Community Pitch Night Reflections & the 2022 CBB Evaluation Report
Saturday night was pretty incredible. Our very first Community-Based Budgeting (CBB) Pitch Night went off with a full house, 18 presentations, a delicious meal catered by Tiffin, and everyone, including my fellow Councillors, rolling up their sleeves and helping out wherever it was needed. The Mill Woods branch of the Edmonton Public Library graciously hosted us; Beta City helped on the back-end online platform, and the project team leads brought their A-game.
For 2023, we received 18 submissions (each on average with a $2,000 request for funding), with a total funding pool of $20,000 for this year's iteration of CBB. This already exceeded the response in Ward Karhiio from last year, and we recognized that the community votes were going to be critical this time around. The entire month of July was dedicated to voting, but Saturday’s Pitch Night was going to be a pivotal midpoint milestone event, based on a suggestion from one of our CBB workshop participants. This event was a new addition this year, so we didn’t know what to expect. We did however know that we wanted each project team to hear from one another; we hoped the event would spark inspiration to collaborate and form new relationships, and that it would start conversations with the broader community.
And it did so much more than that!
I was very grateful that Elder Evelyn joined us and helped to start us off AND close us out in a good way with an opening and closing prayer. “We are here to lift each other up, to learn from our cultures, to build communities that thrive.” She said it all.
Throughout the night, we had project leads share their ideas with the audience - some pitching for the first time, which is a major feat in and of itself. I was blown away by all the excellent small-scale community building ideas out there and the significant number of young leaders participating (many high school and university students). Overwhelmingly, the projects focused on building connections through public art, food, storytelling, and beautification; some projects focus on developing skills and knowledge with young children as well as seniors.
The Pitch Night is one point in time during our voting month, with results that will be consolidated with our other voting channels (in-person ballots at the EPL Mill Woods location and online voting here). Because we haven’t had to do the voting process in the same way as last year, we would like to co-create the next steps with the project teams when the voting finishes at the end of the month. What would make sense ? Is it the top projects that get funded until the funding runs out? What about opportunities to share resources, or co-locate projects? Can some projects be done outside of the CBB process if we can find an appropriate partner? These are questions we hope to discuss with the project teams.
If you haven’t already, please check out these projects online at https://karhiio-cbb-2023.spread.name/ and make the pick for your favourite project. You still have time until the end of July!
And on a side note, we are also incredibly proud of the Evaluation Report for the 2022 CBB process, spearheaded by the ever thoughtful and talented Kathryn Lennon. With data collected through multiple channels, this report summarizes the process but more importantly synthesizes the comments from the various project teams, our partners, and the core group who facilitated the journey from beginning to end. There is so much insight in this report that is informing our 2023 version, and that I hope our City Administration colleagues will consider as they begin to develop their pilot process for participatory budgeting within the City.
