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In lieu of a longer post on race, zoning, laws, and organizing, we'd like to share a short story about how things might have been different in Sanford, Florida. It comes from Rosario, Argentina, where tens of thousands of people have been doing participatory budgeting for over a decade. Each year, they decide how to spend millions of dollars on city programs and infrastructure. PBP Executive Director Josh Lerner recalls a conversation with one participant in 2005:
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A middle-class white woman was telling me how every Tuesday night, she brought her son to play rugby at a club in a run-down neighborhood, near one of Rosario's shantytowns. One night, after dropping off her son, she saw a family that looked like it was from the shantytown (read: dark skin, cheap clothes) walking along the side of the road. They were lugging a bunch of bags and a baby, and it was cold and windy. She drove past them, then stopped. She called out and asked if they wanted a ride. They were extremely gracious and piled into the car, and she dropped them off near their shack.

I asked why she invited random shantytown dwellers into her car on a dark night in a dangerous neighborhood. "I never would’ve done this before," she said, "but now I feel more comfortable and open with different people. Through participatory budgeting I met week after week with people from different classes. You learn about the needs of others, you learn to respect them and give importance to their needs. You learn this by sitting at the table with someone who doesn’t necessarily speak well, but is still able to convey his heart and his suffering."

Putting money on the table helped bring together different people, paving the way for personal transformations. Participatory budgeting also translated this individual learning into structural change - changing how money was distributed and how political decisions were made. Transformations like these are part of the long-term change necessary to prevent more situations like in Sanford. They are among the many reasons why I pour so much energy into The Participatory Budgeting Project, and why I have so much respect for all of you bringing people together to build more democratic communities.