BUDGET BUILDERS GAME
Participatory Budgeting Made Fun and Easy
What is Participatory Budgeting?
Participatory Budgeting is a process that enables people in a community to make decisions about how public money is spent. It gives citizens a direct voice in the allocation of public funds and allows them to identify and prioritize local needs and projects. Through this process, community members work together to develop proposals and vote on which projects should be funded. Participatory Budgeting promotes civic engagement and helps to ensure that public resources are allocated in a transparent and equitable way.
What is budget builders?
Budget Builders is a board game designed to educate people of all ages about participatory budgeting (PB) through hands-on play. It was created in partnership with the Black Brilliance Project, in anticipation of their role in helping the City of Seattle distribute millions of dollars in public funding through the participatory budgeting processes. Budget Builders provides a creative solution to the lack of awareness surrounding PB in Seattle and aims to increase civic literacy and promote engagement with this new public forum.During the game, players are challenged to discuss and debate city-related projects, vote on which projects they would like to see implemented, answer trivia questions to earn points, and increase their budgets by earning more funding. Budget Builders aims to educate members of the Seattle community about participatory budgeting through a fun and engaging activity that guides players through the various stages of the process.
The board
The board contains a total of 4 different "resource votes" that challenges players to have discussions and debates about real world topics such as public transportation, renewable energy sources, food insecurity, and affordable housing.Budget Builders is set in Neo-Seattle in the year of 2150. Neo-Seattle community members (the game players) are tasked with the challenge of navigating various infrastructure project proposals, while staying within their budget, in order to improve the quality of life for its citizens.
Power UpsPlayers get a chance to earn additional funding for their city budget or trivia point multipliers with power up cards.
Trivia CardsPlayers get a chance to earn points by answering trivia questions centered around participatory budgeting
HazardsPlayers need to be cautious with hazard cards as they can lose funding from their budgets or trivia points they earned
LéTania Severe
LéTania Severe PhD (they/them) is a Black, queer, non-binary researcher and firefighter. They began doing defund work in 2020 after a decade of research on homelessness, housing, and education justice. They co-led the Black Brilliance Research Project, a participatory action research project that hired over 100 BIPOC community researchers to do research on safety, health and thriving in their communities. LéTania organizes with Seattle Solidarity Budget, a cross movement coalition of over 200 organizations, fighting for a city budget that divest from harmful systems like police, courts and jails and reinvests in meeting community basic needs including housing, transportation, climate change resilience and more. LéTania is also a coordinator for Seattle’s new Community Response Network, which trains community members to respond to emergencies in their own communities.
PROJECT SPONSORS
Shaun Glaze
BBR was born through collective struggle and Shaun was one of the many midwives. Shaun's main role in BBR is helping to facilitate the teams and resource them to they can just be brilliant. Shaun started doing participatory action research over 10 years ago and loves using research as part of a collective goal to create a world where everyone can thrive.
This project is a University of Washington Information School Sponsored Capstone project. Our team has begun the process of handing off our project to the Black Brilliance Research Project.
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