In 2023, professors Jennifer Tucker and Andreas Hernandez from the University of New Mexico (UNM) collaborated with the community organization People’s Budget to create a participatory budgeting (PB) process for Albuquerque. This initiative aimed to give community members in District 6 direct input on how public funds should be spent.
Participatory budgeting, which began in Brazil, allows residents to decide on the allocation of part of a public budget. The local effort was developed through Tucker’s Foundations of Community Development class and involved students engaging with the community, while Hernandez’s sustainability studies students outlined three possible ways to implement PB. Together with residents, they created a proposal that City Councilor Nichole Rogers adopted, dedicating her entire $1.5 million discretionary budget to the pilot project.
Over the next year, UNM student interns contributed significantly to implementing PB in District 6, one of Albuquerque’s most diverse and historically under-resourced areas. Students Simon Doane, Alicia Rodriguez, and Brenyn Dils served on the PB Steering Committee. Through outreach activities such as focus groups and door-to-door engagement, students asked residents how they would spend $1.5 million in their neighborhood.
Although framed as a budgeting exercise, these discussions addressed broader issues including safety and well-being. Healthy food access quickly became a top priority for residents. As a result, funding was allocated for infrastructure supporting a growers market, and by July 2025 construction had begun on the new site. So far, around $4 million has been directed toward priorities identified by this process.
The initiative also revealed that food security is linked with transportation challenges, economic constraints, education gaps, policy barriers, and social cohesion issues within District 6.
Building on relationships established through PB efforts, Hernandez and then-undergraduate Esther Hewitt formed a participatory action research (PAR) group under UNM’s National Science Foundation-funded Transformation Network project. PAR is a collaborative research approach where researchers work alongside community members to address local concerns.
“What I value most about participatory action research is its grounding in sustained collaboration with communities and institutions around real, lived concerns. By engaging relationships, histories and material conditions together, it often creates space for unexpected creativity and responsive solutions to emerge,” said Andreas Hernandez.
Working closely with Councilor Rogers and other stakeholders from city agencies and organizations as well as UNM faculty and students—including Hewitt—this group focused on improving food justice in District 6.
“I was grateful to be part of the participatory budgeting process because it allowed me to use my education to directly benefit the community,” said Hewitt. “Seeing what’s possible when the university, city and community share resources was incredibly powerful.”
Through joint analysis with stakeholders—including neighborhood leaders—the group identified barriers like limited transportation options for accessing food sources; high costs of healthy foods; lack of clear nutritional information; restrictive policies affecting small-scale entrepreneurs; language access challenges; feelings of isolation among residents; and regulatory complexity.
Several responses have resulted from these insights: establishment of a District 6 Food Policy Council; specialized expertise contributions from UNM faculty such as soil testing by Honors College professor Tomasz Falkowski; policy recommendations drafted by sustainability students for city officials; creation of communication networks like WhatsApp groups; support for legislation expanding food access through bodegas; requests for capital outlay funds for cold storage facilities; development of commercial kitchens; plans for women’s self-defense classes aimed at supporting immigrant safety scheduled for spring 2026; creation of Research Justice Workshops promoting equitable research practices; submission of grant proposals supporting key partners’ educational missions.
Throughout these efforts—and according to participants—participatory action research provided a framework for building trust between institutions and communities while grounding solutions in local knowledge.
The partnership highlights what can be achieved when university faculty members work alongside students—and together with local government officials—as active participants addressing real-world challenges within their own neighborhoods.
