The Participatory Budget is democracy in action: residents can independently decide which changes their city needs the most by proposing their own projects or voting for the projects of others.

The Participatory Budget is an instrument for active residents to change their city or county for the better. An updated version of this platform was launched in the spring of 2017.

The mechanism for a participatory budget was born in the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil in 1989. Today, it’s being used in many cities around the world. A participatory budget allows residents to really have influence in the place where they live and to decide what they want their tax money to go to. Applying is easy: you don’t have to go anywhere, as everything is done online. Voting for projects is transparent and easy-to-understand.

In big cities, which were the first ones to introduce participatory budgets, the biggest support goes to social projects today. In small communities, by contrast, infrastructure projects dominate.

By getting involved in participatory budgets, the residents of the village of Sviatohirske in Poltava Oblast chose a bright idea like the first Interregional Tourist Festival and Fair called Everything’s Going Tourist, while the residents of Dunayivka in Khmelnytskiy Oblast went for a trail for young naturalists called On the Edge of Epochs. And there are hundreds of stories like these.

Since this service was launched, Ukrainians have submitted more than 4,000 proposals for projects, for which over UAH 116 million have been allocated.