Six community items share a $2 million pool of funding in Boston’s upcoming budget thanks to the city’s inaugural participatory budgeting cycle. 

The items, selected by city residents from a menu of more than 1,200 ideas, include rat prevention, community gardens and programs to support incarcerated and formerly incarcerated youth and give rental assistance for young adults ages 16 to 24.

“Thousands of Boston residents participated by sharing their ideas and voting on how to spend $2 million of the City’s money,” the Wu administration said in press release announcing the participatory budgeting results. “Between January 15 and February 15 of 2024, a total of 4,462 Boston residents cast their ballot, selecting their top proposals to be funded.”

The projects, per city rules, are all one-time, or non-recurring investments and will be implemented “starting in the spring of 2025,” the city press release said.

Boston Voters elected to add the grassroots budgeting process to Boston’s budget back in 2021 as part of several reforms to city budgeting. Between July 2024 and January 2025, residents proposed, reviewed and discussed the more than 1,000 proposals following a similar process in neighboring Cambridge and Somerville.

Sukhai Rawlins, an organizer with the organization Youth Justice and Power Union, said she was excited by the communal nature of the process and the results that prioritized vulnerable youth.

“I am excited to think about what this means for Boston to see that so many people came together and decided that breaking the cycles of incarcerated folks being alienated from resources needed to happen,” Rawlins told GBH News.

“In a world where Boston has one of the highest rents that folks are paying, it feels really, really important that young people who are just starting out in this world, just trying to find jobs that pay them enough to stay alive, are being prioritized… that just feels really exciting.”

Rawlins is part of the Better Budget Alliance, a coalition of groups that campaigned for Boston to adopt participatory budgeting. The group is still advocating for the city to allocate more money – at least 1 percent of the city operating budget each year – towards the participatory budgeting process.

It is still unclear how much money the City of Boston will allocate towards participatory budgeting in the upcoming budget.

The complete list of projects receiving funding through Boston’s first participatory budgeting process:

- rat prevention ($500,000)

- community gardens ($500,000)

- access to Fresh Foods ($400,000)

- programs to support incarcerated and formerly incarcerated youth ($250,000)

- rental assistance for youth ages 16-24 ($200,000)

- benches at high-ridership public transit bus stops ($150,000).

Other projects that were considered included publicly accessible fruit trees, expanding youth night recreation activities and a city-wide campaign to promote addiction support services.