Greenspace participatory budgeting

Participatory Budgeting was introduced to encourage more community participation and to direct resources to communities where it is most needed allowing communities to have a say in how public money is spent.  

This helps to promote community engagement and empowerment and aligns with our responsibilities under the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act.

We are interested in finding out what projects local communities think could help nature to recover and thrive as we intend to spend £50k on practical improvements across North Lanarkshire in 2022/23.

Our Greenspace participatory budget exercise is now live for you to submit your ideas.

You can submit suggestions until 10 July 2022 and all suggestions must relate to land that we own or lease and directly help to encourage nature recovery projects.

The aim of this exercise is to improve, enhance, restore, and increase our wildlife habitats and green spaces to benefit everyone in the local area. This will help our local environments to become more resilient to climate change while creating more sustainable areas. Suggestions could include:  

• plant more wildflowers to help bees thrive 
• put up bird boxes  
• create habitats to help restore our local priority plants & animal species 

Our Biodiversity Action Plan may be helpful with your ideas. 

Suggestions can be specific to one area or even the whole of North Lanarkshire and will be reviewed by trained ecologists and council staff to assess the ecological benefit and to make sure they are practical. 

All project suggestions will be reviewed from 11 July 2022 to 31 July 2022 and a summary of all suitable projects will then be published for the community to vote on. Everyone will be encouraged to make their voice heard and decide what suggestions they want to see happen in their local area.

You will have the opportunity to vote on projects from 1 August 2022 – 30 September 2022, the winning projects will be delivered by council staff and there will likely be opportunities to volunteer and get involved directly.

Successful projects will be announced on 17 October 2022 and work will start on the successful projects following that. 

If you have any questions, please email greenspace@northlan.gov.uk