Beginning almost six years ago, AREA Chicago "actively gathers, produces, and shares knowledge about local culture and politics. Its newspaper, website, and events create relationships and sustain community through art, research, education, and activism."

In their most recent magazine, they discussed a different approach to funding that has been taken in Chicago's 49th Ward. Here is a section:

As 49th Ward Alderman Joe Moore tells the story, in 2007 he was at the U.S. Social Forum in Atlanta and attended a workshop on this “really cool process” called “participatory budgeting” (PB). The process allows citizens to decide directly how to allocate all or part of a public budget, typically through a series of meetings, work by community “delegates” or representatives, and ultimately a final vote. It was first implemented in the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1990, and has since spread throughout the developing world and parts of Europe and Canada. Activists and scholars generally champion PB as pro-poor, pro-democracy, and pro-“good governance.”

And

Faced with the difficulty of starting a fundamentally “bottom-up” process from the “top down,” Alderman Moore invited community leaders from diverse civic, religious, and political organizations in the ward to form a participatory budgeting steering committee. Throughout the spring and summer of 2008, the steering committee participated in a series of workshops led by “The Participatory Budgeting Project” to decide on the rules and procedures for the 49th Ward process. Though they made the broad governance decisions at the outset, the steering committee met continually throughout the process to further develop and adjust the procedures.