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Since 2014, Cambridge residents have spent nearly $10 million of the city’s money on 72 initiatives of their choice through the Participatory Budgeting system.
This year, City staff are specifically targeting Harvard students, working with the Harvard Undergraduate Urban Sustainability Lab for the first time to bring campus-wide attention to the voting process.
Residents ages 12 and up — including university students and non-U.S. citizens — can vote online on how to allocate $1 million of city funds through March 16.
The program allows residents to vote for five of 20 project proposals, spanning initiatives on the environment, community resources, youth, transportation, and parks and recreation. The proposed projects range from $12,000 for submersible wheelchairs at the Gold Star Pool to $350,oo0 for basketball court renovations.
Cambridge is working to incorporate Harvard’s over 7,000 undergraduates into the Participatory Budgeting process by collaborating with HUUSL — targeting student mailing lists, postering around campus, and holding an event to explain the process.
“We want to really emphasize the fact that Harvard students are actually Cambridge residents and are equal members and citizens of our community — just as much as anyone else,” Ira Sharma ’28, a leader of the HUUSL Cambridge Civic Task Force, said.
Sharma, a Crimson Editorial editor, added that students voting for Participatory Budgeting is an impactful and easy way to get involved.
“If we want to impact change in any meaningful way, it starts at the local, it starts at the very minutest of levels.”
This emphasis on student involvement expands outside of the campus itself, as city officials are also aiming for a higher level of University student engagement.
“City staff are actually directly pushing for Harvard students to be engaged with this,” Sharma said.
The 2025 Participatory Budget has been developed over the course of nearly one and a half years, according to Melissa L. Liu ’23, Cambridge’s Participatory Budgeting and Engagement Coordinator.
“Everything for this 11th PB cycle in Cambridge kicked off back in August 2023, that’s where we started our first stage, which is called Idea Collection,” Liu said. “We posed the question to the Cambridge community: if you had a million dollars to spend on projects to improve the city, what would you spend it on? And during that month and a half, we collected around 1300 ideas,” she added.
A year after idea collection began, the city narrowed down the projects to the top 20 to propose for voting.
“We gathered around 70 to 80 Cambridge residents who are volunteers. They were responsible for reading, reviewing, prioritizing, and ultimately developing those 1300 ideas that were submitted by the community members into the 20 projects that we see on the ballot today,” Liu said.
Liu stressed the importance of maintaining the inclusivity of the participatory budgeting process not only for university students but also for Cambridge’s younger residents.
“I actually was born and raised in Cambridge, and I remember voting in the very first PB cycle back when I was in middle school. And it really stuck with me,” Liu said.
As voting draws to a close, Liu said the program helps introduce younger residents to civic engagement in the city.
“It’s great habit building. It’s a way to show them that they have a say in the city,” she said.
— Staff writer Jack B. Reardon can be reached at jack.reardon@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @JackBReardon.
— Staff writer Shawn A. Boehmer can be reached at shawn.boehmer@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @ShawnBoehmer.
