Slavic Village residents have until April 15 to submit ideas for how they think $100,000 of private money should be spent in their community. Credit: Mark Oprea

Slavic Village residents: here’s your chance to turn your complaints into solutions.

People’s Budget Cleveland, the advocacy group behind the failed push for citywide participatory budgeting in 2023, is now collecting ideas from Slavic Village residents to figure how to spend $100,000 it raised for a pilot program in the neighborhood.

Anyone high school age and over, either living in Slavic Village or tied to one of its nonprofits, can submit ideas online up or in-person up until April 15.

Those ideas, a PBCLE submission form reads, must be “feasible,” “public-serving,” positive for Slavic Village and can include a wide array of creative programs or physical infrastructure. Submissions, however, can’t include increased policing, hiring a new public employee, or some other limitations.

They may tackle new street trees, crosswalks, playgrounds, public art, literacy classes, community gardens, parks or bike lanes. As of Monday, proposals submitted thus far include a new dog park and a proposed makeover of Warsaw Park off South Broadway.

A public cleanup in Slavic Village in 2023. Ideas submitted so far included a dog park and a makeover to Warsaw Park. Credit: Mark Oprea

“This is a way to really bring people into the conversation to how money gets spent in their community and make them a driving force,” PB CLE program manager Najah Muhammad told Scene.

Rounding up participation hasn’t exactly been easy though. Since launching in October, PBCLE’s coordinators have only received a few ideas, Muhammad said. She suspects many have ideas they want to see implemented “may be holding back.”

About a year after Clevelanders decided not to try a citywide participatory budgeting experience, PB CLE rebounded and opened up a citywide vote to scale the experiment down to a specific neighborhood funded with private dollars. It narrowed the selection down to two: Slavic Village and Lee-Seville. The former was chosen in a coin flip.

By December, PB CLE had raised $75,000 in grant monies and donations. Come January, the Third Federal Foundation gave them $25,000 to round out the project.

The remaining piece is for PBCLE to manage skepticism: how to convince Slavic Village folks to see the value in a democratic way of bettering the neighborhood. 

“What happens often is people change their minds when they see,” Muhammad said. “Then they come around and they join the process and the conversation.”

“People understand grant dollars. They understand civic dollars,” she added. “But this is different.”

Up to 14 finalists will be selected by the end of April by a steering committee made up of community members and residents working alongside PB CLE. General voting will begin in June.

Those who have ideas to submit can send them online at this form here.

Ideas can be submitted in person, as well, at the following locations:

  • Cleveland Public Library Fleet Library (7224 Broadway Ave, Cleveland, OH 44105)
  • Stella Walsh Recreation Center (7345 Broadway Ave, Cleveland, OH 44105)
  • Slavic Village Development (5620 Broadway Ave, Cleveland, OH 44127)  
  • Neighborhood Leadership Institute (5246 Broadway Ave, Cleveland, OH 44127)

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Mark Oprea is a staff writer at Scene. He's covered Cleveland for the past decade, and has contributed to TIME, NPR, Narratively, the Pacific Standard and the Cleveland Magazine. He's the winner of two Press Club awards.