Community Voices Heard (CVH) is the lead community engagement partner in an exciting initiative to pilot Participatory Budgeting in New York City. Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic process in which community members directly decide how to spend part of a public budget. In other words, the people who pay taxes (all of us) decide how tax dollars get spent. The Brazilian city of Porto Alegre started the first full PB process in 1989, for its municipal budget. Since then, PB has spread to more than 1,000 cities around the world.

On August 8th, 2011 the Community Voices Heard (CVH), in partnership with the Community Development Project (CDP), CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities, Families United for Racial and Economic Equality (FUREE), Good Old Lower East Side (GOLES), and Mothers on the Move (MOM), released a new report titled “A Report Card for the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA): Residents’ Evaluation of NYCHA and Recommendations for Improvement.” The report is the result of a year-long, citywide, participatory research project.

Twenty-two members and an intern from Community Voices Heard (CVH) and VOCAL-NY were arrested for disrupting the House floor debate on the debt bill on Monday, August 1st while demanding greater attention to revenue instead of spending cuts to programs we all depend on.