January 5, 2026
This fall, Celina Su, an author, poet, and the inaugural Marilyn J. Gittell Chair in Urban Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center, presented her latest book, Budget Justice: On Building Grassroots Politics and Solidarities, in an event cosponsored by the Center for the Humanities and the Stone Center. The book argues that “everyday folks — who are not elected officials, who are from different communities, and from historically marginalized communities that haven’t had the benefit of public investment or the right to participate in daily political life — should have the resources and power to address their basic needs.”
How can they get that power? One way, Su finds, is through participatory budgeting (PB), a process through which neighbors gather to discuss proposals for funding projects related to community interests such as schools, parks, and public housing. PB is most commonly carried at the municipal level, though it’s also used by school districts, counties, states, and other geographic regions, as well as agencies and institutions. In New York City, the PB process is carried out at the City Council district level; in 2025, city residents allocated more $23 million in funding for their districts’ schools, parks, libraries, and other public spaces.
Su, who in November was named a member of the Community Organizing committee of New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s transition team, recently spoke to the Stone Center about her book.
How did you first become interested in participatory budgeting and budget justice?
Su: I’ve spent a couple of decades now investigating what everyday folks do to participate in decision-making, or governance, or politics outside of voting. And around 14 years ago — around the same time as Occupy Wall Street, which is not a coincidence in my mind — I got asked to serve on the New York City steering committee for participatory budgeting. That was the first time I really looked at participation in institutions that were initiated by government. Before that, I was looking more at “outsider” strategies, like community organizing and protest.
So I’d been paying attention to that for around a decade, but it wasn’t until the 2020 protests and uprisings regarding the murder of George Floyd, and seeing all these public discussions on public budgets, and even seeing placards in the streets with the phrase “budget justice,” that I started paying attention to the budgeting part of PB, rather than the participation part of PB. I had been thinking about participation, but suddenly I thought: What could I learn if I were to take heed of what I’m seeing in the streets, and really focus on budgets as sites of political contestation?
There’s a part of the book where you discuss how you started thinking about how budget justice was an exceptionally helpful framing for ideas related to racial justice, democracy, and political economy, and that this analysis deepened during Covid. How did your experience of the pandemic change your analysis?
Su: I would say that it was a combination of different factors. One was that we were all in it together: everyone was experiencing this global pandemic, the shutdowns and masking. There was this feeling of solidarity — on Zoom calls, people were chatting a little bit more about how others were doing, and they were a little bit more understanding, and responding with grace if someone said, “I’m so sorry, I have to take care of my elderly parents.”
In some ways, people were relating to each other quite a bit. But in other ways, inequalities were so crystallized during the pandemic. Very quickly, we saw that some places were suffering from a lot more sickness and a lot more deaths than others. Some places had access to ventilators; others did not. Every step of the pandemic, there were inequalities. Who had access to appointments to get tested? Who had access to PPE (personal protective equipment) in hospitals?
Rob Nixon uses the term “slow violence” — as opposed to fast violence, like an attack. There’s a lot of structural slow violence involved in who gets protections, access to preventive medicine, access to safe intersections, that really do play out in terms of people’s life expectancies. During the pandemic, I felt like I was watching the effects of slow violence in real time. The inequalities of who lived and who died were largely due to structures, rather than interpersonal violence. That made me think about how we could very clearly and much more quickly than usual see how budget allocations could make a big difference in who lived and who died.
The pandemic was also a time when communities were helping each other — within a community, and across communities. It seemed that people really were trying to work together.
Su: For sure. I personally am not certain I would have survived the pandemic without community relationships, and I’m not someone who was so active in what is called the solidarity economy before. I got access to outdoor space because there happened to be community gardens near me, and the nearest park was not that close by; people hadn’t necessarily thought of parks as an essential need, like food and shelter, until the pandemic. There was that phrase that was around a lot at that time: “We keep each other safe.” I saw cardboard signs all around my neighborhood offering help. They weren’t fancy; they just said: “If you know someone who can’t go grocery shopping by themself right now, text this number.” And community fridges appeared, and there was the 7 pm applause.
Unfortunately, there was utter state failure in a lot of ways. We were hearing about people dying in nursing homes. We couldn’t get access to basic equipment. That made me think: There’s something here about how people are ready to be activated, to work together to help themselves thrive, in a way that informed my emerging definition of budget justice.
What are the benefits of participatory budgeting, beyond having some control over allocating funds?
Su: Participatory budgeting has now proliferated around the U.S. There are a few hundred different processes. In New York, the City Council-led one started 2011, and one of the key lessons I learned from studying it is that people are not apathetic. When people feel like they can make a difference, they do. And when the Community Development Project and the PBNYC research board did a large-scale survey of people who participated in PB, roughly one out of every four reported that they were not eligible to vote in regular elections. They were participating in PB because they knew that they could make a difference.
This suggests that PB is not just a cute side exercise. I’ll also say that in Brazil — where city-level PB processes came from — cities with PB collected 30 percent more in taxes, developed more civil society organizations than those without PB, and boasted of other impressive results, like lowering infant mortality.
The lessons we learn from New York are both that PB can go beyond the usual suspects in terms of who participates, but also that it can be quite constrained by small pots of money and existing relationships between everyday folks and different political actors, especially city agencies. In a context of austerity and so many budget cuts, we saw some city agencies reverse lobby constituents. That is, instead of asking what people needed to build a city budget that was more reflective of their needs, they would say, “We did some research on some hyper-local projects that are amazing. We already did fancy needs assessments, and they’re great. Unfortunately, because of budget cuts, we couldn’t quite complete them. Here’s a menu of choices of projects for which we seek your funds.”
The agencies tried to use the process to fundraise?
Su: Yes, exactly. It really helped me to learn about the extent to which it’s hard to really engage both bureaucrats and everyday residents in problem-solving, because it’s hard to not just try to make up for budget cuts all the time. Everybody involved was well-meaning. At the same time, the successes varied quite a bit. In New York, because the PBNYC process is adjudicated by City Council districts, there are in reality many different processes.
The other thing I learned is that a lot of Americans, and New Yorkers, don’t have meaningful opportunities to talk to people unlike themselves about community needs. The sort of collective conversations and efforts happened historically in other sorts of spaces, like labor unions — we don’t have many civic infrastructures like that now. So PB is an essential, even if quite imperfect, entry point for people to just wonder and deliberate: What are the things that we need?
I saw so many interactions in which people really got activated in nice ways by the folks that they were talking to. In one instance, a man who was white-presenting, middle class, from the Upper West Side, walked across the park to attend an assembly in East Harlem. And he wanted to propose something for his kid’s school. And then he learned that senior citizens who live in public housing, and lack physical mobility, and don’t have washers and dryers in their buildings. And he said, “I’m actually going to rescind my proposal and help you develop yours.”
There were all these interesting projects where someone said, “I hadn’t thought about kids with special needs before. You mean that there’s cool playground equipment that would accommodate them and engage my kid differently, too?” People were joining forces in different ways.
I’m not saying that all of the conversations are going to be easy. People often ask me about how this works, in this moment of polarization. I have to say that I’ve observed hundreds of these sorts of interactions, and I’ve never seen them turn to generic trolling, like we see online. I’m not saying they were all fantastic, or that people suddenly became best friends, but there was something really generative and neighborly about these conversation. That’s not something we get to engage in that often, unfortunately.
Do you view participatory budgeting as the best way forward to achieving budget justice?
Su: I think it’s one essential tool. I don’t know if there’s one best one, especially when it’s being implemented in so many different ways, and so many of them are quite limited. I think what we need, if I were to try to encapsulate it in one phrase, is a fuller, more diverse ecosystem of participation. Just like we can’t have a monocrop of just corn, as great as corn is, we can’t have a monocrop of democratic institutions.
I’m not saying get rid of elections, but rather that we need more ways to engage between elections and protests. After the uprisings, after No Kings protests, how are people supposed to continue the conversation to hold elected officials accountable? Maybe even, or maybe especially, progressive ones. Because certainly, lobbies that don’t have everyday folks’ needs or issues like affordability on their minds are continuing to lobby.
One more thing about PB: It’s helpful in that it’s really concrete and not abstract. There’s something about figuring out what our streets and neighborhoods look like as an entry point that helps people really find common ground fairly quickly. It can also, unfortunately, be weaponized to reinforce inequalities and power dynamics.
PB can be more impactful when it encourages people to experiment a little bit more, and to maybe develop a proof of concept of how things can be done differently. One example: In New York, folks in one district proposed a “down payment” toward an accessible subway station. And they said, “We know that this couple hundred thousand dollars is not going to be enough to build everything we need and make all the renovations. But we think this is very important. And if this wins, we are telling you that it has public support, and we want to put pressure on the government to kick in the rest.” And the city did.
Another sort of interesting project provided proofs of concept for truly different, community-driven policies. One example had to do with nannies and other domestic workers, and family employers — people got together to think about a community agreement that felt fair and reasonable, beyond what’s already in the law books, for wages and potential paid vacations for domestic workers.
Those are the sort of innovative projects that could potentially lead to larger campaigns, and the beginning of hopefully more changes in the city budget.
Read More:
