FORWARD: Issue #8: Civic Health
Generating Civic Transformation
In 2018, a citywide referendum created the New York Civic Engagement Commission (NYC CEC) to be in charge of the annual participatory budgeting process, dubbed “The People’s Money.” Photo © The People's Creative Institute.
How artists and arts entities are changing the way democratic systems and processes work to strengthen civic life.
These projects emphasize raising awareness of participatory voting for New Yorkers, supporting national artist-activist collaborations that design ways to influence policy, and devising lively strategies to bring residents into Philadelphia's city budgeting process.
New York Civic Engagement Commission (NYC CEC) / The People's Money
Employing lively little yellow figurines to raise awareness of participatory voting, this initiative attempted to change the way New Yorkers have input into the city budget.
Location: New York, New York
Date: In November 2018, New York City voters approved a ballot initiative establishing the NYC CEC. In February 2023, the People’s Money Artist Collective, with the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, launched an open call for five artists to help build the creative identity for The People’s Money: Citywide Participatory Budgeting Get Out the Vote campaign.
Artists: Tsewang Lhamo (Queens), Giannina Gutierrez (Manhattan), Taquon Capri Middleton (Brooklyn), Lina Montoya (Staten Island), Onyeka Okwu-uwa (the Bronx), Yazmany Arboleda (inaugural People’s Artist at the CEC, April 2022)
Partners: NYC Department of Cultural Affairs
The Sunnies, yellow figures ranging from foot-high sculptures to 12-foot-tall Giant Sunny Puppet Twins (pictured), are meant to remind people that they should participate in budget decision, for the benefit of all New Yorkers. Their color began with a project Yazmany collaborated on in Kenya with Nairobi cultural producer Nabila Alibhai. The artist explains that Sheik Hamsa said the “optimistic yellow” is the color of a sun that shines on all people equally, without discriminating. Photos © The People's Creative Institute.
If you spent any time in New York City in the latter part of 2024, you probably spotted the figurines. They popped up all over the place, in public spaces like libraries, community halls, and parks. About a foot tall and colored a particularly cheery shade of bright yellow, they represented the people of the city. They also symbolized optimism and hope.
They were the fun face of—guess what?—city budgeting.
The Sunnies, brainchild of an artist employed by the city, appeared in the run-up to New York’s second round of a process called participatory budgeting (PB). In a four-step sequence that now starts every spring, residents 11 and older can suggest, shape, and vote on community-specific funding proposals. Around $5 million of the city’s budget is earmarked for these initiatives.
The Sunnies were meant to remind people that they should join together and take part, for the benefit of all New Yorkers.
Usually presented in a complex technical format with bureaucratic jargon describing hard-to-grasp planning cycles, city budgets are typically decided in council chambers with limited public input. Despite the outsized role local government spending plays in our lives, the current budgeting approach often leaves residents feeling left out.
Tippy, the Tender People's Money Monster, is a playful octopus.
So, over the last couple of decades, cities across the United States have taken the first steps toward a model in which citizens can have a more direct say in budgets. Chicago, Boston, and Phoenix have introduced PB in limited districts, while Vallejo, California, became the first to implement it citywide in 2009.
New York jumped on the bandwagon in 2011 with a pilot program that included four city council districts. In 2018, a citywide referendum created the New York Civic Engagement Commission (NYC CEC) to be in charge of the process, dubbed “The People’s Money,” each year. The first citywide cycle of participatory budgeting kicked off in September 2022. As the CEC’s website explains, “Thousands of residents submitted ideas, developed ballots, and ultimately voted on projects. The 46 projects with the most votes were funded a total $5 million to address community needs as identified by residents, with an overwhelming focus on youth and mental health services.” Residents’ voting has strengthened mental health programs, created job training initiatives, and improved city parks.
When the 2024 cycle rolled around, the CEC decided to get creative to motivate people to take part in what could easily be seen as a dull and demanding process. They went with an artist-driven strategy—to inject some humor, fun, and optimism into PB.
When the 2024 cycle rolled around, the CEC decided to get creative to motivate people to take part in what could easily be seen as a dull and demanding process. They went with an artist-driven strategy—to inject some humor, fun, and optimism into [participatory budgeting].
The People's Bus was the first of the NYC CEC's "bold and audacious work with government," Yazmany explains. Formerly used to transport people detained on Rikers Island, it has been transformed with input from New Yorkers into a community center on wheels, with the purpose of engaging people in NYC’s civic life through beauty and joy.
The design on the interior of the bus is made of 8.8 million recycled beads from Materials for the Arts, representing the 8.8 million New Yorkers across the five boroughs, explains artist Yazmany Arboleda in a video.
The People's Bus at The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center, 2021. According to a video on a CEC website, the bus visited the neighborhoods hardest hit by COVID-19 in each of the five boroughs, "bringing resources, education, beauty, and joy." At each stop, an Ice Cream Truck of Rights provided free ice cream while creatively educating recipients about their housing, immigration, labor, and voting rights. Arts organizations, government agencies, community groups, and neighborhood leaders provided additional resources.
The CEC called upon their first resident “People’s Artist,” Yazmany Arboleda, to begin ideating about building public awareness. In partnership with the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs, they also held an open call in February 2023 to bring five other artists to help with the creative identity of the PB push. Alongside Arboleda, Tsewang Lhamo (Queens), Giannia Gutierrez (Manhattan), Taquon Capri Middleton (Brooklyn), Lina Montoya (Staten Island), and Onyeka Ukwu-uwa (the Bronx) formed the People’s Money Artists Collective.
While the Collective’s work ranged from postering to online promotion, it was the Sunnies campaign—centered on a collaboration between Arboleda and Middleton—that had the most significant impact. Two 12-foot “dancing” Sunnies became regular features in city street parades. An inflatable Sunnie served as a giant voting booth
While the Collective’s work ranged from postering to online promotion, it was the Sunnies campaign—centered on a collaboration between Arboleda and Middleton—that had the most significant impact.
The small sunny figures are hand-crafted by a team of immigrant Latin American mothers, embodying the spirit of the diverse and thriving city.
Little Amal participates in the People's Money process in 2022. A 12-foot-tall puppet, Amal represents a 10-year-old Syrian refugee child and is a monumental symbol to many refugees. Find more about Amal in the Public Art Now collection from FORWARD Issue 7.
As for the ubiquitous foot-high figurines, they were molded in clay and painted by a group of Latin American immigrant mothers through the People's Creative Institute.
The whole point, Arboleda explains in a video, was to have optimistic yellow people “come into the world to invite us to be more playful, more joyful—to engage one another in a meaningful way, to support the well-being of each other.” Arboleda had employed bright yellow earlier in a collaborative project in Kenya. Inspired by a Muslim sheikh, he and his partners got a group of Christian and Muslim leaders to paint their houses of worship yellow. “It’s the color of the sun,” Arboleda says, quoting the Kenyan sheikh. “It shines on all people equally.”
The little figures helped do the job. Nearly 140,000 New Yorkers voted in the participatory budgeting process last year, making it the most successful “People’s Money” campaign yet. The results of their votes will be decided later this year.
Center for Performance and Civic Practice
A nonprofit supports artist-activist collaborations designing ways to influence policy in positive directions.
Location: National
Date: Founded in 2012; leadership circle finalized in 2020
Artists: Various
Partners: Various
Leaderhip: Quenna L. Barrett, M. Simone Boyd, Estefanía Fadul, Ashley Hanson, Rebecca Martinez, Nikiko Masumoto, Michael Rohd, Shannon Scrofano, Mark Valdez, and Anu Yadav
Photos courtesy CPCP.
In Harrisonburg, Virginia, a theater artist named Heidi Winters Vogel and Father Daniel Robayo-Hidalgo, the rector of a local Episcopal church, worked together to develop theatrical and storytelling strategies that allowed community residents with differing faith, racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds to connect with one another. The goal: to build coalitions to press for change in the community.
Champaign, Illinois–based poet and theater-maker Latrelle Bright partnered with Carol Hays, the executive director of Prairie Rivers Network, a nonprofit focused on the health of waterways. They set up creative workshops exploring why many people of color are reluctant to venture out into nature. Then they collaborated on a day trip and activities for Black visitors at a lakeside forest preserve, including a water-themed performance.
In California’s Central Valley, artist/farmer Nikiko Masumoto joined forces with the Center for Land-Based Learning’s Mary Kimball to support the Center’s agricultural education program, in which students research agricultural issues and present their work to state government. The pair collaborated on storytelling workshops in which the students explored the role of hunger and food scarcity in their lives.
These are a few of the arts-fueled civic initiatives inspired and supported by the Center for Performance and Civic Practice (CPCP). The organization, which spun off of Sojourn Theatre, uses the concept of “civic practice” to match artists with community partners to codesign programs specific to the locale in which they’re taking place.
In Champaign, Illinois, in 2019, poet and theater-maker Latrelle Bright partnered with Carol Hays, the executive director of Prairie Rivers Network, to set up creative workshops exploring why many people of color are reluctant to venture out into nature.
Bright and Hays collaborated on a day trip and activities for Black visitors at a lakeside forest preserve, including a water-themed performance.
Under the rubric of the Catalyst Initiative, the Mellon Foundation–funded projects are decided upon collectively through a 10-person Leadership Circle, most of whom are artists of color. People of color are prioritized in the search for community leadership of the projects too.
The Center works with the partnerships to help them develop their projects from idea to reality via convenings and consultations, and then the grantees themselves typically meet with local people to hear concerns and develop strategies. Since the CPCP’s founding in 2012, artists from theater, dance, the literary world, multimedia, and the visual arts have worked with organizations concerned with civic policy, transportation, the environment, agriculture, historical preservation, health, water conservation, and other issues.
In Harrisonburg, Virginia, in 2019, theater artist Heidi Winters Vogel and Father Daniel Robayo-Hidalgo worked together to develop theatrical and storytelling strategies that allowed community residents with differing backgrounds to connect with one another.
The goal of practicing these storytelling strategies is to build coalitions to press for change in the community.
Artists from theater, dance, the literary world, multimedia, and the visual arts have worked with organizations concerned with civic policy, transportation, the environment, agriculture, historical preservation, health, water conservation, and other issues.
In addition to the Catalyst Initiative, the CPCP offers consulting services to non-arts organizations interested in introducing arts strategies into their work, and, on the other end of the process, provides help to arts organizations working with civic partners.
CPCP co-founder Michael Rohd is a veteran theater maker, educator, and arts facilitator who also serves as the director for the Co-Lab for Civic Imagination at the University of Montana. For him, one key to reinvigorating civic life is to back off of pre-existing ideological viewpoints and try to see civic and social issues with new eyes—a process to which the arts can make major contributions.
“I think the malady in America right now is that the concept of ‘certainty’ has poisoned the civic body,” he says. He believes that the antidote to the poison is simple: making the kinds of fresh inquiry that are at the heart of all art.
“We must not give up on curiosity as a civic virtue,” he says. CPCP artists’ curiosity—about their neighbors, about how civic systems work, and about the issues impacting our communities—has helped to engender environments of exploration and dialogue. This then opens the way to using art-based tactics to crack open hard-to-address issues, thereby helping to build civic health in communities around the country.
Students explored the role of hunger and food scarcity in their lives at storytelling workshops in Central Valley, California, in 2015.
Artist/farmer Nikiko Masumoto.
In the Center’s agricultural education program, students research agricultural issues and present their work to state government.
People's Budget Office
Artists and activists devise lively strategies to bring Philadelphians into the city budgeting process.
Location: Pennsylvania
Date: Founded in 2021
Artists: The project is facilitated by artist Phoebe Bachman in collaboration with Illkya Acosta, Ro Adler, Eleanor Barba, Sarah Bishop-Stone, Aaron Brokenbough, Blanche Brown, Pamela Chuang, Laura Duarte Bateman, Josh Graupera, Sophie Greenspan, Oscar Gresh, Sterling Johnson, Erme Maula, Maria Möller, Ingrid Raphaël, Lili Razi, Arshayla Robinson, Root Catalyst, Erik Ruin, Samantha Rise, Eugenio Salas, Ricky Yanas, and Lily Xie
Partners: Mural Arts Philadelphia
Photo by Akeil Roberston, courtesy Phoebe Bachman.
As residents of Philadelphia voiced their outrage following the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police in 2020, calls to defund the police shone a light on municipal budget priorities—and on what many in Philly perceived as an unnecessarily bloated police budget. At the same time, a decline in employment and wages brought about by the pandemic was hitting the city’s wage-based tax revenue hard. Philadelphia’s civic arts budget was cut completely, and libraries and parks and recreation also faced cuts.
Citizens took to the streets to protest. “It was a moment when people recognized the importance of learning about local government,” says Philadelphia artist Phoebe Bachman. “Often the next step [following protests] … is education and radical imagination.” Ignited by the local frustration, funded by the City of Philadelphia, and led by Mural Arts Philadelphia, The People’s Budget was established, with Bachman as the project’s lead.
The People’s Budget concept emerged when artist Jesse Krimes approached Mural Arts with a proposal to create more budgeting awareness through the arts. Mural Arts agreed and contacted Bachman, an experienced artist and activist, to join him. Among their initial projects were teach-ins about the city budget online, and a quilting project, in which people could express needs and priorities.
Photo courtesy Phoebe Bachman.
It was a moment when people recognized the importance of learning about local government. Often the next step [following protests] ... is education and radical imagination.
—Phoebe Bachman, artist
Photo by Phoebe Bachman.
Photo by Phoebe Bachman.
Stitching Our Futures (2021). Photo by Steve Weinik.
Photo by Steve Weinik, courtesy Phoebe Bachman.
After Krimes left the project, Bachman assembled a group of artists to take the initiative to the next level. Postering and more teach-ins followed, along with a “People’s Budget Festival” held in a West Philadelphia recreation center.
“We really were trying to think about the budget, which people consider very dry, as something playful,” Bachman says. “We wanted to bring people into the topic in a way that actually made them think about how it affects their lives. So we had music, vending, and interactive activities, like a game room with these oversized sculptures that presented different aspects of the budget. One of the artists made placemats with a word search, a maze, and a place to write your own recommendations for the city budget.”
Bachman and company turned their neighborhood teach-ins into more formalized workshops called Budget 101—covering the basics of the budgeting process—and Budget 201, a deeper dive into issues like public safety, housing, education, and environmental justice.
We really were trying to think about the budget, which people consider very dry, as something playful.
—Phoebe Bachman, artist
Photo courtesy Phoebe Bachman.
The People's Budget Roundtable on April 25, 2024. Photo by Steve Weinik, courtesy Phoebe Bachman.
Artwork by Erik Ruin, photo courtesy Phoebe Bachman.
And in the spring of 2024 they added a theatrical element, the People’s Budget Roundtable. Bachman and her associates gathered an intergenerational group of activists and other concerned community members. With the cooperation of the city, these role-players took their places at the big, and very round, table that dominates City Hall’s Caucus Room, not far from the City Council chamber. The public was invited to listen to the politician performers carry on a sort of ideal discussion of city budgeting priorities, touching on issues like transportation, housing, and public safety—without arguing, but instead connecting concerns across issue boundaries and departmental silos.
“We wanted to bring those activist voices directly to City Hall,” says Bachman, “and think about how the folks we had been working with who were advocating around these different issues could occupy the seats of power.”
The group then invited anyone attending to join them around the table, and the discussions continued—joined by some actual city council members who had come over after morning hearings had ended. The audience also included many City Hall employees who work on budget issues, Bachman says.
Spring 2025 has brought a highly visible People’s Budget project to JFK Plaza/LOVE Park near City Hall for the third year in a row: the People’s Budget Office, a retrofitted shipping container that’s a resource for budgeting information and the headquarters for the project’s artist-in-residence program. As such, it holds workshops, film screenings, and livestreams of City Hall discussions. It’s also been a showcase for various artistic creations by the artists, intended to illuminate the budgeting process—including, says Bachman, screen prints, zines, and comic books.
It's been fascinating to see how people have started to think about the budget more frequently. There are a lot more people engaged in the budget now than there were a couple of years ago.
—Phoebe Bachman, artist
Photo by Steve Weinik, courtesy Phoebe Bachman.
“It's been fascinating to see how people have started to think about the budget more frequently,” she says. “There are a lot more people engaged in the budget now than there were a couple of years ago when those initial conversations around defunding the police and Black Lives Matter were happening. More people are familiar with giving public testimony, and a lot more people keyed into how the budget works. Of course, there are a lot of different organizations who inform people about the city budget. But I think that the level of publicness that we've been able to offer, both at LOVE Park and in the neighborhoods, has brought this conversation into a different space than it was before.
“A budget is a moral document, a law, a plan with a price tag, a forecast for our future. It shows us what a city values, where it’s willing to invest, and, equally importantly, what it's willing to ignore. Art, in its broadest sense, plays a vital role in this process—it fuels imagination, learning, and recognition.”
The level of publicness that we've been able to offer ... has brought this conversation into a different space than it was before.
—Phoebe Bachman, artist
FORWARD: Issue #8
Civic Health
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