The Bottom-Up Revolution Is…Making City Budgeting More Participatory
Matt Harder is the founder of Civic Trust, a participatory budgeting company that provides technology infrastructure, communications and process methodology to help citizens participate in their governments’ budgeting process.
In this episode of The Bottom-Up Revolution, Harder joins host Tiffany Owens Reed to discuss participatory budgeting, a method of getting resident input on how a city’s budget is spent. They talk about the three phases of participatory budgeting, the benefits and challenges to implementing this method, and real-world examples of where it’s been implemented.
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Tiffany Owens Reed 0:06
Hi everybody. Welcome to another episode of the bottom up Revolution podcast. I'm your host. Tiffany Owens Reid, I am glad to be back. I hope you all had a wonderful holiday and a great start to the new year. Today, I am excited to bring you a conversation with a friend of mine, Matt harder is the founder of civic trust, a participatory budgeting company that provides the technology infrastructure, communications and process methodology for citizens to participate in their government's budgeting process. Matt and I, as I mentioned, are longtime friends. We crossed paths in Brooklyn years ago, and have been lucky to stay in touch, sharing many conversations and insights over the past few years, but I find his work with participatory budgeting very interesting, and I'm excited to bring him on the show today to talk about how participating budgeting can can contribute to this conversation about making our cities more resilient and just providing a bottom up way for citizens To be more involved. Matt, welcome to the show. Thanks, Tiffany, glad to be here. We're finally making it happen our podcast conversation. That's
Matt Harder 1:08
right, I dropped enough hints
Tiffany Owens Reed 1:10
over the last year. Well, I have no doubt this is going to be a great conversation. We have a lot to cover, but I would love to just kick things off with you sharing a little bit of your story. Can you share a little bit about kind of your journey to how you found yourself in this space of caring about communities and bringing innovation to local government?
Matt Harder 1:31
Yeah, I didn't study it in college or anything. It wasn't I wasn't civically active as a young person or anything. But in my 20s, I lived in Costa Rica, and a couple things happened being far away from the United States. I was there for about five years. One of them was I, I kind of got this sense that we probably couldn't vote our way out of the issues that were facing us. We were facing issues as a as a nation, that you know, you could try and support the Democrats, you could try support Republicans, but there were certain issues around, for example, you know, warfare or budgeting, or things like that, that, like, you just couldn't give input on. And so I just sort of realized the method that we had for participating in our democracy seemed fundamentally to, like, just not be working very well. And then also, when I was there, I sort of gained a fondness for American civic culture, because I was living in a very poor town that had a lot of challenges, and they really didn't have any kind of a civic culture. And I realized that in the United States, we really were blessed to have local communities where people are very active and take their local communities very seriously. And so I kind of started thinking, you know, okay, voting isn't quite enough. I don't think we need to do more than that. And I came to the conclusion that technology, using technology to interface with our government, was going to be something really powerful. So I moved back to the United States. I actually got involved with the Occupy Wall Street movement for a while. I was very serious about reform, and I helped them out for about a year. Basically, what I observed there was that you can have a bunch of people with the will to try and create something new, and try and fix things and change things, but if you don't have a good decision making structure, like they did not have a good governance structure at all. They couldn't make decisions. They famously didn't make any demands, because they didn't know how to actually sort of prioritize right and make decisions. So I realized you can have all this energy and all this good will, but if you can't make good decisions, then you're not going to actually create change. And so that led me to staying in New York and eventually finding my way to participatory budgeting, and I just found that as such a beautiful way for people to not only give input on their government's expenditures and be able to give ideas for ways to improve their communities, but it's also a way. It's a way where they're not just giving advice to their government, but they're spending actual dollars. And so it was actually something concrete that they could do, that I thought would really change their relationship with their government. So that's how I got into
Tiffany Owens Reed 4:16
it. So your first experience with participatory budgeting was with the city of New York, right? Do I have that, right?
Matt Harder 4:21
Yeah, I got hired by the city council. Okay,
Tiffany Owens Reed 4:25
tell me a little bit about that. What was
Matt Harder 4:28
that like? So I really had no idea how I was going to put all these pieces together that I mentioned to you, like, Okay, I think technology is going to be really powerful. I want us to be focusing on local government, because I think that's where we can affect change. Can affect change. And I didn't know what that meant, though, in terms of a career. And I just I came upon a book by a professor at Columbia called her. Name is Holly Russell Gilman, and it's called political innovation in participatory budgeting, something like that. And. And it talked about PB. So I read the book, and then, by coincidence, I met Holly at a speaking event, and I told her I had read her book, and she was very excited, and so she just kind of introduced me to participatory budgeting. She said, You know, this is she introduced me to a person who was hiring for it, and I had read her book. I liked it, I liked the idea, but the job just sort of came to me, and then I was in charge for two years or two cycles, let's say, for their PB process, for their voting and their PB process. So I'll get into what PB participatory budgeting is in a bit. But they were spending $40 million a year on projects that the community came up with, and that they had 100,000 voters per year. 35 different districts were voting. So those are separate ballots, 17 different languages. And so I was just running around making sure that all of this made sense and the ballots were good, and we're tallying these 100,000 votes properly. So I did that for two cycles for them, and that's how I got into the PB space.
Tiffany Owens Reed 6:01
What an interesting and exciting start to this new pathway for you. I feel like this is a good time to go ahead and give our readers a definition of participatory budgeting. So can you, can you go ahead and go into that in a little bit more detail, just kind of tell us a little bit more about what it is and what the process
Matt Harder 6:17
is like. Yeah, basically, participatory budgeting is just a way to get citizen input on how a piece of the budget is spent. It's that simple. But in order to do that properly, you need a pretty strict methodology. And so I think of it in three phases. And so you'll you'll gather community members together and create a steering committee and make the rules and such. So there's a there's planning at the beginning, and then you enter into phase one, and that is idea collection. And so let's say that I'll draw scenario. So we just finished a process in Denver, actually, and so I'll just draw on that process. They had a million dollars, and there were seven neighborhoods that they wanted to have give input on how to spend the million dollars. And so in the first phase, we go to those neighborhoods and we collect a bunch of ideas. We collected 380 ideas from people there in a bunch of different categories, transportation, Safety, Environment, Food, all kinds of different stuff. And we're just like, What are ways you could improve your community? And so we provide a website where people can drop these ideas and people can view them and share them, and you kind of get this collective intelligence view of, what do people think are a bunch of different ideas to fix up the neighborhood? And so that's phase one. You're just collecting all these ideas and making people aware of the process. Then you have the second phase, which is ballot development, ballot creation. And what you do there is you get another set of residents involved in helping refine these ideas and turn them into a ballot. So they'll take ideas and they'll filter out the ones that wouldn't work for whatever reason. Maybe they're out of scope, they're too expensive, they're just sort of not thematically aligned with what the city is trying to do. And then they'll take this set of remaining possible projects, and they work with city agencies to actually scope them. Like, what would this look like if it were a real city project, right? And so it becomes sort of like an official thing that kind of looks like a ballot initiative, and then it's priced so priced, and so we know what it's going to cost, and we know what the city is willing to do, what's part, what parks is actually willing to install or transport or whatever. And then the third phase is we go back to that community, those seven neighborhoods in this example, in West Denver, and we do a large civic engagement campaign where we just let everybody know, hey, here's a bunch of ideas from your community, and you can vote on them. You can choose on you can choose which projects get built in your neighborhood, and you have this million dollars to spend. So which of these projects would you like? And people can vote. There's different types of voting you can do. I particularly like a type of voting called knapsack voting, which is, if you have a million dollars to spend, let's say you're a resident, your voting experience is you get to select as many projects as you want for that million dollars. That's a good thing, because then you actually have each of the projects competing against each other, and so you get a really good idea of what are people's actual priorities when you have only a million dollars and people are choosing and having all the different projects compete against each other, what are the real priorities when they can't just say they want everything? So that's a good one, but they in Denver, they used ranked choice voting this time, and that's also good. It's a little bit different in terms of the data that comes out. It's easier to do with paper, so that's why they choose that and so that's what participatory budgeting is, is it's using that methodology to get community input on the on the budget, on a piece of the budget. And we just wrapped ours three weeks ago. I think we announced the winners in Denver. And. Now the city is going to spend several months on process or project implementation,
Tiffany Owens Reed 10:03
just to bridge the gap from your time in New York City to what you're doing now. So now you run your own company, civic trust. I would be curious to know if you could just share a little bit about from your experience working in New York, working with the council, working inside the infrastructure of a city government to like what you're doing. Now, you know, as a business owner, I'm just curious along the theme of innovation, what did you see in that first job? And then how did what you see inspire you as you were thinking about civic trust, like, were there, were there ways that you thought the process could run better, and what, what was it that you were seeing that that kind of inspired you to a keep doing this, but then kind of branch out and do it on your own in this more entrepreneurial way?
Matt Harder 10:49
Yeah. I mean, the way I felt about New York, just to be candid, was that it was, it was a gold mine in terms of what a cool idea it was, you know, in terms of civic engagement, like, what better way than saying, Hey, this is your tax dollars. We want to hear from you, and to actually engage in a rigorous process where you're going to wind up with good projects at the end, and people are going to feel included, and they're going to feel a sense of transparency. So I loved that. I thought that their methodology was, I thought it needed updating, right? They didn't really use technology at the time. Now, this was five plus years ago, and so things have been updated over there. So they have a different process entirely now, and it's probably working fine, but at the time, they weren't really using it. And so that's when I kind of realized, I kind of I saw it as, okay, this is a sort of niche process, like they have the money, but, you know, you needed to be in person to do a lot of the engagement. Their communication strategy was kind of lacking, like a lot of people would not even know it was happening. And so there were just challenges with it. And I kind of well. And then the last thing was, implementation was very challenging. You know, it was challenging to get the city agencies to agree to do some of the work. And so what I realized when I wanted to start my company was I need to make this easier. I need to make it easier for cities to do, and I need to make it more fun. I need to make it something where, when you're a resident and you're invited to be part of a PB you're excited about it, right? Because it's kind of gamified. The software is cool, and it's the same way you use, like, a good piece of software, I don't know, like Duolingo or something. It's like, there's certain types of software you use, and it's just kind of fun. It's rewarding. And so I was like, I want to give the citizen that kind of an experience, and I want to give or resident really, because it's really just if you live there or study there or something, I want to give them that experience. And I want cities to feel like they can do it, like they can actually implement PB without receiving a whole bunch of pushback, without it having a lot of friction. And so those were the two big reforms that I came up with for starting civic trust. All right,
Tiffany Owens Reed 12:58
so I'm going to go off script now and kind of ask you something that I've been thinking about, do you feel like there's ever a future in which this participatory process could be applied to more of how local governments work? Because I am sure I'm not the only citizen who sometimes feel like feels as though local governments have become sort of like semi independent agencies, sort of setting the priority, spending the money the way mostly they want to, and then they do have these like mechanisms for community engagement that I think are mostly pretty ineffective. So I'm just curious, from from your from where you sit, do you ever, I don't know, think about the possibility of this participatory process becoming more mainstream, rather than like, the exception?
Matt Harder 13:45
Well, I think there's two different things there. So one is, like, whether it could be mainstream from just a budgeting standpoint, let's say. And I think absolutely like, I would like to see PB done in every single city in the United States. And I think it will like, I think when we figure out how to run it in a way which is, like, totally rewarding to the agencies that put it on, to the elected officials that choose to do it, you know, to all the residents who get involved and see it as a way to give, like, really frictionless feedback and learn more about their communities, and even increase volunteerism and stuff like that. Like, I think these are all the things that PB can do, for sure. I think there's going to be a no brainer to implement that in every city. And in 50 years, people are going to look back and they'll be like, how did you even tell your city what you wanted them to do? And we'd be like, well, we didn't we just, you know, we had had every everything had become separate, and they were kind of managing us, and we didn't really give input, you know. So once, once it becomes really powerful, I think that's going to change, and I think it's going to become a standard that's on the budgeting side, I think on the policy side, like on different types of of engagement, because that's kind of what you were asking, to an extent, right? Is like, Could we go outside of it?
Tiffany Owens Reed 14:51
I think I'd be happy sticking with the budget, because that is just such a huge part of, like, the what determines the future of. A city, and what we're investing in, what we're spending money on. And I think that many cities, they really struggle with not having good transparency about their money. Where is the money coming from? What is it being allocated to? Which part of our budget is already earmarked from past councils, who are leaders, who have already made decisions and that fund, those funds, have to go certain places. You know, as our revenue up is our revenue down. So I guess what I'm asking is, like, do you see a future in which this type of process can be used, not just for, like, the special fund projects, but for, like, literally, an entire budget, to some degree, where citizens are actually have way more transparency, way more input as to, like, what the priorities are for, for the city's finances? That's
Matt Harder 15:43
a great question. I think that so. So I would say short term. My goal for PB is something like 5% of an agency's budget, you know, and that those are, like the last mile projects. Those are the projects that a person touches. It's a bench that somebody would sit on, or a shade structure to sit under, or a fruit tree that they would pick from, or a mural that they would appreciate, you know, an electrical box that was painted. Or, you know, just like smaller projects, but that means something to you, and we're kind of like easy to put together, or even, like bus timers or whatever, like things that make things more convenient, more beautiful, more comfortable, that's low hanging fruit, and to be honest with you, so doing just what I described to you, like, just like, can we get the parties together to build a shade structure, right? Like, to run that process and then have it finally built by parks or whoever? That actually requires a pretty good level of coordination amongst all the parties, right? Getting the idea in from the first person, having everybody vote on it, having parks put it on their priority list and then actually installing it. So what I would say is we want to get really good at that first 5% we want to get really good at that kind of implementation before we do things that are more complex. Because if you're going to start affecting a larger part of the budget. You want big representation. You don't want 5% of the population choosing, you know, a very impactful thing in terms of the budget, right? Like, if you get small representation, but they just wanted to build some benches. It's really no harm, no foul. But if you really want people to be paying attention to, like, a large part of the budget, you better have a good, good process, a very rigorous form of outreach. And not only that, but like making sure that people are very well informed all of a sudden on these things, like the level of the requirement for how informed a citizen should be to give feedback on, you know, let's say the police budget, right? That was a big thing in my sector. You know, for example, in the summer of 2020 2021, whatever, when there was a lot of police reform that was being suggested, one of the things I came up against, that was a challenge is, what kind of information does a person need to be qualified to give, to give input on a police budget? Right? It's just, and I'm not saying that I know one way or the other. I'm just saying, it's an open question, right? It's not an it's not something so immediate as I would like lighting in this area where I walk home because it feels dangerous at night, like a person can easily give that information. And then, when you run a PB, another 1000 people say the same thing, and then the lighting gets installed. It's so simple. And so I think when you move to areas of the budget that are more, you know, that are more the way that the institutions actually function, you would need to have a more rigorous process. I think the PB could grow into something where you're giving more thorough types of feedback, but you would need to layer on means of really informing the participants, so that they really knew what they were, what they were voting on and how important some of these things work.
Tiffany Owens Reed 18:41
That makes sense. I would say, though, sometimes I get the impression that there are still moderately informed people influencing huge sections of our budget. Anyway. You know what I mean? If that's private developers, if that's land holders, if that's activists, part of me is kind of like, well, it's happening anyway. You have questionably qualified people influencing huge sums of money. We just don't know who they are, at least the top sometimes it's a very valid someone's participating in the budget, yeah, not us. Yeah,
Matt Harder 19:17
exactly No. You nailed it. And I think, I think you're totally right. My position as a process implementer is I'm very conservative about this kind of thing. If I'm going to go to a city and I say, give us a piece of the budget, and we're going to spend it responsibly, and what I can guarantee you is we're going to walk away from this, and everybody's going to feel like it was a good process, and that's going to include all the the residents who submitted ideas and then voted. And that also includes your agencies, like they're going to walk away and they're going to say, this is a pretty good group of projects, right? Like that happens every time that you know, if I were to share with you some of our winners, like, they're always very common sensical. I. Would hesitate to to tell them what's going to happen if people start to weigh in on things like that, because I don't really know what would happen, right? We would have to, it would be much more rigorous. You'd have to be much more rigorous. So I agree with you, but I'm also I would think, like, how would you put that process together in a way where, because if agencies didn't like it, just to be honest with you, you know, like, if they were, like, threatened by it, then it would be really hard to even sign it up in the first place, right? So it's like, one has to be careful being antagonistic to the system, as opposed to trying to kind of just help it out or improve it, like you can you can easily be perceived as antagonistic. I guess is my point. You have to be really careful. That
Tiffany Owens Reed 20:45
makes sense. Okay, let's get back on on script. Thanks for going down that rabbit trail with me. I am you kind of started to explain a little bit about how civic trust runs, but I'd like to give you a chance to just tell us a little bit more about your company, you kind of tell us a little about where the idea came from. But can you just walk us through what is civic trust?
Matt Harder 21:07
Yeah, so we do process consultation, communications and technology for a city that wants to do participatory budgeting. And so the process consultation is this process might take six to nine months. Like I said, the whole idea is that all the different stakeholders and participants feel like it was a good use of their time. We survey them at the end and ask people how they felt about their experience. And you know, we get really good grades from the public. You know, like 98 99% of people say that it was offered, if it was offered every year, they would do it again, and that they would like to see it expanded in the city, and that it helped the city build trust with them, for example, so people, they really walk away feeling like it's the kind of process they want to see more of. And so when we're doing process consultation and thinking about how to build this process with the existing community, that's what we're thinking about. It's like, how do we make this something where everybody walks away feeling super positive and constructive about it, and then we do communications so or strategic communications. It's just trying to get as many people involved as possible and motivated to participate. And then the whole thing runs on a website that we built. It's a tech platform where you can submit all the ideas, and then when it's time to vote, you can vote on the platform, and then there's a back end for administrators to kind of monitor how it's going. And one of the things that we built this last year that I really like is when somebody submits a project, or later on, if they vote, they put in, they do a demographic survey, and then that feeds into a back end that the admins can see. And then they can check the demographics of the process so they can see if they need to backfill anybody, you know, maybe you're not getting enough of, you know, one or the other thing. And so as the process is running, you can choose where you want to emphasize your communications. Oh,
Tiffany Owens Reed 22:53
that's really interesting. Can you share maybe one of a successful project that you've done, that you've executed?
Matt Harder 23:02
Well, I was already talking about Denver. I can tell you about I'll actually tell you about one that we did in Atlanta a couple years ago that I really liked, because it highlights some other things that we are trying to do in terms of getting involved with the community. In Atlanta, I worked for a city council district. We did one cycle. We did two cycles with them, but in this one particular cycle, they only had $50,000 but they wanted to do a PB with it, and they wanted to target a park called Candler Park and so and usually PBS are much more expensive than that, but I was actually interested in, can we do something impactful with only $50,000 because I've always believed that it's the process of involving the community that's exciting. It's not really the size of the projects. And if you have a smaller budget, can it be more flexible, which is the case here, because it's not capital projects which have to be installed by major city agencies, where every project is, you know, $300,000 this could be, you know, one of the projects was paint electrical boxes for, you know, 200 bucks a pop, and just have a local mural painter do it. And so that's actually kind of an exciting process for a very, very low amount of money, if you're a resident. So they hired me with in to run this $50,000 PB. And we thought, wow, you know, we really don't have resources. We better get the community involved to the best of our ability. So they reached out to local nonprofits. One of them was trees Atlanta. Another one was the Candler Park Conservancy. Another was Candler Park neighborhood organization. They said, Hey, we're gonna spend $50,000 on this park. Would you guys like to help? Can you get the word out for us? Do you have any project ideas? We'd love to get some ideas from you. And to our delight, they said, Okay, absolutely, we'll get involved, and we're going to get this, get the word out. But not only that, we have projects that we want to get done. And so not only are we going to submit them, we will cover half of the cost if they win. And so we wound up increasing the pot size from $50,000 which we brought $210,000 and. And it wound up making it a lot easier for those projects to get selected, because, for example, there was a bathroom renovation. This was my favorite project. This was the number one winning project. 15 projects won, but the number one was a bathroom that had been shuttered for like, two decades, and it was a mixture of budget and then red tape or whatever. They couldn't get this bathroom to work, right? But it's like this very, very popular, well, traffic park where all the kids are playing soccer, and they can't use this bathroom. So everybody wanted it fixed. And they saw us, and they thought, not only you're gonna bring some capital together to make this bathroom work, but you're probably gonna be able to cut some of the red tape and get the city to do it quicker, right? Whoever that was, like the parks department or whatever. And so we wound up, instead of spending the $30,000 to fix the bathroom, there was going to be, it only cost $5,000 of our budget, because everybody else chipped in from the community, like we had each of those organizations that I mentioned, I think, chipped in. And so, yeah, that that process in Candler Park, we wound up getting, you know, over 1000 people involved and different organizations. And I thought that was really nice, just because you saw how the city would, it, would it would it inform me of and it's this has helped inform our direction moving forward is the city can be a convener of a process where it brings organizations, neighborhood organizations, together, who are already interested in fixing things up and improving things. And we can bring some capital and just create just a kind of, I don't know, like a memetic magnet or something. It's something where everybody's paying attention to the same time to fixing up a certain asset, and then, so they all get together, they all submit their ideas, they submit they bring some capital. And then, you know, 15 projects got built that year, and it wasn't just us. We were increasing the capacity of the nonprofits. You know, we were trying to drive people to them. We were hiring local artists to do some of the work. We were some of those nonprofits were helping with the process implementation. So the city was giving money to these local nonprofits to oversee getting completed. These types of partnerships aren't that common, right? Like this was a way to get all these partnerships going and to kind of make them more robust.
Tiffany Owens Reed 27:17
How does it make you feel when you're in a city and you start seeing the ideas that are coming in on the platform, I'm sure you get a ton, like, just, I don't know, hundreds of ideas submitted, dozens. I don't know what, hundreds? Yeah, okay, so one part of me is thinking, wow, this is really cool. This participatory process is allowing for a type of collaboration and feedback and dialog and problem solving that wouldn't have happened otherwise. The other part of me says, like, wow, it's also revealing, like deep, deep dysfunction and non responsiveness from like, local governments. If there are hundreds of like prop like, small problems in a city that haven't been addressed for years. How do you interpret that? How do you
Matt Harder 28:12
it's a good question. I see it all as positive, because I'm an optimist, right? But it's like, you know, this was a famous thing, very famous in the New York PB was a bunch of the Brooklyn schools, maybe some Manhattan too, but I was focused more on Brooklyn. They were requesting air conditioners, and it was egg on the face of the New York City government, because they're like the schools. These are brick schools, right? They're like these schools don't have air conditioners, and you expect the kids to sit in here, you know? And so what was funny, but this is what happened. Was several the of the schools won. But what really happened was it drew attention to the fact that this basic resource wasn't being provided, and then the schools wound up the government funded to put air conditioners in all the schools. So all the schools got air conditioners, right? This happened. And so you know, when you're raising awareness, it's a good thing, it's a good thing, it's a positive thing. And so I'm very in favor of it. I love it. I find it very positive. And I think all these things benefit from being aired out.
Tiffany Owens Reed 29:13
I hope so. I hope that the cities were that are experiencing this approach are able to to see the flywheel that you're building, the value of it, you know, the value of being able to bring together all these different agencies and build this little ecosystem of collaboration. But also, I hope that they're looking at the list of all those ideas and seeing it as an opportunity to be more responsive to their constituents and to pay pay closer attention to, like, the things that really touch people's lives, yeah?
Matt Harder 29:43
Well, they don't know what they don't know, right? And so when you asked at the beginning of that last question, like, how does it feel when the ideas start to roll in? Like, it's amazing, because citizens have so many good ideas. Yeah, they have so many good ideas. And like, part of the failure of the modern I don't know, like, manager. Government is that we separate the government from the citizenry and like, That's ridiculous. At the end of all of our processes, we ask people, would you like to be more civically involved than you already are? And 75% of people consistently say they would like to be more civically engaged than they currently are.
Tiffany Owens Reed 30:17
Okay, so, but Matt, you're like, the innovation guy. You're so big on innovation, like and I feel like what you're saying is we don't have an effective system for mobilizing ordinary citizens or for capturing their insights and ideas, for capturing for capturing all that positive energy that could be put to solving city problems. Like, maybe participatory budgeting is part of that solution. But as you think through your innovative lens. Like, I mean, what comes to you, what comes to your mind as as, like, what could be possible solutions to that?
Matt Harder 30:48
I mean, honestly, the way that I think about it is, Pb is a vehicle for all these things. At least this is the way civic trust is oriented, right? Like, there's different ways of doing PB. A lot of them, I would consider a little bit old fashioned, and that they just remain within the original constructs of PV, and a lot of times they don't use technology, etc. And so those processes are more, I guess you could say standard. But what we see in civic trust to address your question, which is like, how do you increase the capacity of the of the citizenry, right? Like, how do you use this methodology to actually have them get more involved in the government? And so for me, what that is, I mean, I'm thinking about it right now in Denver, for example, we've got one of the projects, projects that won was tree planting, and so I'm in touch with the forestry guy over there, and we're going to see how that went. But what I want to help try and build in is a volunteerism angle, right? Which is, if you voted on this process, on this project, like, let's say you voted in favor of the project, there's a piece of there's a next stage on the ballot says, If this project wins, would you be willing to, willing or interested in helping install it? Right? And so what if we could do. And actually, we have an upcoming project I'll talk about later, with a philanthropy and, you know, they don't even have to work exclusively with city agencies. They can just work with contractors. So they'd be wide open to do the same thing that I'm about to describe to you, which would be, if you're in favor of this project, would you like to get involved in helping it become real? You know? And when you're doing that, you're addressing that 75% of people that would like to be more civically engaged than they already are. You're saying, well, here's a way to do it, and then you plug them in with one of the nonprofit partners to go do a, you know, a big, whatever it may be, tree planting is an obvious day, but it could be building a playground like, that's a thing too, right? Just whatever it is. And it's kind of taking this step forward. And so I think the like, the Holy Grail, the really big process that maybe you're envisioning when you imagine, like, unleashing all of the capacity, the latent capacity of the residents, you know, and getting them to work in collaboration with the city. I think about that, you know, like, I think that would be amazing. And I don't know what that looks like yet, I know that we want to work against this kind of like managerial government that doesn't want participation. But what I can say is that PB will help us move in that direction, for sure, because you already have the people saying, These are the projects that we want, you know, these are our ideas. And then we're going to vote on which ones we want to win. And then the next step is, and we're willing to help, you know, or fund like, that'd be another thing that we could do, which would be bringing other people to fund. And so you get people to help, to start to build that capacity. And like I said, the city is a convener, right? They're not the ones doing all of the work, right?
Tiffany Owens Reed 33:35
I think you're on to something here. I hope to see in the I hope to live a day in a future where someone has figured out how to rock the boat as it pertains to empowering citizens to solve problems in their city. You know, we used to do this. It's weird that we even have to have this conversation. You know how it's like, oh, I live in my city. I can see all these problems, and I'm not really allowed to solve them, you know, I'm not, I'm not the way that the whole system has been set up, you know, kind of what you're saying with the managerial government and the expert government and the bureaucratic government, or the administrative government, you know, I just, I think the relationship between the government and citizens has definitely, is definitely in need of desperate, desperately in need of innovation. And it'd be really interesting to see like, the kinds of interesting neighborhoods and places we could be developing if we were able to to see citizens as collaborators and find creative ways to let them, let them be creative, and let them do take some risks and let them do some experiments and see what works. You know, I completely
Matt Harder 34:38
agree. I completely agree. I love that line of thinking, and so for for myself and the trenches trying to, like, see this become reality, a challenge is city agencies. One, it doesn't necessarily make a lot of sense to them. You know, they don't necessarily look at the citizenry as like a bunch of latent capacity, right? Like they see them as like consumers or whatever, you know, like they're out there kind of taking what we give them, and then they help fund it, and they're not experts or whatever. I don't mean that in a sort of derisive way. I just mean that they they don't often look to them as, you know, the ones that are they're highly informed, and I understand why they would feel that way. And so, you know, because, if, because certain forms of public engagement attract bad behavior too, right? And so, like, they have reasons occasionally for thinking that the public isn't, like, super easy to deal with, but I would say it's a matter of helping them understand how it's in their favor to involve residents. Like, how do you do that? How do you get city agencies to feel like, Oh, I'd love resident participation in this part of the process, you know, and just do it with something small at the beginning and help to build that muscle out. And so that's what we're thinking about, like just these baby steps where they can get comfortable working with residents on stuff like that and wanting to do more of it. I'm glad you
Tiffany Owens Reed 35:58
touched on that. I was going to ask you about, what are some of the challenges you face, especially as you're talking to city governments about this idea and this concept and anything else come to mind there?
Matt Harder 36:12
I mean, yeah, I think that a lot of cities are kind of threatened by their population to some extent, to be honest with you. You know, I think that we've all, you know, you and my, you and I, people who are in the space have gone to city council meetings or town halls or different events that have kind of gone badly, where the public is angry. And let's say that the you know, elected official, or whoever, the planner, whoever's putting that on is, sort of, is sort of seen as a target. And these things happen. And so I can tell that when I'm talking to a city about, hey, why don't we get a whole bunch more involvement from the population, there's some part of them that's thinking OOF That sounds scary, you know, because sometimes they're irrational or emotional or whatever. And what I realize, though, and sometimes I communicate this to them, is that those methods of public engagement, like some of these methods, breed anger and frustration from the public right like, who wants to sit in a room for three hours to be able to stand at a microphone for three minutes, you know, and nobody's even necessarily paying attention to you. And it's just it can be rationally classified as a waste of time,
Tiffany Owens Reed 37:29
yeah, or you have, like, no way of knowing what's actually going to happen to, like, your comp, like, if anyone's even taken you seriously, right? It's like, there's no, there's no clear line between my investment of time and energy and emotion and any tangible improvement or change or even, like a dialog, you know,
Matt Harder 37:47
exactly, exactly. And so somebody might walk out of that meeting and and somebody, if I were to ask them, Hey, how did you fill out that meeting? They said, well, it was a total waste of time. What the average, you know, civic engagement person would say is, like, how do I get them to not think it was a waste time? How do I get them to want to participate more? And participate more? And I'm on the other side of the fence, I'm like, no, they're probably right. It was probably a waste of time, like a lot of these things, these methods which exist, are, Rationally speaking, not a good use of time. Whereas, compared with Pb, instead of, like you said, you know, you're spending your energy and you don't know what the effect is going to be. Instead, you drop an idea in, and you share it around, and you start to get some likes, and you start to get some traction, and you see, is this popular or not? Do people like this or not? You know? And so it's a better use of time. It's a lot, it's much smaller time investment, and it's a much more rational time investment, especially when it comes time to voting, then it's just absolutely fair. It's like, Hey, do people like your idea or not, it's being voted on, and so it's a very rational use of time. So your question was like, what kind of pushback do we get? I think people sometimes originally city people, they can conflate this with typical civic engagement, which it is not. It's very empowering. It's very positive, it's constructive. There's no political baggage. Doesn't matter what your political leanings are at all because this is about infrastructure and shared space and so that getting across to them that this is a whole it's a whole different approach that is very positive, and we have a lot of data to support that. Matt,
Tiffany Owens Reed 39:16
we're nearing the end of our time here, so I want to ask you, and maybe you've kind of touched on this already, so it's kind of a chance for you to sort of synthesize your thoughts on this. But how are you hoping, or how do you hope your work with civic trust influences how people think about what it means to solve community problems together.
Matt Harder 39:39
Yeah, I would say the example I gave of the Atlanta process. I was touching on it when I was explaining that, which is, I would love to see the city be a convener and a capacity builder in the neighborhood. So it's sort of like, okay, we're going to host this event. We're going to bring money to the table, but then we want. To inspire all these different sort of stakeholders, right? Like, we want to be a positive force for the local organizations that are trying to improve the community. We want to be an on ramp for residents who want to get involved. You know, we get this all the time where somebody will vote, and then they'll say, I want to be able to submit one of these projects next year, right? Like they really want to. And so it's a matter. It's then in the balls in our court, like, Okay, we need to do really good job of communication, because these people didn't know it wasn't communicated to them that they could do this, right? And so there's a lot of capacity building needing, needed on our side to get the word out to everybody, because that's typically, typically, the response we get for people is like, everybody should do this. Everybody should know about this. You know, our literally, our number one complaint that we get is, I almost didn't find out about this. Somebody sent me like a Facebook link, like, how did I this is such an important deal, and how did I almost miss it, right? And so that's a compliment, right? We're like, okay, cool. I'm glad you think it's important. You know, it's hard to get hundreds of 1000s of people on the same page about something if we're still early, but I would say that's what, that's what I'm thinking about with. This is the city bringing all these different people together. And really it's not about projects. It's about planting in the minds of the residents and the participants that cities can evolve. City structures can evolve and adapt and innovate, and it can be just as fun to deal with your city as to deal with another piece of technology. Like, you know, you get inside a Tesla and you're like, oh, there's amazing. Or you use Amazon, and all of a sudden, you know, you start to have way better products, you know, like, because everything is peer reviewed. And you're like, oh, I can kind of like, see, you know, if I'm gonna buy a vacuum cleaner from Amazon, I can see what 5000 other people said about it first, right? Which is, like, actually a really, really good scenario for you know, if I'm a consumer, it's good to know that this many people have, like, tested this product that didn't exist before Amazon, right? So it's like, Can we, can we put these kinds of, can technology be used to put these kinds of innovations in government, where all of a sudden your government becomes more transparent, Transparent Transparent to you, more user friendly to you. And so that's what we want to do. We want to help governments innovate in that way, and then convene different groups together to get involved, to do cool projects.
Tiffany Owens Reed 42:32
Talking about the future is a great segue for my second to last question. But can you share a little bit about what's next for civic trust as we're looking to 2025
Matt Harder 42:42
Yeah, we're so Denver. You know, we're located in Boulder, and so we happen to be working with Denver down the street, which is very fortunate. We usually work remotely, but Denver is our most recent client, and their their budget has been increased from $1 million last year to 2 million. And so we're hoping to get our hands dirty, planning a new process for them in the spring, and then we're also talking to a large educational group in California about helping spend resources for them. They have to allocate quite a large sum of money, and so we're not going to announce that yet, because it's just in talks, but it would be around using PB methodology for after school programs. And the the last thing we're doing is we're partnering with the philanthropy in Pennsylvania, and that'll be very exciting, because their mission is to improve a small town. And so, you know, we've had discussions with philanthropies in the past, and it's this kind of thing where it's like, they will have a purpose, they will want to have an impact with the population. And so it's like, Well, cool. If you want to have an impact. Have you asked the people what they what they want? You know, have are they participants? Do they feel that this is transparent? And so this is our chance to get that out there and have this be a much more impactful project, dollar for dollar for this philanthropy. And so we're going to be applying PB to one of their projects in 2025 and looking forward to that
Tiffany Owens Reed 44:21
too. Yeah, it'd be really exciting to see where that goes. It's kind of a whole new pathway to explore for for you, all right, this has been a great conversation, Matt, obviously. No surprise there. To wrap things up, I get to ask you a question. I ask everyone who comes on the show, tell us a little bit about the city where you're based. I'd love to know, what do you enjoy about it? And if someone were coming through your town for a few hours, what are two or three local spots you recommend we check out to get a slice of local life cool. So
Matt Harder 44:49
I live in Boulder, Colorado. I love boulder. Moved out here from New York a few years ago, and Boulder is really a gym because. Because it's small, it's very walkable. I live downtown. I get to walk everywhere, as if I still lived in Brooklyn or something. But it has like an incredible economy, like my good friends here. I have friends that do all kinds of cool Bitcoin work and web three work and quantum computing labs. Everybody works at a quantum lab, you know? So you'll it's like, really, really. It's like an inspiring place for entrepreneurship and for business. You know, I just learned a lot from people here. So I was just amazed that a town of 100,000 people can just have, like, such a good, such a good I don't want to say job market, but just sort of like entrepreneurial environment, let's say and so I love that. I love that I can live in a very walkable, very pleasant, beautiful town, where it's also just like super dynamic in terms of work and in terms of interests and and also, what else. Last thing I'll say about that is, like, there's a lot of technology here. It's kind of a tech hub. It's known as sort of, like a little, I don't want to say a mini Silicon Valley, because Silicon Valley's gone so crazy, but, like, it is very tech forward as a town. But also, people love outdoors, right? You wouldn't live in the Colorado, Colorado Front Range if you weren't an outdoors person. So it's like techie and outdoorsy people, and it's in the same person. They're all both, which is fantastic. And so two things to do, there's, we have a local I don't have to call it a park, but like, an outdoor area called Chautauqua, which is five minutes from downtown, and it's just completely gorgeous. It abuts the town. That's where our famous rock formations called the flat irons are, and it's just covered in trails. And so you can drive five minutes from town, it's really in town, literally five minutes from downtown, and just be in this area of trails that just go everywhere. Like, really tall, you know, tall, flat, super long, super short, whatever. Like, you've got all these different outdoor areas, outdoor options there at Chautauqua. So that's just amazing. I'm there all the time. And the other thing is Pearl Street Mall, we have one of the nicest walking malls in the country, and they put it there. I don't know if it was the 80s or something. It's been there a really long time, but as far as walking malls, like it is a gold standard. It's filled with like, gardens and statues and benches and the the commercial part of it just does really, really well. And there's tons of restaurants, there's bars like, it converts really well. It's like, during the day, it's super fun, and people are walking around doing some shopping. And it also at night, you know, has a lot of people there. So it's just a really successful, really good outdoor mall. This
Tiffany Owens Reed 47:44
wouldn't be a real conversation with Matt harder if I did not ask if you have a good burrito recommendation.
Matt Harder 47:49
I wish. I wish, honestly, like here in Colorado, I have not found I'm from California originally, and I have very high standards. The best I found here is a place called verde on 28th and it's pretty good, but the California standards, you're not getting that here
Tiffany Owens Reed 48:08
sounds similar to my husband, who spent some time in New Mexico, and he's very particular about his burritos, and he says that the only burrito that's really a burrito are the ones that you find at this one restaurant in Albuquerque. And I can't remember the name of it, but he's it. He's like, it's basically 90% meat, 5% tortilla, 5% sauce. So I understand, I understand. Well, Matt, thank you so much for coming onto the show. I've really enjoyed our conversation. To our audience. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed this dialog. Please share it with a friend. If you did, you can also send me a note, tiffany@strongtowns.org if you have any feedback. And If there's someone in your community who you think we should have on the show, someone who's really embodying the bottom up grassroots ethos and contributing to their community, then please use the form in the show notes, the suggested guest form, where you can nominate this person and and yeah, and hopefully we'll be able to capture their story. So until we bring you another conversation, keep doing what you can to build a strong town you.
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Tiffany Owens Reed is the host of The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast. A graduate of The King's College and former journalist, she is a New Yorker at heart, currently living in Texas. In addition to writing for Strong Towns and freelancing as a project manager, she reads, writes, and curates content for Cities Decoded, an educational platform designed to help ordinary people understand cities. Explore free resources here and follow her on Instagram @citiesdecoded.