A Playbook for Community-Based Budgeting

Published by: David Suzuki Foundation
Authored by: Maryam Mohiuddin Ahmed, PhD, Samantha Matters, MDes

Sustainable Communities community and culture, economics, human health and wellbeing

The Playbook for Community-Based Budgeting is a resource designed to reimagine budgeting as a relational, participatory and justice-oriented practice. Moving away from mainstream, colonial-capitalist frameworks that emphasize scarcity, measurement and control, this playbook invites communities, practitioners and institutions to experiment with budgeting as a practice of care, reciprocity and collective imagination.

The playbook begins by exploring the definition of community and how exclusion and power dynamics shape conventional budgeting. It traces the historical and cultural roots of participatory and community-based budgeting and shares contemporary case stories of relational finance and budgeting in practice.