A scene from the third day of Seattle’s 2020 BLM protests
From the Black Brilliance Research Project report
Months of Black Lives Matter rallies, marches, protests, and the occupied takeover of the blocks around Cal Anderson and Capitol Hill’s East Precinct have pushed Seattle to shift 20% of its police budget into a $30 million participatory budgeting process hoped to spur new spending on social programs, community health, and economic investment.
Friday, a team of more than 100 researchers, community organizers, and activists will deliver their findings to the Seattle City Council that will underpin the effort. The Black Brilliance Research Project’s 1,045-page report is only the start of what officials hope will be a new way of making decisions for the city’s communities.
“One of the things that I know from working in health and human services and and the needs of our community over these past 20 some odd years is that folks will come into our community they will have focus groups,” Latanya Horace of the Silent Task Force that contributed to the report said in a preview of the group’s findings earlier this week. “They will ask us what we — what they want to know about our communities. And they’ll take that information, go back and package it up and come out with a plan that does not include black folks doing the work for their own community.”
Tammy Morales, chair of the Community Economic Development Committee receiving the report, and the council’s representative for South Seattle, says the hope is for the city to scale up its early steps in participatory budgeting used on decisions around streets and parks and find a way to apply a similar approach to the bigger challenges — and opportunities — of social justice.
“This is a shift away from the city driving so much of this and letting the community do that,” Morales said. “These are communities that are typically left out. People who are disproportionately impacted should have a say. This is about shifting access to power and resources. The community is saying, ‘Let us decide the strategies.'”
For the researchers who worked on the massive, painstaking report and overcame a mid-stream reorganization of how the project was managed, Friday’s presentation is, alone, worthy of celebration given the months behind them and the challenges ahead.
“That research project ended up becoming the world’s largest black and brown community-led research in the world in the world,” Shaun Glaze said during the preview presentation this week. “That happened during a pandemic,” Glaze said with amazement. “Here. In Seattle.”
The report submitted Friday will set the framework for how the shift to helping communities “decide the strategies” happens in Seattle. Based on hundreds of hours of research and community surveys, the report provides outlines for the types of issues Seattle’s communities want to have more control over — and how that control needs to be shaped to make sure it works and fully includes Black, Indigenous and People of Color participants.
The city’s Your Voice, Your Choice neighborhood grant process is a loose model for one shape of what could come next. But CHS’s report here on a 2018 community session to help shape that year’s process documented how easily that kind of process can be untracked by the parochial, the quirky, and the frustrated.
How much money the effort will have to work with is to be determined. The council seeded the effort with $30 million from the SPD cuts. The $3 million research and an expected $1 million to $5 million in implementation costs will eat up a large chunk. Morales declined to put a number on how much will be left when it comes times to launch new investments that emerge from the new participatory processes. Some issues like equity in digital access will be more expensive to try to address than others.
Next steps will feel familiar to those who have watched Seattle process play out before. A steering committee will be formed and members appointed, rules will be shaped based on the findings from the Black Brilliance Research report, workgroups will be created. The timeline for the collection, approval — like Your Voice, Your Choice, city staff will be involved to sign off on projects to make sure the line items fit into the city departments and budgets — and implementation for this first year of the effort are set:
All those things are familiar. What leaders like Morales and organizers hope is that this process will be different because it has been created and will be run by the people it is shaping city spending for.
For Morales, helping make the work of the Black Brilliance Research succeed is a chance for her and her fellow city council members to stand behind their words of support for Black Lives Matter.
Without this new effort, “we miss the opportunity to demonstrate our commitment to community,” Morales said. “We have to put our money where our mouth is.”
You can view a draft of the Black Brilliance Research Project report here (PDF).
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The standout line for me here is of the $30 million budgeted $4 million to $9 million is going to be siphoned off for activists and NGO insiders for research and process. On the high end thats almost 33%!
Just a quick reminder for all of what Denver is doing with $3 million dollars: https://denverite.com/2021/02/02/in-the-first-six-months-of-health-care-professionals-replacing-police-officers-no-one-they-encountered-was-arrested/
Reject the corruption that is taking over our city and costing us millions of dollars in November.
Well, I went through all 1,045 pages of this report so nobody else has to, although that description is a little deceptive as it turns out every page after 99 is appendices. Hundreds of pages are the results of old voter surveys, presented by the laborsaving technique of just copying and pasting the raw data, completely unformatted in such a way so that several pages are only a cut off half of a single sentence. Many of the pages are a list of the unredacted email addresses of the respondents to the 2017 Voter Survey.
It is fairly riddled with spelling and grammatical errors but it would feel sort of mean to point them all out so I’ll just mention that as an indication of the quality level of the written report.
The most striking feature of the report is the astonish unscientific character of the entire thing. It starts off with vague, cult-like statements such as “Pay for Black healers” and “Fund spaces and land to anchor programming”. Language like this is rarely defined.
Recommendations for the Participatory Budgeting project include staffers known as “Budget Delegates” who are a minimum of 10 years old, although the “Steering Committee” reserves the right to “lower the minimum age”.
I think I am probably the only person on the planet who will follow and watch the links to the videos prepared by the Black Brilliance Project buried in the report like “The Faces of Trauma”, so I’m glad to be able to say I actually agreed with the perspective of a black man interviewed on his experiences with correction officers who says “Fuck that shit” in reference to how helpful he believed more diversity training would be. The video is itself contained in a longer video, a somewhat surreal slideshow of scrolling GIF images.
The only actual original research or work by the Black Brilliance Project referenced outside preparing the report is administering a survey of “the community”, where slightly over 1,000 people are surveyed, although at least some are cited as being white so maybe we can assume no more than a three digit number of black people were included? A later reference indicates also that they can “double count” multiracial people. This “data” forms the background of the entire report.
The research methods also include a rather childish sounding practice called “storymapping” but you might feel out of luck if you want to look at the details because the citation for the specific research guidelines used by the project managers helpfully leads to a broken link which is copied over and over on several pages. It is, however, included in the appendixes.
The research guideline book includes, and I am not making this up, “Theatre of the Oppressed”, where people will “play out skits” to “depict the status quo”.
Interviewers are encouraged to use the debunked practice of “power poses”, and a YouTube link to a TED Talk is provided to assist.
A reference to “unmet needs” seems to indicate project money was funnelled to buy computers for the “researchers” and pay their internet bills.
Another buried recommendation: “$1 Billion anti-gentrification, land acquisition fund to help Black community acquire property”.
The paucity of meaningful numbers or data might be explained by how the collection, sharing, and analyzation of data is in part specifically left to “murals”.
The most frequently repeated demand is for more unaccountable money to be given to the activists themselves and their associated projects, which are typically murals, clothing, or similar.
My final overall impression of the report is that the entire scheme of “Participatory Budgeting” is something you need to either run away from or fight back on if you hear anyone suggest it. Don’t believe in it. Don’t support candidates who support it after pretending to read the reports it’s based on. This entire work was a disturbing, amateur, and frankly sometimes insane collection of absurdities by ideologically blinded and biased people. But it was pretty fun to read and I encourage other readers to go through and see what I missed.
Dumb question, were there any success metrics? Or some form of measurable goals?
Not in the quantifiable sense I think you mean, the gist of this document is more setting up the committee/workgroup structures for deciding on what proposals will be funded. The goals are phrased in broader terms as needs for funding in “housing”, “youth”, etc.
Will any of these proposals improve the water transmission from the Cedar River Reservoir? Improve streets, sidewalks, and transit? Add books to the library? Improve math, grammar, and science education in public schools?
Even if local government can improve “Crises and Wellness” and “Physical Spaces”, do we want government to? This all sounds like a great way to never again develop a Polio vaccine or land a rover on Mars.
Thanks for the press release! So, what the hell happened with King County Equity Now, who still holds the entirety of the contract through the nonprofit Freedom Project but has been completely removed from the Black Brilliance Project?
Not sure why anyone should be taking this group seriously based on the quality of that “report”.
Have they explained at all how the 3 million they got for this research project was spent? I have never been able to find that information out.
Agree or disagree with the project, you have to respect the magnificent payday a handful of founders of previously unheard-of non-profits are about to get to conduct ambiguously defined and unauditable projects with non-existent success requirements.
Why do I get the feeling the strategy is to give nonprofit leaders a pile of money so that they’ll be quiet when nothing substantially changes?
This is essentially what this is.
Activists get to grift some taxpayer money, and the city council can take a victory lap for how woke they are. All while nothing tangible changes for people who actually need it. Seattle’s city government in a nutshell.
Came here for all the white comments about how black people like myself should behave…SMH
Nobody’s commenting on how black people behave. People are objecting to how black activists use racial grievances to take millions of taxpayer dollars for themselves in ways that are unethical. Black folks make up 6% of the regional population and have no problem trying to divert the vast majority of Social service dollars to themselves People should object to that more not less.
The irony of blaming the black man for what the white liberals created. Priceless.
Nice try. No one is telling black people how to behave. The complaint is that this is a vague, error-filled shakedown with no defined metrics for success, paid for by city dollars.
James, if it makes you feel any better, I have no doubt plenty of white grifters managed to get in on this, too.
What an absolute mess. For more context, check out this coverage by Seattle City Council Insight: https://sccinsight.com/2021/02/08/black-brilliance-research-project-effort-fractures/