This week, Milwaukee’s Common Council will amend next year’s $2 billion city budget before finalizing it in early November. But there is a smaller pot of money that Milwaukee residents will have a direct say on how it is spent.
The Milwaukee Community Impact Fund is $600,000 dollars of city money that residents will propose ideas for and ultimately vote on which projects get funded. This practice, known as participatory budgeting, is a part of public budgets worldwide from South Africa to Eau Claire, Wisconsin. The goal of Milwaukee’s version is to fund non-police solutions to public safety, following the launch of LiberateMKE in 2019.
Yolanda Odufuwa is a member of the African American Roundtable and serves on its participatory budget committee. They joined Lake Effect’s Sam Woods to discuss the origins of the fund, and how Milwaukee residents can get involved.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Sam Woods: I want to start with an overview of the basics of the fund and how we got here. So what is the Milwaukee Community Impact Fund and what does this represent for the city of Milwaukee in a nutshell?
Yolanda Odufuwa: So the Community Impact Fund is focused on one-time investments to improve the quality of life of residents of Milwaukee. What makes the Community Impact Fund unique is that everyday people have a say in how it's used, especially in this PB (participatory budgeting) process. But also these type of projects are typically outside of their traditional structures of policing. So that's the unique opportunity that we have here. We are able to test these experiments of building community safety outside of police, but we also get to have a more democratic process in how these projects are created and ultimately funded.
Can you give us a timeline of how we got here, starting from the launch of the LiberateMKE campaign in 2019?
So [LiberateMKE] was a direct call for Milwaukee city government to divest money from the police department because they invest over $300 million each year in the police department despite it not being effective for ending violence and other forms of conflict in our communities. Instead the campaign wanted to invest those funds into community services, things that improve the quality of life and have shown over and over again to actually decrease violence, decrease mental health crises, improve access to education, other things that generally improve the lives of everyday people.
So that was the direct call of the LiberateMKE campaign. Early on, there were some concrete wins where they divested funds from the police department. Then in 2023, we hit a bit of a roadblock with the introduction of Act 12 by the state government. It prohibited the city of Milwaukee from doing that divestment from the police department to community services. It also required that the city maintain its police force at a certain level and restricted how Milwaukee could use revenue from the new sales tax in its overall city budget. So we really had the hurdle of the city investing hundreds of millions of dollars in the police, but then we also had the state government throwing this extra barrier and extra control over our budget and how the revenue we produce is used.
I think Act 12 is typically talked about as a budget savior in Milwaukee, particularly city leaders reference it to say we are in a better budget situation because of Act 12. Because we now have revenue from a sales tax, as well as changes in a formula to the state shared revenue that help us balance our budgets. You mentioned these a little bit, but go deeper into the strings that were attached in Act 12 and how it relates to this participatory budgeting effort.
So, in exchange for the authority to implement the new sales tax, the city of Milwaukee was required to return at least 25 school resource officers to public schools, even though there was a long, hard-won fight to get officers out of Milwaukee Public Schools. Even the school board agreed to have those officers removed.
It also limits the ability to control the city budget. Act 12 requires the police department to maintain its force levels, even though it was already struggling to get new officers. It requires police force funding to stay the same, even though we spent more than $300 million on police and policing. It hasn't been proven to improve the quality of life or safety in the city, but the state still requires this. It also limits diversity partnerships. The city of Milwaukee actually made progress in partnering with nonprofit organizations across the city to reach young people in a more effective way. But Act 12 limits the ability for the city to do that, especially diversity initiatives.
It's been framed as a way to save money, a way to balance our budget, but the cost to Black people in the city is beyond any sort of economic benefit that the state or city government has been able to articulate. The cost to families across the city and county, especially Black people in Milwaukee, feels very callous to say it's worth it — like the possible violence against Black children in schools is worth a 2% sales tax.
I want to note that participatory budgeting is not a totally new idea. It’s something that has been tried all over the world and across the United States — including here in Wisconsin, in Eau Claire, where $300,000 was allocated in a similar manner. But would you say that the goal of this campaign in Milwaukee is to find and fund ideas that ensure public safety without policing? Is that a fair encapsulation of the goals of this campaign?
Yeah, I think PB challenges the typical process, and it also challenges what we tend to believe is possible. It's kind of the exact opposite of what Act 12 was. Act 12 was an extremely anti-democratic process; PB is a very democratic process of shared power and community. Even though it's city government allocating the initial funds, a community-led steering committee typically designs and oversees the process and ensures that residents are able to create the ideas for projects. Those projects are then collected and put into proposals for ballots that residents vote on.
In Eau Claire, there were different projects around wheelchair accessibility, some around food, and others around streetlights, things both small and large that will dramatically improve the quality of life for people. Even though it may seem like a small amount of money on paper, I think this sets the stage for what our future can look like.
So let's get into that future. How does this process work? Who gets to vote on how these dollars are used? And what is the timeline for implementation as far as we can tell right now?
So far with the implementation, we've actually been pushing the Common Council to make progress in establishing a steering committee. One of the asks we're making right now is for residents to call or email their representative on the Common Council to put forth candidates for the steering committee. I know Milele Coggs is one of the main leaders of the charge for participatory budgeting, but we want to encourage everyone to really be active and push this forward. Because one of the big issues with our city government is that funds that are allocated for one thing often are pulled for something else if there isn't enough movement on that budget item.
Once the steering committee is established, they then finalize what this process looks like.
For example, in Eau Claire, that steering committee created a way for both digital and in-person collection of ideas for projects. They also had delegates to hold listening sessions, go to community events, do some canvassing as a way to collect these different project ideas. That steering committee then condenses those ideas into more concrete proposals, and there's a final voting period where the main projects, the final projects, they're typically about five to six that people vote on, are on a ballot. I'm hoping that in Milwaukee we have like a digital option as well for the ballot. But typically public spaces are also used in the voting process like libraries and polling locations that are used in elections.
People interested in this process should call or email their representative on the Common Council to push them to set up a steering committee and get the process going. But how can people who are interested get involved right now, in late October 2025?
I would say there's a few ways. In addition to calling their reps, I believe that you should support African American Roundtable in any way you can, whether that's donating, whether that's putting your own name forward for being on that steering committee. Also, go to community events and learn more about PB.
But a smaller way to be more involved is talking to your neighbors: learning about who they are, learning about what they care about, learning about what affects them. And that'll actually help us create project ideas that are impactful, that actually reflect the spirit of the fund. So much of our power is dependent on everyday people coming together. So knowing the people around you and then working together to contact your representatives and attend community events and participating in this process.
From your perspective, what do you hope comes of this process?
I'm hoping a few things. The first is that there is renewed spirit and energy around everyday people participating in the budgeting process. I think over the years, people have become discouraged because they see the same decisions being made around our city budget despite extreme support for divestment from policing and investment in community services. I think this PB process will reenergize our communities, renew some faith in democratic processes. I'm really excited about the different projects that are going to come up. How are we going to challenge our imagination? How are we going to connect different generations of people to come up with different projects that like reflect their needs, their wants, their dreams?
