A new form of citizen participation arises in Barcelona, combining participatory budgets and crowdfunding. It is a co-responsibility model called Matchfunding and it allowes citizens to start and support initiatives for the improvement of Barcelona by connecting participation and democracy with public budgets.
The Goteo Foundation (www.goteo.org), in collaboration with the Barcelona City Council and Barcelona Activa, launches the call “Conjuntament” A matchfunding pool of 96.000€ are available to multiply citizens donations made to the 24 social initiatives. Every € donated by the citizens will be duplicated by the Goteo Foundation.
The 24 social initiatives want to change Barcelona and its neighborhoods through a lot of projects which are economically sustainable and related to sectors as agro-ecology, feminism, technological sovereignty, cooperative housing, labor inclusion, documentary production, the commons, the economy of cares and the sharing & social economy.
- Legitimacy: Public institutions legitimize their budgets while allowing citizens to decide and prioritize how public money is used. Creating a space for participation where citizenship promotes and supports initiatives coming from below.
- Participation: Citizens decide to launch projects and to choose which projects to support.
- Sustainability: Projects come from neighborhoods and organized citizenship, in opposition to top-down policies. Communities are behind these projects and they want to make them alive.
- Transparency: Citizens audit the whole process, as they can check and visualize instantly how the money is used.
- Success: The success rate rises until more than 90%, when a public institution multiplicate the donations made to the crowdfunding campaigns.
- Learning lab: While they are in campaign, projects learn as they work collectively, making the project stronger and growing their network.
Key points
- The call for projects was open from October 23th to December 4th 2017.
- 24 projects have been selected and ranked according to the criteria gathered into the Terms and according to two categories: 1. social entrepreneurship and 2. Common and collaborative economies.
- Past 8th of February a communication workshop for the 24 selected projects was held.
- Advising has been carried out with the promoters in order to help them to prepare their crowdfunding campaigns. This will continue during the campaign and post-campaign.
What is the impact of the matchfunding call Conjuntament?
- 67 projects have been submitted, where 24 of these were selected.
- These projects need a total of € 192,543 as a minimum budget of crowdfunding and € 321,419 as a optimal.
- The Goteo Foundation, in collaboration with the Barcelona City Council and Barcelona Activa, created a matchfunding pool of € 94,000 available for the projects (€ 4,000 per project) to meet their budgets.
Manuela Frudà 
