These Teens Mapped Out How To Spend Their City's $790 Million Budget

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Zain Murdock
July 5, 2023

As the movement to stop Cop City has grown, Atlanta’s city spending has attracted international attention. But at this 2023 youth summit, 27 Atlanta teenagers were asked to fashion their own $790 million budgets.

The thoughtful teens were tasked with 10  departments to spread the wealth, including judicial operations, corrections, parks and recreation, police, and transportation. 

They advocated for better housing, accessible grocery stores, fixing the streets, officer de-escalation training, safer living conditions for incarcerated Atlantans, and more.

These types of exercises aren’t new. Especially after calls to defund the police nationwide, surveys, workshops, and research projects have been experimenting with community-based participatory budgeting which involves having community members decide how to spend portions of public budgets. 

But if we’re already imagining this far, why not go all the way?

For example, what could these teens have been able to create if they weren’t required to allocate funding to prisons, courts, and police? 

What if they were asked to redefine public safety in their eyes without the violent criminal legal system being inevitable? Other participatory budgeting sessions, mock and real, have done it.

And individually and collectively, all of us can, too. No matter your age, education, or proximity to power, we all have an imagination. The least we can do for a liberated future is envision what it could actually look like.

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