Resilient Participatory Budgeting is led by Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research Faculty Leader Michael Menser (Brooklyn College, Departments of Philosophy, Urban Sustainability Studies, and Caribbean Studies; The Graduate Center, Earth and Environmental Science, and Environmental Psychology) and is the Associate Director for Public Engagement of the Science and Resilience Institute at Jamaica Bay, and President of the Board of the Participatory Budgeting Project. Resilient PB is supported by Digital Humanities Designer for Mapping Civic Engagement Kristen Hackett (PhD student at The Graduate Center, CUNY), an activist, scholar, and educator working towards decolonized, anti-racist, and just urban futures in New York City, and Civic Tech Assistant Cecily Wu (Student at Brooklyn College in Urban Sustainability and Sociology), who has worked with resiliency endeavors ranging from community projects, education, and policy reform.

Creating Resilience Curriculum for CUNY and Public Libraries to promote “green” proposals for the new city-wide Participatory Budgeting Process

Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic process through which community members determine how public funds are allocated within their community. (See www.pbnyc.org). Resilient PB will create curriculum and programming to support and educate CUNY faculty and students to work with community stakeholders to promote participatory democracy and climate justice in NYC in a sustained manner. Collaborating with the NYC Civic Engagement Commission, Resilient PB aims to put CUNY and its communities at the forefront of NYC's efforts to meet existing and anticipated resiliency needs.​

In particular, Resilient PB will focus on utilizing civic tech tools to bring a resilience framework into the new city wide participatory budgeting process. In Resilient PB, educators, activists, and civic professionals will collaboratively design a teaching module that can be woven into existing humanities, science, and business courses across CUNY. These modules will clarify the stakes of urban resilience and adaptation, the principles of the participatory budgeting process, the tools and criteria for evaluating and addressingcommunity needs by collaboratively constructing and evaluating proposals to address those needs. It will also utilize a suite of humanistic skill sets necessary to proliferate and support just adaptation practices including cultural receptivity, critical thinking, systems or organizational thinking, and prompts for facilitating dialog around climate change and the necessity of climate justice.