s the timeline? Shaun do you want to talk about timeline and I’ll put up the slide?

Shaun Glaze 12:51
Sure I’ll talk about timeline. So we are in January. January and February we’re still going to be doing more of the research, but January also keep kicks-off the outreach aspects of PB, the telling people that PB exists and getting them excited, and getting the steering committee job description type stuff out and circulated and people applying. So January and February is all of that pre work that is happening. The research continues. Y’all, this is still a data collection opportunity. You want to tell us that everything is wrong? Great. Drop it in the chat, so that we can add that to the analysis. We have on this call also several Black Brilliance Researchers — want to give y’all a shout out — as well as our volunteer researchers that have been supporting — a shout out to y’all. There are hundreds of people who have been talking to 1000s of people in community to learn what this should look like, and it is really exciting to continue this work forward. So we have our “what’s PB” — everyone’s learning about it, art’s going up — there’s gonna be murals, there’s going to be music videos, there’s going to be resources into community, people getting internet so they can participate more — all that stuff. That’s January and February. February and March so far, we’re going to be on track to start actually collecting concrete ideas related to those five buckets. For those who joined a little bit later, those five buckets include housing, includes youth, includes mental health, includes economic development, and also includes crisis and wellness. So as we think about those five buckets, community — anyone connected to Seattle — is going to start saying, “Here are my ideas, y’all.” And we’re going to be sharing that out with each other. So that’s February and March. After that, we’re going to start putting those ideas into groups so that when two people have the same idea, we’re all looking at only one thing on the paper. And then into the summer, we’ll start the process of voting, and then later in the year, the ideas become real and funded. So that’s the overall timeline. Let’s go ahead and shake this up though. If you are have been part of our experiences so far, you’ll know that most people really love breakout rooms, because that’s the world we live in now y’all! Breakout rooms! Right, right? Yeah, I see you. Y’all excited? Yes. Feeling it! Great. So here’s what we’re thinking: unless it breaks Zoom, we’re thinking of creating breakout rooms that are about five people, because 100 people in one room is too many. Just statistically doesn’t quite work out. So I want you all to start thinking about a couple of key questions, and I believe their in the agenda as well.

Shaun Glaze 15:14
Yeah they are. I’m working on breakout rooms for you all.

Shaun Glaze 15:41
I can read the questions while you’re putting those rooms together. So when you enter your room, you’re going to do a couple of key things. I want y’all to remember this first, because you’re gonna get in the room, and you’ll be like, wait, I forgot. The first thing I want y’all to figure out is who’s going to be your note taker. You don’t have to write anything down, per se, but we do think that the note taker will play an important role to making sure we’re capturing all the brilliance you’re going to be generating in those breakout rooms. What we want you to do is identify your note taker. Your note taker will likely be putting the notes in like the chat. Yeah, I think that’s probably the easiest thing, honestly. But you’ll put the notes in the chat, and you’ll eventually copy them over into a Google Doc for us (thank you!). Then you’re going to make sure that each person answers the following questions: What does your community need to participate in PB? And what’s the best way to get your community what it needs? What does your community need and what’s the best way to get that to them? It’s okay if you have multiple communities. I do, we probably all do. You don’t have to sort of debate and explain who your community is if you don’t want to. What’s really important to us is getting a sense of what those needs are, so that we can start putting together resources and requests to make sure the ball’s rolling on those. And knowing what’s the best way to get community what they need is important. I’ll tell you a quick story before we hop into these rooms, because I know that when new people join, it kind of messes up the breakouts. One of the things that we did early on for this research is we really carved out money to put aside for people getting computers and getting internet. Computers and internet. It’s COVID. We don’t want to be doing too many in person things, and we know that these two things you’ll need regardless. What we found was there was one community of like, “Yes, we’d love — none of us have devices — we would love devices.” And we’re like, “Okay, great — we have tablets, and we have laptops.” And they’re like, “Okay, we don’t really know the difference between these two things becaues we don’t use a lot of technology. Laptops is probably fine.” So we give them laptops, and then they’re like, “Actually, these things are really complicated! My community does not need laptops, we actually need tablets. The simpler, the better so that we can use that to really get online and actually use this tool that you’ve given us.” And so thankfully, because we had the flexibility and our plan, we were able to just swap those things out. People have what they need, and they can move forward and participate fully. It’s the same kind of thing where it’s like if you ask community, community might need one thing, and it might change. Or if you just assume that everyone needs laptops, and you give everyone laptops, and then it turns out people can’t use them anyway, then that doesn’t work either. So I want y’all to really just dig in on those two key questions. All right. Where are we at, LéTania?

LéTania Severe 18:42
I’m ready. All right.

Shaun Glaze 18:46
Any last questions? What’s the first thing yall are gonna do? You’re gonna find a note taker.

LéTania Severe 18:57
Yeah, somebody needs to have the document too. What we can do is we can send it out to all the breakout rooms just in case. So we’ll remind you. Alright, here we go. We’re just gonna — everyone’s gonna go. Alright. See ya!

LéTania Severe 19:14
We lost some people who were like breakout rooms, No! I feel you.

Shaun Glaze 19:21
We have Sharon, we can put Sharon in one of the groups.

LéTania Severe 19:26
Oh, yeah. Let me do that.

Shaun Glaze 19:33
Yeah. 18 looks good for Sharon. Angélica!?

LéTania Severe 19:37
Yeah I tell Angélica to come back.

Shaun Glaze 19:40
I just refuse to go. I get to be co-host I guess.

LéTania Severe 19:48
Nikkita is probably like not paying attention. All right, let me pause this.

LéTania Severe 0:03
So great job you all doing the breakout room thing, you survived! I think there were like 15 people who were like breakout rooms, nah! and then they left. And that’s okay. That gave room for some more people to come in. I understand. There are Zooms where I’m like, oh, we’re doing breakout rooms, I think I’m good. You know? I get it. I’m actually an introvert and like, zoom actually is great. Like, if we were having all these meetings in person, I’d be like, oh, man, okay, I can do it. I can do it. But Zoom seems — it’s chill. It’s the right amount of, you know, people interaction. So any questions? We want to focus on any questions you all have. You can throw them in the chat. Angélica is gonna manage that and Shaun and I can answer any of your questions.

Unknown Speaker 1:09
I have a question about the steering committee. One of the priority populations I didn’t see were people who had experienced police violence. And it just made me wonder if that was something to specify.

Shaun Glaze 1:26
A great point. Yeah, we’re writing this down. It will be added.

LéTania Severe 1:32
Sola, to answer your question in the chat — put it in the shared agenda. Let me find the link. Is this it? Yes, this is it.

Shaun Glaze 1:42
Oh “how should we share notes?” Yes, put it in the agenda.

LéTania Severe 1:45
Yeah. At the bottom of the agenda, you’ll see there’s kind of a template, and I think there’s only 10 breakout rooms on there, so if you were in room 11 to 18, please —

Shaun Glaze 2:02
I’ll just copy paste. Don’t worry about creating a new one. Find a blank one and do your stuff. I don’t want y’all to have to worry about that.

LéTania Severe 2:09
Perfect, thank you. Shaun’s on it. Any other questions?

Angélica Chazaro 2:14
Nicole has a question about is funding constrained for projects within Seattle only or King County?

LéTania Severe 2:19
That’s a great question. I think that’s probably to be determined. I think the city can kind of determine that. Go for it Angélica, you look like you got an answer.

Angélica Chazaro 2:29
Yeah, yes. So part of the proposal development phase will involve like scoping — where the city and legal experts from both the city and from community will look at the projects and see if it’s something that the city of Seattle is legally allowed to fund with public dollars. And so I think it’ll sort of depend. There might be a lot of projects that are funded by the City of Seattle, but end up impacting people across King County. But generally speaking, whatever limitations we have for public dollars for the city of Seattle to spend will apply in this area as well.

LéTania Severe 3:06
Also, King County did get some money for PB as well. I think they got 10 million. So there will be also a King County PB process. I’m not sure how that will look or how that one is being created. We’re in the process of trying to see if we can talk to those folks, so we can share what we know. But for now, I’m not 100% sure how that one will be done.

LéTania Severe 3:34
I saw another question, Mary, I don’t understand. You. Could you ask your question? Mary’s one of our researchers on the Black Brilliance Research Project. We see Mary in meetings almost every day.

Mary W. 3:50
What up though? I’m talking about the idea of, you know, just visually, it just is so flat oftentimes in this platform of zoom. If folks can you know, if you’re feeling what somebody says, you know, give it a [hand motion] or like “I’m feeling you.”

LéTania Severe 4:11
There we go, Alex knows what’s up. Thank you, Alex, I see that. There might be some other ones. Oh, we got some claps. There we go. Mary, I love the encouragement for that. One thing I don’t think we talked about earlier that I will add, and then we’ll go back to the questions is — and you probably saw it — what can you do right now? So there’s a couple areas where you can really be engaged in how this all plays out at this point. And a lot of that is just around outreach and getting information out. One of those ways is to educate your community. It can be in a variety of ways. Mary is on the silent taskforce team for the Black Brilliance Research Project, and there’s a lot of artists on there. And so they’ll be giving information about PB out in some very cool artistic ways. I’ve heard some talks about a jingle. And then we have some other folks who are artists who are talking about doing murals and things like that. And so one of the things you can do is provide a teach-in, we don’t want to do all the teach-ins. Nobody wants to just hear us talk. Your friends and family and your people that you work with want to hear you talk about PB, something that you’re interested in. And if you’re passionate about it, you may want to get involved in that way. And so we’re hoping to maybe do a train-the-trainer for the teach-ins next week. (We typically are like, we should do that next week!) So next week look out, you’ll be getting emails about a potential train-the-trainer opportunity next week so that you can kind of learn. We’ll give you the slides that we showed you, we’ll give you some more information so that you can manage a teach-in for your community. Another way to get involved is to help create media content. That’s some of the stuff I was talking about Mary’s team doing in our Forever Safe Spaces team, which is filled with artists. They will be creating content around PB so that it’s fun. In last week’s meeting, there was a lot of talk about PB and J because PB — someone called it Participatory Budgeting and Justice. So you can be very creative, you can be corny, we’re very corny. So Shaun and I are researchers. We like to be corny about data stuff. So do whatever works for you. Thank you Peter. The other way to get involved — the third way — would be helping to identify barriers in your community to PB. You answered some questions around those areas in the breakout rooms. We’ll take that information and kind of consolidate it and share it out to the larger group. But think about how you want to be involved. And we’re gonna throw a survey in here in the last five minutes to give you an opportunity to essentially say how you want to be involved so that we can contact you around a specific area. You may want to be involved in all the things — awesome. You can come hang out with us and do PB stuff all the time, and we would love it. So you’ll have that opportunity. Yes, my favorite sandwich. I love that. Thank you, Jack. Let’s see what questions am I missing, Angélica?

Angélica Chazaro 7:10
We had a question about who’s currently on the Black Brilliance Research Project, and Shaun answered, saying there’s currently 9 teams and 105 people on the BBRP, plus about 150 volunteers who participate, as well as researchers, graphic designers, etc. And so it’s a huge and beautiful group right now. And then Nikko asked if there’s any outreach to immigrant and refugee communities. I’ll throw that back at y’all.

LéTania Severe 7:34
Sweet. Yes. Go for it Shaun.

Shaun Glaze 7:40
I wasn’t sure if you’re asking about the Black Brilliance Research Project or PB, but the answer is pretty intertwined. So at least two of the research teams are led by immigrants and refugees, including Bridging Cultural Gaps, as well as East African Community Services. We’d love to continue to engage more and more people. There are also several communities that we’ve been connected to through the last six-plus months that have helped to provide information to connect us with people on the research side. On PB, no matter what the numbers are, we want more. We’re greedy. We want to make sure we’re reaching out to every single community member that is out there. People who have roots of any kind here in Seattle, including people who’ve been displaced outside of Seattle. Many of our immigrant refugee communities have also been affected by displacement, by gentrification, by systemic disinvestment, whatever words you want to describe it, people have been forced to move time and time again. And so it’s definitely something that’s top of mind for us. I see a message from Kat that says, “When considering priority areas mental health is noted. Can we consider expanding that to behavioral health to include both mental health and substance use disorder?” I will tell you from the research that those things are so intertwined that people don’t usually talk about them super separately. So what we’re hearing from community is that there are different ways for people to talk about mental health, behavioral health, substance use, and all of that is a huge priority. There’s also things like neurodivergence that isn’t necessarily connected to or talked about in the same way in terms of mental health, but it’s certainly deeply intertwined with all of that as well. So, when we present the research, it is really trying to figure out how to take these stories, these ideas, these data points that people share with us and put them together in a way where people can see their ideas reflected. I would have no hesitation imagining that if someone suggested a proposal that comes together for, say, substance use — I think that people who are in the workgroups, the people who are in the steering committees, the people who are going to be helping to shepherd this process will know — because they’ll read the full report — that, of course, that’s reflected and should be an idea that’s able to move forward. And so that’s what’s really most important. I don’t want y’all to get too attached to whatever “big bucket” label we put on things. The full report — that’s at this point over 1000 pages — goes into great detail about the kinds of stories and experiences that people really want to see highlighted in projects. Okay, I hear more pb&j. That’s exciting.

LéTania Severe 10:45
Yeah. We have a question from iPhone, I think, I don’t know. It looks like your hand is raised I think. You can unmute.

iPhone 10:54
Yeah, I just put it in the chat, I just basically was saying, “we’re still here.” People talk in circles about anti displacement, and there is a group of, you know, African Americans that are still here — urban Black natives, whatever you want to call us. And I do feel that sometimes we fall victim to all the labels that are out there. If there’s nothing to call us, then we’re just subject to kind of falling where we may and it’s easy to say, oh, immigrant refugee communities. You can label that group and call them to the space, or you can say BIPOC, but who is that? Nobody’s really talking about Black people that have lived here for generations, that are on the brink of losing their houses, and that have children that pretty much the city of Seattle is guaranteeing the displacement of — we’re still here! So I just want to make sure that that group is addressed, because there’s often conversation about, “oh, well, you know, everything has to be low income.” We’ve already lost our doctors and lawyers. Now all that’s left is government workers and the essential workers that have two-earner households that are in the Black community. So if you’re not reaching those people, you’re basically guaranteeing the displacement of those people. And looking at AMI is not going to help.

Shaun Glaze 12:29
I agree! Absolutely! And several of our research teams are — whatever word you want to use — from Seattle, longtime, multiple-generation folks. More than half probably if you add them up, I would say. So that has always been part of the conversation. There’s even specific call-outs for different work groups. Black women, in particular from Seattle I know was named explicitly over and over and over again, as a community that needs to be reflected in some of these workgroups. And I do think that, like you said, there is often (at least in terms of how the city official language tries to approach I’m going to put in quotes “this issue”) [a tendancy] to kind of talk around it. To talk about AMI [Area Median Income], or to talk about other things to kind of get at that. What we find is that what’s really awesome about this project is everyone is a community member. We are Black- and brown-led, we are very Black-led research. People don’t talk around issues. We’re very direct people. We might be very diverse and not a monolith, but generally speaking, Black folks talk, you know, direct. We call things what they are. And so what’s really great about this report is we don’t have to sort of guess what people say or guess what people want to see. Because they’re very direct about it. So if PB is building out — we have our steering committee, we have all these work groups, people getting engaged, etc. — but if Black people who are here and who have roots here who’ve been here for a while aren’t reflected, I think everyone’s gonna be like, I’m gonna call bullshit. Can we say bullshit? On recordings? Is that a rule?

LéTania Severe 14:10
We can say whatever we want. This is our recording, you know? You can’t get through a Zoom without saying a curse word, so it’s fine.

Shaun Glaze 14:17
I can’t though. I try and I fail each time. Literally, people are gonna call it — they’re gonna say hey, like that’s not okay. Like, that doesn’t make sense. All of this is possible because of decades of organizing by Black people here in Seattle pushing and pushing and pushing, sometimes being ignored and then a little change happens, and then you get this big thing — it wouldn’t happen without Black folks. I’m going to have to go on mute because my kid’s watching TV.

LéTania Severe 14:45
Yep, that’s cool. We are wrapping up anyway. I don’t know your name, but honestly I would love to get more people who haven’t been reflected in the work in the past to reach out and let us know how you want to be involved. Also, I’ll say your involvement could literally just be this teach-in and then like telling, you know, a few people who who are like, what’d you do today? And you’d be like, oh, by the way, I went to this teach-in. That is important — just telling people when they’re like, “what is Participatory Budgeting?” And you’re like, “It’s pb&j!” And then you just go into it. But you could also be very involved, where you’re doing those three things I said — like helping to do teach-ins, creating media content, or identifying barriers — or you might want to be like, “I want to be on a steering committee! I want to be on a workgroup! How do I do that?” And so you all have my email and we have another email that we’ll be sending out from, so you’ll get a different email address from us shortly because I can’t be having all these emails go through my business email to be honest. Shaun told me today that if you send a lot of emails, you could get blacklisted, and I was like, Well, shit, I can’t have that. So we have an email sending thing that we’ll send out as a follow-up to this. It’ll include the recording, it’ll include the notes, it’ll include information about how you can get involved. I dropped a link to a survey in the chat. Please fill that out before you go so that we know how you want to be engaged with us. Maybe this is all — you know, this is it. And that’s cool. We really appreciate you stopping in and and learning about PB with us. But maybe you want to join some of the those groups that would be doing a little more work. And it’d be helpful to know that so that we can send out information based on your interests.

Shaun Glaze 16:37
And we’ll also have meetings at different times. I’m getting some private messages. You might see an early, early morning meeting or a late evening meeting, depending on availability. Those of you who have late stuff in the day or small humans. Like I get you, I feel you I feel your pain. We will have things at different times in the day, so you don’t have to feel left out.

LéTania Severe 16:55
Yes. And as I mentioned, we talked about doing some teach-ins next week as well as a train-the-trainer. So we might have some dates — probably do a day and evening most of the days next week. So look out for that. We still have to schedule that out. We’d like to get as many people just to know that Participatory Budgeting is a thing (there’s 30 million dollars) and how they can get involved as quickly as possible, just so that they know and they can start to get involved how they want. So I think I’ll leave it there. Yes, Sola, it’s great to see you. It’s great to see a lot of you. A lot of you who I know, a lot of new people. Again, if you want to drop your affiliation in the chat so we know who’s represented and how you might network, that’d be great. Otherwise, do the survey and we’ll see you soon if you want. But you will be seeing some PB stuff coming out. Maybe a sticker from Megan, which I’m very excited about. We’ll hang out for a little bit.

Shaun Glaze 17:53
We’ll hang out. Always do. We can stop the recording though.

LéTania Severe 17:57
Yes, we can. Thank you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai