Democracy Beyond Elections

Shari Davis has dedicated her life to empowering marginalized communities and breaking down barriers between people and government. As Executive Director of the Participatory Budgeting Project (PBP), Shari provides strategic leadership to ensure PBP is mission-focused and resourced for impactful system change outcomes. She joined PBP staff after nearly 15 years of service and leadership in local government. As Director of Youth Engagement and Employment for the City of Boston she launched Youth Lead the Change, the first youth participatory budgeting process in the US. 

Shari first got involved in city government in high school, serving as the Citywide Neighborhood Safety Coordinator on the Boston Mayor’s Youth Council and working at the Mayor’s Youthline. Shari is a 2019 Obama Foundation Fellow. Shari is a graduate of Boston University’s Sargent College for Health and Rehabilitation Sciences and holds a master’s degree in anatomy and physiology.

Public budgets and decisions are too often disconnected from the people they impact most. This structural political inequality fuels some of the biggest problems in our society, leading to deep polarization, harm, and skepticism of democracy itself. 

Amidst a global pandemic and nationwide demands for racial justice, communities are urgently demanding participatory budgeting (PB) and other participatory democratic practices as a means to divest from systems of oppression and reinvest in innovative community-driven solutions.

PBP is building Democracy Beyond Elections, an early-stage organizing coalition that disrupts how cities and towns decide on our most urgent priorities, between and beyond elections. We propose a national Democracy Coach program that trains frontline community leaders and elected officials to launch participatory democracy pilots at the local, state, and federal levels. This program has deep potential to elevate the power of people across the U.S. who have historically been excluded from political participation.

It’s no secret that the government as currently designed is not run for the benefit of all. In fact, a recent study by Pew Research Center (2019) shows that just 17% of Americans trust the government to do what is right. This creates a deep chasm between what those in government understand and what community members experience as needs. Communities with low electoral participation or low levels of civic engagement are least likely to participate in government decision-making and most likely to be excluded — and their needs are often neglected in budget and policy decisions. This disconnect fuels some of the biggest problems with our democracy, especially record-low participation and trust in government.

At this moment, as people recognize the need to change practices and policies to reflect community needs, the problem is less about why public participation is needed and more about how. How do we set up infrastructure, design the process, and reimagine what is possible together?

That is the work that PBP has been in since inception and is what this moment calls for: bold solutions that live at the intersection of civic health, justice and healing.

People recognize that our current democracy is flawed, but solutions to change it are less known. Democracy Beyond Elections (DBE) is an early-stage organizing coalition that disrupts how communities decide on pressing issues, between and beyond elections. Participatory democracy is democracy in its purest form - bringing community into the overall operation of government rather than just elections.

We will accomplish this through four strategic areas:

1. Design and pilot new models of participatory democracy
2. Create tools and resources for advocacy and implementation
3. Scale participatory practices through a Democracy Coach program
4. Co-build a narrative shift campaign to broaden public definition of democracy.

We will launch a national Democracy Coach program that recruits and trains a cohort of community leaders and elected officials primed to launch new pilots in cities and towns across the U.S. We will build an online technology platform that connects cohorts with no-cost customized technical assistance and advocacy coaching, evidence-based toolkits, and learning exchanges to stay connected and share best practices. 

The Democracy Coach program will serve as proof of concept that raises the profile of participatory democracy, as well as shift how we think about democracy in an inherently participatory way. 

Our project prioritizes engaging community organizers and elected officials committed to building the power of those who have been historically excluded from political participation, including people of color, immigrants, low-income people, youth, and currently and formerly incarcerated individuals. 

These populations, especially women, have been shown to participate in participatory practices such as participatory budgeting (PB) at higher rates than in typical local elections. In many successful participatory democracy practices globally, residents as young as 11, non-citizens, and currently and formerly incarcerated individuals are generally eligible to participate.

Participatory democracy centers community voice in ways conventional decision-making hasn’t prioritized, and allows participants to come together across increasingly expanding partisan divides to work together for the good of their communities. Research has shown that participatory democratic practices like PB can lead to more equitable outcomes: 

• Disproportionately engage low-income residents and communities of color, compared with typical local elections and engagement

• Boost voter turnout of these communities (people who take part in PB are 7% more likely to vote in elections)

• Increase civic skills in research, communication, negotiation, and teamwork

• Direct money toward lower-income communities

• Impact broader policy and spending decisions, shifting hundreds of millions of additional dollars toward community priorities

We deserve budgets and policies that treat people like people. Our current landscape has shifted public perception to reimagine bold solutions that elevate communities left behind. With COVID overlapping with demands for racial justice, PBP is well-positioned to guide communities so that resources are allocated for both an equitable pandemic response and community-controlled leadership.

We are seeking resources to take our work to the next level. Currently, we are working with 17 cities and 10 states ready to elevate new Divest/Invest models. Our project will mobilize these cities, to redistribute real power to residents who know their communities best.

Our project was created after PBP’s decade-long implementation of PB in over 30 cities across the U.S., and learning that PB alone is insufficient to build an equitable democracy. Around the world, a growing movement of democracy practitioners have successfully infused participatory democratic practices, new technologies, and peer learning to make government more responsive and equitable — but this approach has yet to be practiced here in the U.S. 

In 2019, we pivoted our work and launched Democracy Beyond Elections (DBE) in collaboration with nearly 150 local, state, and national organizers, funders, and officials. We heard from dozens of attendees that more opportunities for learning about participatory practices, paired with concrete guides and models to implement participatory practices, are needed. 

While we have made critical advancements to establish our core campaign team and policy platform, we are hearing that officials and movement leaders are ready to build and launch pilots, but need greater tools and support to meaningfully engage diverse frontline communities, communities of color, and low-income communities in leading equitable decision-making.

Our proposed project is a result of listening and learning to partner needs and developing a program that offers customized assistance, learning space, and peer support. 

I am a person who has witnessed my family and community not only be left out of decisions, but harmed in the process. After working in government for 15 years with an intention to build pipelines for Black and Brown leadership, I learned that the system has to change in order to not only be inclusive but also support that leadership. I believe that we can have government institutions that are composed of community members that are experts in their experience and I have seen PB be used to create that reality.  

Through my work with PBP, I have committed to building powerful new opportunities for underrepresented communities to participate in public decision-making — and right now, our work is at a tipping point. 

People are rising up, demanding control control over the budgets, policies, and decisions that impact us all. I believe that when local knowledge, resources, and relationships are supported by technical expertise, tools, and training, communities can thrive. 

Our work so far on PB has built a strong foundation and robust model for participatory democracy to flourish in the United States. Since 2009, PBP has worked with partners to launch PB processes in over 30 cities, empowering more than 739,000 people to directly decide how to spend over $386 million in public funds. This includes launching flagship PB processes in New York City, Chicago, Greensboro, Seattle, Vallejo, Cambridge, Long Beach, Phoenix, and Boston, among many others, and we have supported 85% of processes nationwide. 

Through my work at PBP, I build powerful new opportunities for historically excluded communities to participate in public decision-making. I have co-led this work across the country in rural and urban environments and have been recognized widely for our innovative work. My acclamations include being a 2019 Obama Fellow, 2020 TED Main Stage Speaker, EXTRAordinary Women in Boston Recipient. 

In partnership with my team, board, and partners I have successfully worked with dozens of governments and organizations across the country in growing PB, notably: 

• Growing PBNYC from 7,000 residents deciding how to spend $5 million in 2011 to over 118,000 residents deciding on nearly $40 million in 2019. 

• Advocating for the California Department of Transportation to allocate up to $25 million for PB in transportation planning grants.

• Designing and launching the first youth-led ‘Safe Schools’ participatory policymaking/PB pilot in Brooklyn, NY where students decided on over $1 million in funding and policy changes to make their schools safer. 

A big learning for me is that deep systems change requires not just one strategy but many. 

When I was running the youth employment program in Boston, one challenge was the community named that there weren’t enough youth jobs and employment support. Leadership also made clear that there were no additional resources to put into the program. 

I responded by looking at our solutions differently. There was no one solution. There were many. We shifted our strategy to collecting ideas from youth, held focus groups, but in particular allowed people to redesign the program. 

The results speak for themselves: 

• Youth and civic tech experts built out a portal for job-seekers to access and apply for jobs and developed a new algorithm that considered location and barriers when generating job placement. 

• Over 4,000 youth were connected to employment opportunities annually.

• Government centered equity in ensuring that traditionally excluded youth had meaningful opportunities to access workforce development experience. 

This learning informs our DBE work. In the field there can be tensions around using one particular innovation. We believe that we should use many and recognize that for many of social justice interventions to work, they have to be employed in concert.

I lead PBP with energy, passion, and a commitment to building leader-full spaces that share power and are adaptive to the opportunities at hand. In 2014, I worked with youth in Boston to launch and implement Youth Lead the Change (YLC), the first youth-led PB process in the country that brought together youth from across the City to spend $1 million of their City’s budget in low-income communities. I intentionally co-designed and implemented YLC rooted in equity and inclusion, by:

• Designing the process with a decision-making body of youth from low income communities of color.

• Focusing outreach on neighborhoods with the highest percentage of low-income residents and on individuals impacted by the criminal justice system, those that identify as houseless and as a part of the LGBTQIA+ community. 

• Partnering with organizations whose constituencies reflect historically excluded people.

• Providing translation, interpretation, food access and child care.

• Voting to be inclusive of all residents, including youth, immigrants, and formerly incarcerated individuals

PB YLC participants have reported being more likely to vote in local and national elections, developing self-confidence, empathy, and teamwork; many have even continued to serve in local government as employees or long-term volunteers of YLC and related leadership opportunities.

Our project reflects a metamorphosis of how we practice democracy. It is a radical re-imagination of what justice and shared power looks like, driven by community-led solutions and backed by government resources. We are hearing from our partners and communities on the ground that this re-imagination is not only possible, it’s what is needed. 

Our Democracy Coach program moves us from imagination to action. We believe that our project has potential to disrupt how cities across the U.S. decide on our most pressing issues, by equipping frontline community leaders with the tools and knowledge to shape a new reality. 

While PB is an established civic participation tool in the U.S., participatory democracy has yet to be widely adopted in the U.S. and provides an opportunity to divest from harmful systems of oppression and reinvest real wealth and decision-making power into marginalized communities.  

Our project infuses civic participation innovations, peer learning, and technology to launch equitable participatory democracy pilots that will yield: 

• Increased civic engagement

• New community leaders

• More equitable and effective spending and policies that better meet community needs

• Stronger relationships between residents, government, and community organizations

• Broader political participation, especially from historically marginalized communities

By empowering communities to hold real power in government, we can stop calling it participatory democracy and simply call it democracy.

We believe that communities hold invaluable local knowledge, resources, and relationships to address community needs and priorities. In order to tackle some of the biggest problems we see in our democracy, communities must have real power over public budgets and spending.

Built on the theory of change that people closest to the issues are best positioned to realize tangible solutions, Democracy Beyond Elections convenes national civic engagement, policy, and organizing groups to develop a shared policy agenda, build political and community support, and launch collaborative pilot programs that model a more equitable and participatory democracy.

Our work shifts social and politics dynamics to foster new models of participatory democracy with sustained impacts for individuals, institutions, and systems.

Short-Term Outcomes:

• New and existing participatory democracy processes increase the amount of money and issues that residents can decide. 

• Large-scale equitable participatory democracy processes raise the bar for civic engagement, inspiring governments to open up bigger decisions to residents. 

• More prominent officials, organizations, and funders focused on equity and democracy launch and support participatory democracy programs.

• More democracy advocates recognize participatory democracy as a key part of structural democracy reforms. 

Longer-Term Outcomes: 

• Approaches to participatory democracy gain traction among democracy practitioners, as evidenced by a set of national organizations commiting to work on a participatory democracy campaign.

• Participatory democracy becomes more widely supported, with fifty government officials, organizations, and funders endorsing the campaign.

• Participatory democracy policies are advanced, with government institutions launching new participatory democracy processes. 

Over the next year- 

• Build the democracy coach training program, including curriculum design and materials creation.

• Recruit, train and provide ongoing support to a cohort of 20 democracy coaches.

• Recruit a cohort of 20 elected officials ready to launch participatory processes in their communities.

• Build an online portal for managing information and sharing communication between and amongst the cohorts.

Over the next five years-

• Continuously work to improve the democracy coach program by comprehensive testing and evaluation. 

• Recruit, train and support a cohort of 150 to 200 democracy coaches

• 150-200 cities, states, schools boards or other legislative bodies have enacted participatory democracy in their communities

• Host a national conference on participatory democracy, featuring the work of the democracy coaches from across the country.

• Financial - In order to grow this work to meet the moment in the movement and outlined impacts it will require an investment of $10,000,000 over three years 

• Time - Narrative shift work and campaign to shift culture and sustained long term systemic change strategy takes time

• Technical - Our program will require equitable civic technology development and capacity to support our digital platform 

• Professional development to support a growing, learning and leaderful staff

Financial - PBP is currently building on 10 years of fundraising and development that has grown to a $1.5 million dollar organization. Currently, we are working with partners to collaboratively raise funds and are building both new and deeper relationships with the philanthropic community to allow us to make our programming and services available to grassroots leadership. 

Time - While this work takes time, we are approaching it as an emergent learning approach that allows us to test, learn and continue to reimagine how to tailor and transform our work. System change work requires an investment in and a recognition of the need to have an entire ecosystem approach. This is why PBP is committed to both learning and collaboration.

Technology - Currently we have relationships with some of the most successful open source tool developers to support PD initiatives internationally. These relationships we can leverage for collaboration on tool development will allow the best outcomes for pilot instances while not replacing the need for human to human interaction for deep social justice work to be effective. 

Professional development - Our team is learning and growing and PBP has to learn, grow, and support that development. Our strategic plan has 4 directions that guide us, one of which is organizational health and sustainability. As a team, PBP is leveraging the Obama Fellowship, Bridgespan Leadership Group  and other resources to interrogate and improve our practices around growth, leadership, ensuring equity and confronting racial bias. 

Our Democracy Beyond Elections partner and supporter network is not only wide but strong. Our established core team includes five local, state, and national partners, and we have been working closely with over a dozen supporting partners through platform development discussions, working groups, joint fundraising cultivation, and resource development. Core partners include Center for Popular Democracy, Participatory Budgeting Project, People’s Action, Jefferson Center, and Theatre of the Oppressed NYC. Our partners bring expertise in divest/invest strategies, community/grassroots political organizing, participatory democracy and centering equity in building systems that work. 

Since March 2020, we began regularly convening a group of stakeholders to create a model for participatory policymaking to pilot in the field, plus tools and resources to support implementation. Members include Center for Popular Democracy, Generation Citizen, People’s Action, State Innovation Exchange, Public Agenda, Demos, Coro Center, Local Progress, Jefferson Center. To date, we are collectively exploring key phases in the processes, priority audiences, design principles, channels for engagement, metrics and evaluation, and key equity indicators. 

Lastly, we worked with researcher Alexa Kasdan to create a comprehensive landscape analysis and executive summary to highlight bright spots in expanding democracy beyond elections, including the Irish Citizens Assembly, New York City’s Civic Engagement Commission, Scotland’s Community Empowerment Act, and the Decide Madrid civic participation program.

We recently focused our revenue model through a new business model canvas, with key features outlined below, so that our work remains financially sustainable. 

Focused Customer Segments:

- National Civic Engagement Funders: Program officers at national foundations focused on civic engagement, including for specific issues or demographic groups.

- Public Decision-makers: Recently elected officials, candidates, and appointed officials who oversee significant funding streams and are committed to equity and democracy.

- National civic engagement advocates: Lead staff at national organizations focused on or seeking support for civic engagement.

Key Activities we offer:

- Knowledge Production & Dissemination: Produce and share communications - content, research, and data, to demonstrate impacts, increase participatory democracy demand, and publicly recognize clients.

- Network Building: Build relationships and educate government officials, staff, and advocates to increase demand and support for participatory democracy.

- Tool Development: Collaboratively create tools and resources for effective civic engagement and participatory democracy process implementation. 

- Technical Assistance: Provide project management, coaching, and training for government officials, staff, and advocates that want to launch or implement participatory democracy practices. 

Key Revenue Streams:

- National Civic Engagement Funders: Grants from prioritized funders and via referrals to other funders.

- Public Budget Decision-makers: Direct fee for service contracts. Grants, through referrals to funders.

- National Civic Engagement Advocates: Grants through joint fundraising. Some direct fee for service contracts for capacity building and advocacy support. Some indirect fee for service contracts with governments, through referrals by advocates. 

Key Revenue Streams:

- National Civic Engagement Funders: Grants from prioritized funders and via referrals to other funders.

- Public Budget Decision-makers: Direct fee for service contracts. Grants, through referrals to funders.

- National Civic Engagement Advocates: Grants through joint fundraising. Some direct fee for service contracts for capacity building and advocacy support. Some indirect fee for service contracts with governments, through referrals by advocates. 

• Democracy Fund: $600,000, General Operating Support for PBP, 2018-2021

• Ford Foundation: $350,000, Project Support for Democracy Beyond Elections, 2019-2021

• JPB Foundation, $350,000, Project Support for Democracy Beyond Elections, 2019-2021

We are aiming to raise $560,000 in grant funding by the close of 2020 and $10,000,000 over three years. This would allow us to deeply invest in staff retention, development, and growth to support our deep investment in our project. This estimate reflects launching a successful democracy coach program, collaborative tool development with partners, and the creation of a functional digital platform to access to support the program.

2020 PBP Organizational Budget Expenses: $1,449,848

Currently, we have established a core team of five local, state, and national partners, with over a dozen supporting partners. Core partners include Center for Popular Democracy, Participatory Budgeting Project, People’s Action, Jefferson Center, and Theatre of the Oppressed NYC.

To successfully grow this work, we are seeking to partner with current and prospective elected officials with an explicit equity lens to establish and launch pilots in their jurisdictions. We seek collaborative partners that are values aligned with ours as well as our partners, and understand and support the principles of participatory democracy.