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The impact of Participatory Budgeting in Moray continues to increase.
As Speyside celebrates the success of the Speyside YP Decide team’s Participatory Budgeting evening last Friday, as reported by insideMORAY yesterday, the Money for Moray Participatory Budgeting Team is planning to host a PB Conference to be held in Elgin Town Hall on 9 November.
Participatory Budgeting gives people direct power to make decisions on how to spend specified budgets.
So far in Moray this has been used very successfully to allocate grant funding to local groups and projects. However, there is an expectation that Local Authorities will be allocating 1% of their budgets through PB by 2021.
Local Authority Officers and Councillors from neighbouring Local Authorities with an interest in PB are being invited to attend the Money for Moray PB Conference. They will be discussing options for how best to manage participatory budgeting once it is adopted as a way of allocating up to 1% of “mainstream” Local Authorities budgets.
Formed two years ago, the Money for Moray Participatory Budgeting Team is a 15 strong group of volunteers drawn from community organisations in Moray. It has a successful history of managing PB programmes distributing a total of £275,000 to 91 organisations throughout Moray over the last two years.
Over the coming weeks, in the run up to the conference, insideMORAY will be celebrating the impact of Participatory Budgeting, and the potential for it to contribute to increasing the power of communities to make decisions for themselves. Please feel free to contribute by sending your stories and pictures to editor@insidemoray.com