Over the last few months we have been busy preparing new and updated resources related to Participatory Budgeting. We want to give you a brief overview of what’s available, and where to find them on our website.

Choose for Cheetham Evaluation Report

Over 100 young people. 21 organisations bidding for funding. A large and successful grant making PB programme that ran in early 2025.

This new report was commissioned as part of our support for Choose for Cheetham, a £200k+ youth-led participatory grants programme.

It includes a detailed description of how this innovative and large scale grant programme was delivered, feedback from participants, plus reflections and learning tips by the staff at Young Manchester.

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Briefing Paper: Participatory Budgeting in Youth and School contexts

The first in our planned series of short briefings to introduce PB to a new audience.

This briefing was produced in May 2025 to quickly explain the potential in your school, educational establishment or community setting.

It contains short case studies and links to further reading, as well as how to access our ongoing support.

The briefing is 4 pages in total and can easily be printed as a booklet or shared as a PDF. Its suitable for teachers, youth workers and anyone interested in promoting PB in youth settings.

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Our New Participatory Budgeting Knowledge Bank

Find curated stories and news about participatory budgeting activity in our new knowledge bank. Most of these stories are from external websites and news bulletins about PB spanning over fifteen years and collected as part of our work of supporting PB.

It already contains over 50 articles, and we’ll continue to expand it. Each is a short digest of the topic, case or example, and contains a link to find more information.

We have arranged articles into nine categories to make it easier to find relevant examples, links or information.

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Participatory Budgeting at Scale

Mainstreaming Participatory Budgeting for Service Commissioning and Investment.

This briefing report was originally produced in 2016 in response to the launch of Scotland’s Community Choices programme.  In March 2025 it was updated to add refreshed content, new examples and reflect Shared Future’s current branding. It is relevant to any public sector organisation working in the UK with an interest in furthering democratic engagement.

It proposes six approaches for local authorities and their partners to help you decide the best way to do PB in your context, as well as lots of supporting information.

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Grant Making Through Participatory Budgeting

A ‘how to’ guide for community led organisations and community engagement workers

Updated in January 2025, this report is specifically written with community led organisations in mind, but also useful for front line community development workers, Town and Parish Councils or Local Authorities starting out on using Participatory Budgeting (PB). It condenses our learning from over 15 years of doing PB in the UK.

Whilst there is already a lot of information available on PB, this guide lays out a simple 10 step process for PB grant making, from forming a planning group right through the monitoring and evaluation. With a range of customisable templates and links to further information.

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The Values Principles and Standards for Participatory Budgeting

This document provides participatory budgeting (PB) projects with a way to understand the values, principles and standards they already or could adopt in their process, and to what extent.

Our Seven Values for Participatory Budgeting are:

“Deliberation”, “Transparency”, “Accessibility”, “Local Ownership”, “Scale”, “Support for Democracy” and “Shared Responsibility”.

For each we provide a short statement, or principle, as well as a set of standards to unpack the individual values. The resources can help you decide the focus of your PB programme, and evaluate how well it is being delivered.

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We are constantly updating our resources, so keep checking back for what is new, on our news feed, in our reports and resources and in the PB knowledge bank. And of course check out our PB services page.