Budget like a policymaker & stand to win an iPad or Airpods in NYC’s participatory budgeting exercise

Adulting can be hard, especially when you have access to adult money and have to decide and prioritise your spending.

You have to start analysing what you spend your money on and even make tough decisions, such as where you have to cut back on certain items.

Now, if you struggle to budget for your own life, imagine budgeting for bigger projects that impact society. How do you choose and empower the right projects that can help benefit the community?

The Youth Action Challenge (YAC), a National Youth Council (NYC) initiative which empowers youths to champion ground-up initiatives, is back for its fifth season, and it’ll have a segment where youths will judge and decide which teams should get additional funding to bring their project to life.

You can also stand to win prizes like iPad, Airpods, Nintendo Switch and Grab vouchers when you take part in the participatory budgeting exercise from Feb. 17 to Mar. 2, 2024.

Allocate & win

Policy-making and budgeting are more complex than one may think.

The participatory budgeting exercise will allow youths to see how budget allocation works, as they make key decisions in identifying, discussing and prioritising public spending projects.

During the exercise, youths can vote and allocate additional funds to projects they believe will create change in the community.

Youths will be allocated S$30,000 in virtual dollars, and you can fund a minimum of three teams. The lowest amount you can give to a project is S$1,000.

However, like budgeting in real life, you don’t actually have to use the full virtual amount given. Instead, you are encouraged to carefully deliberate and weigh each project for its merits and whether you should allocate funds to the project.

Once you submit your votes, you can submit feedback on the exercise, such as why you voted for a particular project and what trade-offs you could have made.

Your feedback is crucial to help you win the prizes, as you will need to elaborate on your key takeaways and justify your decisions.

The winners will be chosen based on the comments they submit and are judged on how thoughtful and purposeful they were during the exercise.

While this is all virtual currency, your votes and allocations still matter. All votes will be tallied and aggregated to help calculate a proportion of the actual grants project teams will eventually receive to bring their ideas to life.

Your budgeting will have real-life impact and could help these projects make meaningful change in the community.

So, challenge yourself to allocate your budget to projects like policymakers, and the learnings could help shift how you budget your own life. Join the exercise here.

NYC is committed to supporting youths to be heard, be empowered and be the change through civic engagement platforms such as the Youth Action Challenge Participatory Budgeting exercise or the youth panels.

Top photos via National Youth Council

This sponsored article by the National Youth Council made the writer consider how she spends her money.