The People's Money (NYC)

The bet

The People's Money grew out of a 2018 charter referendum in which New Yorkers voted to create a Civic Engagement Commission and expand participation citywide. It launched in 2022 as the city's first citywide participatory budget. Residents would propose ideas through borough assemblies, then vote directly on which community projects the city should fund.

The bet was that a metropolis of eight million could run inclusive, hands-on budgeting at scale, and that doing so would build civic trust and habit.

Peak

Voting was open to residents as young as 11 and to New Yorkers regardless of immigration status, a deliberate reach toward people the formal system leaves out. In the 2024 cycle close to 140,000 residents voted to fund 20 community projects with $3.5 million, covering youth job training, mental health, food access, senior services and more; in 2026 a fourth cycle drew 134,418 voters for 20 projects and $4 million. Across cycles the process has funded dozens of projects and run assemblies in all five boroughs.

What worked

Teenagers and undocumented residents took part in an actual municipal decision. That matters, and a turnout of 140,000 is a serious number.

The process surfaces neighborhood priorities and builds the habit of participation. It also shows that a huge, diverse city can administer structured citizen allocation without it collapsing into chaos. As civic teaching and as inclusion, The People's Money is a success.

What failed — the mechanism

The weakness is the ratio of gesture to power. The few million dollars residents allocate sit against a city budget of $125.8 billion, far less than a hundredth of a percent. New Yorkers get a real vote over what is, fiscally, a rounding error, while the decisions that actually shape the city stay outside the process entirely.

Run generously, that still builds engagement. Run thinly, it risks teaching the opposite lesson: that participation is a contained ritual the administration grants and could shrink, rather than a channel into consequential choices.

The machinery works. The stakes are just kept small enough that participation and power stay only loosely joined.

What Agora takes from it

Participation cut off from proportionate power can teach cynicism as efficiently as it teaches engagement. If the only thing citizens are invited to decide is a token pot, the invitation itself can read as a way of keeping them away from the decisions that count.

Agora anchors participation to what officials are actually doing, the bills, budgets and rules that carry consequence, so that taking part connects people to power instead of fencing them off from it.