About L.A. REPAIR

Los Angeles has some of the lowest income and highest need areas in the country resulting from years of structural and institutional racism. These inequities were further made apparent as the COVID-19 pandemic disproportionately impacted our low-income communities of color.

The Fiscal Year 2021-22 Adopted Budget included $10M to launch the Los Angeles Reforms for Equity and Public Acknowledgment of Institutional Racism (L.A. REPAIR) Innovation Fund, which includes the City’s first participatory budgeting pilot, designed to empower nine (9) communities, called REPAIR Zones, with the decision-making power to allocate approximately $8.5M through a participatory process. Participatory Budgeting is the most direct way to enable marginalized and historically disempowered groups to decide on investment priorities for their communities.

Unlike the majority of Participatory Budgeting programs implemented by other government entities, L.A. REPAIR is geared towards providing dollars for programming versus capital projects. Programs created by community-based nonprofit organizations will be funded to direct the most impactful services based on ideas from underserved communities.

There are five steps to the L.A. REPAIR participatory budgeting process:

1. Design: A Steering Committee comprised of community members from all nine REPAIR Zones met at the start of the pilot to develop the Guidebook to govern the process. Then, Advisory Committees for each REPAIR Zone, along with Community Engagement Partners, were selected to guide and implement the process for their Zone. 
2. Idea Collection: Advisory Committees and Community Engagement Partners outreached to the REPAIR Zones to collect ideas for services and projects the community wants to see funded.
3. Proposal Development: LA Civil Rights summarized and sorted the collected ideas, and the Advisory Committee developed program concepts. Nonprofit organizations submitted proposals in response to the program concepts, and the top nine from each REPAIR Zone made the ballot.
4. Vote: Finally, each community voted! Anyone 15+ who lived, worked, studied, or was the guardian of a student in the REPAIR Zone was eligible to vote. The highest-ranked projects were selected.
5. Project Implementation: Then, it’s time to fund and implement the projects. The nonprofit organizations will have one year to complete their project, and LA Civil Rights will monitor and evaluate their outcomes with assistance from the Advisory Committees.