This story was originally published in Nonprofit Quarterly on November 4, 2025: https://nonprofitquarterly.org/peoples-budgets-insist-on-care-first-for-and-by-everyone/
State of the Movements is a recurring NPQ column dedicated to tracking the pulse of social movements and the solidarity economy in 2025.
In the shadow of federal layoffs, President Donald Trump’s administration has inadvertently revealed that budgets are not neutral. Rather, public budgets are moral documents that expose our polity’s deepest priorities and health—or its failures.
To date, working mostly at the city level, people’s budget coalitions have advocated for budgets that truly meet people’s needs. In so doing, they have demonstrated that austerity is not the only option available to elected officials; it is a political choice.
Between September 26 and 29, about two dozen people’s budget organizers from around the nation joined over 100 activists at the Participatory Budgeting Project’s conference “Our Time, Our Power: A Participatory Democracy Learning Exchange” in Orange, NJ, followed by continued conversations of shared lessons and next steps at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. I participated as a scholar focusing on local governance and as a volunteer researcher/collaborator with People’s Plan NYC; here, I highlight some key themes from these gatherings.
What Is a People’s Budget Anyway?
The movement for people’s budgets has been building for a few years now. Between 2020 and 2022, active campaigns using the term “people’s budget” emerged, without central coordination, in cities around the country—and not just in large, coastal ones like Seattle, Los Angeles, New York, and Philadelphia. Grassroots groups and coalitions also fought for people’s budgets in Birmingham, AL; Norman, OK; Washtenaw County, MI; Sacramento, CA; Nashville, TN; Raleigh, NC; and Cleveland, OH.
People’s budget campaigns are essential to help counter divide-and-conquer neoliberal logics and “flood the zone” tactics by the Right.
The exact names of their campaigns vary a bit; some call themselves solidarity budgets, for instance. While some had already been homing in on city budgets as focal points for years or decades, most of them took off in a short span of time, during or after the pandemic and the 2020 uprisings associated with Black Lives Matter.
Why People’s Budget Campaigns Matter
People’s budget campaigns are essential to help counter divide-and-conquer neoliberal logics and “flood the zone” tactics by the Right. They not only counter intransigence but also keep multi-issue and multi-constituency coalitions intact. They do so by engaging otherwise siloed groups (like those focused solely on affordable housing versus those focused on libraries) to not compete against each other for crumbs of the proverbial budget pie, but to work together for a bigger or different one altogether.
These efforts yield results. In Los Angeles County, the Reimagine L.A. County coalition helped to place Measure J—the