Description
The Center for Economic Democracy (CED) contributes to a just, sustainable, and equitable economy by advocating for greater public participation in governance. CED’s work is focused in Boston, where it is based. The organization’s signal achievement has been the passage of a referendum amending Boston’s City Charter to mandate participatory budgeting. This is the first time the Charter has been changed by citizens of Boston rather than by the legislature of the Commonwealth. CED was founded in 2012 as the Economic Justice Funding Circle. It took its new name in 2015 when activist and organizer Aaron Tanaka became executive director. CED has worked on establishing community grantmaking vehicles and democratically governed investment funds, including Boston Ujima Project, which has raised a $5 million fund to support new ventures that serve the community and offer a return to investors. The passage of the participatory budgeting referendum is only the start of CED’s effort to make Boston a model of democratic governance for the rest of the nation. Over the next three years, the Center will work closely with the city and stakeholders to design the participatory budgeting process, which must still be implemented legislatively by the City Council. Meanwhile, CED will continue to advocate for thorough reform of the City Charter. Tanaka and his colleagues observe that there are many more opportunities for citizens to participate actively in their own governance—including policing and city planning. But the current charter obstructs their implementation. Most of the grant funds will support the participatory budgeting and Charter reform work, with the balance directed to CED’s core budget. CED is working at democracy’s ”ground-zero”—at the municipal level, where people live and work and shop. Cities and towns are often where democracy begins to falter first, where citizens begin to lose faith, to mistrust the officials and agencies that are meant to serve them. Tanaka argues that rebuilding trust requires giving people a direct role in decision making, enabling them to see that democratic governance isn’t something that happens to them but that they themselves enact.