Tackling a government budget through community and technology
Kelsey Foster shares how New Orleanians got involved in the city’s budget with an online game after Hurricane Katrina
I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Kelsey Foster, a former journalist and now the budget campaign manager for the Committee for a Better New Orleans, a small civic-engagement focused non-profit in New Orleans.
Keep reading to learn how Kelsey and her team are leading the Big Easy Budget Game to engage more New Orleanians in the city’s budget planning process.
The following has been lightly edited for clarity.
Coding it Forward: Can you tell us about your background and how you ended up in the civic tech space?
Kelsey Foster: I came to New Orleans as a reporter and covered charter schools after Katrina with an online investigative newsroom called The Lens, where I worked for about 4 years. The Lens was part of a post-Katrina coalition called the New Orleans Coalition on Open Governance that did transparency and good government work. The Knight Foundation was underwriting my position at The Lens, so when that funding went away, I joined the New Orleans Coalition on Open Governance as the Communications Director. When the Coalition disbanded in a formal sense, I became part of the staff at The Committee for a Better New Orleans. I kind of lurked around the government transparency circles for a little bit and landed here.
CIF: How did the skills you acquired as a journalist assist you in the work you’re doing now?
KF: When you’re working with the community and especially with something as clunky as city budgeting, I think it’s important to always keep in mind, “How do you make this as basic as possible?” Don’t let yourself into the “acronym bubble” and the “alphabet soup” of the very wonky nuts and bolts of city government. It’s important to always have the mindset of approaching things from the perspective of my grandma or someone who just has no idea of how this might work.
My specific journalism background has given me a mindset of always thinking about how technology can help us visualize or interact with news in a way that is more engaging than just reading a story or watching a video.
CIF: Working within the government space, how have you navigated the bureaucracy?
KF: The Committee for a Better New Orleans (CBNO) is a non-profit organization so we are completely separate from city government, but we work closely with them. CBNO has always let the community drive the conversation. They know what they need, they know what problems they’re having, and I think that a lot of the time government and nonprofits try to guess.
We had not been working in the city budget world before Hurricane Katrina. After having a citywide convening of neighbors, it’s a gap that we identified. They told us over and over again that the thing they needed and weren’t getting from the government was understanding where money was going, how it was being spent, and how it works. That’s not necessarily something we would have identified on our own. When you bring neighbors together to talk about the problems you’re expecting to hear them talk about potholes (especially in New Orleans after the storm), blight, cutting the grass — so it was fascinating to hear people say they needed better transparency around the city budget. It was a great example of really letting community take the lead and co-create these programs and processes for you.
CIF: Could you tell our readers a little more about The Committee for a Better New Orleans and about the program that you direct — The Big Easy Budget Game?
KF: The Committee for a Better New Orleans is a 53-year-old civic engagement organization. We’ve been around for a long time and believe the city works better when the people who live in it have a say in how it works. A lot of the time, we work as a bridge between city hall and communities. There is not a lot of historic or generational trust in government in Louisiana for very legitimate reasons. We work to build that trust, but also help people understand government and how they can plug in.
The Committee for a Better New Orleans has three main programs. One is a leadership forum where we teach people from the community, from all sectors and all walks of life, about the nuts and bolts of our city. The second program is a larger policy push, a very formal civic engagement plan; they are typically called community participation plans and we have been working for a long time to finalize one and get it through the government. The third program is the people’s budget program, which I direct. This was a program we started in the recovery years when we heard from people that they really needed to better understand how recovery money was being spent.
It was hard, initially, to figure out how to talk to people about the city budget which is approximately a billion dollars. Money comes from the federal government, state government, and local taxes. It is spent in very specific ways and about a third of New Orleanians are unbanked or underbanked — they don’t have a checking account, a savings account or they’re relying on things like payday lenders or cash. It’s really hard to explain these complex financial processes to people that aren’t engaged in the financial market.
All good things start with failure. We went out with a spreadsheet and a powerpoint and spoke to people about the budget and it was way too wonky. We thought we could make it more approachable by boiling it down to the very essence of how we spend money and then making it interactive. During our first year, we actually gave people cups of red beans and each bean represented a million dollars. Participants could go around the room and spend their beans on police, parks, libraries, or whatever it might be. People loved it! We had an amazing turnout with senior citizens, young people, immigrants, native New Orleanians, etc. It was this really fun, wild time during which people got to get together to have a more constructive conversation about the budget.
At the end of the day, we had to count around 700 pounds of red beans. I never want to do that ever again in my life! We had proof of concept and thought that this would be a great place for technology to step in — reach a wider audience and give us better data because counting beans is only so accurate. The data we get from the Big Easy Budget Game is really clean. We know it’s verified players that are playing and there’s control over their spending.
CIF: Why do you believe it’s important to get the community involved in the city’s budget?
KF: That’s an interesting question because when we initially went to the city’s budget office and the mayor and told them some of our ideas, they did not understand why we would want to talk to the community about the budget. However, we had secret allies on the budget staff who were really excited about other people understanding what they do all day so they were incredibly helpful in helping us form the work.
Even though it wasn’t something that the city thought would be an issue, New Orleanians told us loud and clear that they wanted to learn more about the budget. Especially in a post-disaster situation where there is so much money coming in and slow results, people wanted to understand where their tax dollars were going. At the time of the program launch, our former mayor had just been indicted on twenty-some counts of bribery and embezzlement and is now in federal prison. Trust in how the city handles money was at a very low point. The game was a great way to rebuild trust in the community by giving people the ability to hold government accountable.
I would say about one-third of the people that play the game play it with me in person. Outreach has been incredibly important since moving to the tech phase of this program. It’s great because we can reach so many more people, but the people that we naturally reach tend to be young, white, and college-educated and New Orleans is a majority African American city and our demographic results should reflect that or we’re not doing our job. We’ve partnered with a lot of local organizations to make that happen. We go to adult learning classrooms, HIV clinics, after-school programs, anywhere where we can have a conversation.
CIF: How do you go about getting buy-in from both sides for what you’re doing?
KF: It’s definitely tricky. We just elected a new mayor to city council last spring and this is our second year formally partnering with government. With the old administration, we didn’t really have a functional relationship at all, but now we have one or two council people who are willing to do new things. They hosted budget game nights in their district with us and sat down with their constituents to talk about the budget. They’ve seen how you can have a much more constructive conversation when you’re using something like this as a tool versus giving someone a microphone in a town hall for two minutes to yell about their pothole. Now, we go out and play in every council district with an elected official. It has been great for both the community and the city side.
CIF: Any last words of wisdom for our readers?
KF: This echoes what I already said, but if you’re trying to solve civic problems in the community, ask the community first. Your interpretation of their problem might be different and you will get a better product at the end of the day if you are co-creating with real people, especially people who are not tech savvy or native tech users.
I would also encourage you to think about the languages people speak when you’re creating a civic tech tool, whether it’s an actual language like English or Spanish or just the cultural language. It was important that we didn’t just cut and paste from the budget language, but used words that my grandma could understand. Tech can be a leveler of the playing field or it can tip the scale further in one direction — it depends on how intentional you are about equity going into a project.
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