A direct democracy process to imagine the borough’s future in an innovative and participatory way.

In 2023, CDN-NDG borough was looking to innovate in public participation and budgetary decision-making. The administration decided to launch its very first participatory budget, inviting residents to decide on the allocation of a $500,000 budget, and called on Percolab for the codesign and implementation of the process.

It is a vast area — the most populous borough in Montreal (approximately 280,000 people), highly diverse (135 languages spoken) and home to many families. Mayor Gracia Kasoki Katahwa chose to give the initiative the theme “families’ well-being,” aware of the challenges families face living in an urban environment.

The success of the first edition led to a second one in 2024. In total, several thousand residents discussed, formulated and chose meaningful projects to improve quality of life in their neighbourhoods.

OUR ROLE

• Design and deploy the first 2 editions of the Borough’s participatory budget, in collaboration with its teams.

• Mobilize highly creative collaborative and participatory practices and processes to foster community engagement and the project’s impact on relationships and on the territory.

• Support participants in fully understanding and embracing the concept and process of participatory budgeting, which is little known to the public and departs from conventional public participation models.

• Support participants in fully asserting their own expertise, finding their voice and recognizing their role in the process.

• Design highly participatory, creative and innovative processes and tools that encourage participation from everyone: children, adults and seniors alike, across multiple cultures and languages, and varied mobility levels and socio-economic conditions.

• Reduce barriers to participation by taking into consideration, in both design and facilitation, the factors that affect confidence, ability and drive to participate, turning them into levers for engagement.

• Incorporate capacity building and continuous improvement so that each action feeds into the next, and individual and organizational learnings lead to a stronger ability for teams to deploy such processes and for residents to participate in them.

• Work in prototyping mode, over two years, with a process entirely new to both the public and the administration, to ensure it meets real needs while continuously trying new approaches.

IMPACT

• More than 4,700 people of all ages were able to talk, listen, imagine ways to improve their daily lives and exercise real decision-making power over the allocation of a total public budget of $1 million.

• 10 projects completed or underway that contribute to neighbourhood well-being: community fridges, pollinator garden, outdoor gym, micro-forest…

• Authentic conversations between borough employees and residents around shared issues and ideas, in a relaxed setting with a real opportunity for action and connection.

• A stronger capacity among borough employees involved to deploy practices and processes that support more engaging and generative collaboration and participation.

Project Highlights

For the first iteration in 2023, we drew on a fairly classic participatory budget structure while bringing Percolab’s distinct approach to public participation: making each step and workshop increasingly participatory and creative.

For the second iteration in 2024, we were able to build on the lived experience and learnings of the first.

During the project analysis phase, we experimented with an innovative workshop bringing together residents (whether or not they had submitted a project) and the employees involved in analyzing and implementing projects. The intention was to give everyone a genuine opportunity to understand each other’s perspectives, and to find ways for projects to meet constraints and criteria while preserving the essence of the original intent. It was also about fostering civil servants’ engagement and connection to the projects and the people behind them, so that their analysis and implementation work would carry greater meaning. By creating opportunities to talk and listen to one another, we help reduce polarization and strengthen the social fabric.

During the final decision phase, we created an immersive experience designed to complement the voting process (online and in person) with a process that was engaging and generated real learnings. The Participatory Budget Pop-Up Shop invited people to browse the projects that had emerged from the process (presented as cardboard boxes) and do their shopping — all the way to the checkout, where they had to stay within a $500,000 budget.

Gamifying a public participation process — making it something you can touch, walk through and feel — allows people to embody it, shift their posture and see it from a new angle; in this case, the allocation of a public budget.

To learn more about the project, visit:

Our Vision 

This project inspires us to imagine a desired future where all institutions would set aside a portion of their budget to share budgetary decision-making power with their communities and partners — coming together for authentic conversations about shared challenges, in ways that transform relationships and how we connect to prosperity.

It starts even with a small budget and limited time: a first test good enough to make a positive impact, documented to lay the groundwork for a second version that is more adapted, more creative and more ambitious. And so on.

And how about you? Where do you see an opportunity for participatory budgeting in your own context?

If you have an idea, reach out! We’d love to explore with you how it could come to life.