ParticipateNYC

The bet

New York City voters created the Civic Engagement Commission through a 2018 charter amendment. In 2022 the commission launched The People's Money on participate.nyc.gov, the city's first-ever citywide participatory budget.

The design took unusual care over who counts as a participant. Anyone living in the city aged eleven or older could take part, regardless of immigration status. Ballots came in a dozen languages, and people could vote in person or online. The bet was that a big, diverse city could run an inclusive vote on how to spend public money, and that doing it well at the margin would build the habit and the trust for something larger.

Peak

In the first cycles, New Yorkers proposed ideas, evaluated projects and voted to allocate between $3.5 million and $5 million a cycle across community needs. The decision was binding. In the first cycle, in 2023, the city paid 105 community partners for outreach in neighborhoods that civic processes usually miss; 88 organisations did outreach in 2024.

Built on the open-source Decidim platform, the process stood up quickly and inclusively. It became a credible example of a major American city taking participatory budgeting citywide, where before it had been left to individual council districts.

What worked

Inclusion is the achievement. The vote was open to teenagers and to residents regardless of immigration status. Everything was translated into twelve languages, and digital tools were paired with in-person voting and partner outreach. Almost nothing else in the field has better inclusion design.

The decision over those dollars was a decision, not advice, so this was participation with a consequence attached. As a municipal commitment in Agora's own backyard, it is serious work.

What failed — the mechanism

The power on offer is real but tiny. Residents decide between $3.5 million and $5 million a cycle, close to a rounding error against a city budget of $125.8 billion. The decisions that actually shape life in New York (the capital plan, agency budgets, land use) sit entirely outside the platform.

So the participation is authentic and the stakes are symbolic. Organic turnout stays modest for a city of millions, which is why the process leans so heavily on its community partners to produce it.

Survival is the other weakness. The whole effort is a program of the Civic Engagement Commission and the mayor who launched it, so it depends on the administration. The city's earlier council-based participatory budgeting is a warning of a different kind. The Council paused it in 2020 during the pandemic and brought it back in 2022. The number of districts taking part fell from 32 in 2018-19 to 22 in 2025-26, even as the Council reported nearly 130,000 voters in 2026, its highest turnout since the program began in 2011.

What Agora takes from it

ParticipateNYC is close to home, and it does inclusion better than most. Its limit is that the power it hands over is small and walled off from the substance of governing. That is the distance between a participation program and a channel to decisions that matter.

Agora ties participation to the substance of an official's work instead of a carved-out pot of money. Agora is independent of any one administration, so a change of mayor does not end it.