Models for Participatory Budgeting

around those concepts and ideas." He also clarified that the mayor was invited, although
he did not attend because he was at what Lumumba describes as a "mayor's school"
conference at Harvard University.
In his office, Mayor Lumumba spoke to the Jackson Free Press about the assembly, which
started under his father's city-council tenure with an intent he says is centered around an
idea that he and his sister, Rukia Lumumba, repeat often: "Three minutes on a microphone
does not make community participation." In city council meetings, citizens who wish to
voice their concerns on an agenda item during the public-hearing session are limited to
three minutes' speaking time.” (Bragg, 2017)
For the first time, in July 2019, the city of Jackson partnered with the Jackson-based
People’s Advocacy Institute to engage in PB activity through the People’s Assembly. While not
much has been written around the specifics of the activity, members of LBS made the trip to
Jackson to experience the activity firsthand. While the activity did involve a game, the game
seemed to be designed in a manner quite different than the gamification described by Lerner.
Rather than gamifying a decision on how to spend a small part of the city’s budget, citizens were
presented with the entire civic budget, with full details on insurance, interest, and obligations and
were given money to express how they would want the discretionary funds allocated. This would
seem to violate several of Lerner’s principals, including the “magic circle,” where players are
taught to abstract their decisions from the real world, as well as Lerner’s injunction to not overload
participants with too much information up front. While Lerner feared this would overwhelm
“players,” showing the real world trade-offs on budgetary spending for an entire civil budget
seemed to galvanize the players to engage in the game thoughtfully and creatively. Rather than
creating elaborate advocacy campaigns for relatively small allocations, as was the case in Chicago,
the game was designed to produce data which would go directly into the city’s budgetary decision
for the entire budget. Players were given “just in time” information, as those who were overseeing
the game were on hand to explain when players’ decisions may have violated budgeting laws.
While Lerner may have viewed this as poorly designed gameplay, showing citizens what tradeoffs
were possible and which were not may have been an essential pedagogical tool which
answered citizens’ critical questions on why money simply can not be shifted around on a massive
civic scale.
By refusing to use a “magic circle” theory of disembodiment, the game located the citizens
of Jackson in a specific time and place and gave them control over the budgetary decisions which
would affect their entire city. This gave citizens material stakes in the process of playing the game
which seemed qualitatively different than the experience individuals felt when discussing small
pots of money tied to specific allocations. The motivation for playing becomes different, as there
is no possibility of getting personal “pet projects” funded. Instead, you are providing information
to be aggregated by the city and included in budgetary decisions. The entire process shows the
value of attentive and well-trained technical assistance staff and being able to guide people through
this complex game. It also shows the value of the reservoir of public support the regime in Jackson,
Mississippi has built up over decades of grassroots organizing and electoral political campaigns.
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