What if communities didn’t simply comment on public investments, but co-created them? The Nature in Neighborhoods Community Choice Grants program reimagines how parks and natural spaces are planned and funded in the Portland region. As Oregon’s first participatory budgeting program for parks and nature, the process empowered community members to propose, develop, and ultimately decide which projects would receive public investment.
We know that conventional public processes often reinforce conventional outcomes. The Community Choice Grants challenged that model by placing community members, not agencies or designers, at the center of project development and funding decisions. Led by Metro, the region’s elected government, the program invited residents to identify opportunities, collaborate with design professionals in public workshops, and collectively develop proposals that reflected their aspirations for parks, nature, climate resilience, and equitable access.
Rather than asking the public to react to completed concepts, the process transformed residents into co-designers. Hundreds of participants generated ideas, refined projects, and cast thousands of votes to determine which investments would move forward. The result was not simply a collection of funded projects, but a new model for civic participation, one that builds trust, broadens representation, and demonstrates that communities create stronger places when they help shape the decisions that affect them.
People with particular affinities within these communities were compensated community design advocates—the recent round focused on people with disabilities, while the pilot round convened advocates from the urban Indigenous community.
Using Adobe Firefly, an AI platform trained on licensed content, we rapidly translated community ideas into hundreds of visual possibilities, making complex planning concepts more accessible, collaborative, and engaging. This required our designers to stay flexible and be open minded, while the software leveled the playing field across all projects.
All public materials and public events were Spanish-English bilingual and ASL interpreted, with additional languages included at key stages.
Between the two rounds, we facilitated over 25 public events, enabling residents to collaborate directly with designers, agency staff, and community leaders to transform ideas into fundable projects. The process generated hundreds of community-created concepts, more than 6,000 public votes, and investments that reflected Indigenous knowledge, climate resilience, equitable access to nature, and the unique priorities of neighborhoods throughout the region.
Select site plans and renders are below. View all of the funded projects here.
