In 2023, professors Jennifer Tucker, community and regional planning, and Andreas Hernandez, sustainability studies, partnered with the community organization People's Budget to design a participatory budgeting (PB) process for Albuquerque.

Originating in Brazil, PB is a democratic tool that invites community members to directly decide how a portion of public funds should be spent, bringing voices often left out of budget decisions into the process.

PB emerged locally through a collaboration between Tucker's Foundations of Community Development class and the People's Budget coalition, shaped by broader national conversations about public safety and resource allocation.

"Especially since the 2020 racial justice uprisings, communities across the country were looking for ways to shift city budgets toward community care and well-being, away from policing and punitivism," Tucker said. "Since the 1970s, police have increasingly been tasked with responding to issues like poverty, mental health and even policing children in schools, becoming what scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore describes as 'catch-all solutions for social problems.'"

Tucker's students focused on community engagement, while Hernandez's students designed three potential implementation pathways. Working with residents, they crafted a proposal that District 6 City Councilor Nichole Rogers adopted, committing her full $1.5 million discretionary budget to the pilot.

Over the following year, UNM student interns played a crucial role in bringing PB to life in District 6, one of Albuquerque's most diverse and historically under-resourced districts. Three UNM students, Simon Doane, Alicia Rodriguez and Brenyn Dils served on the PB Steering Committee.

Through focus groups, surveys, community events, outreach tables and extensive door-knocking, students and volunteers asked residents a simple but transformative question: "If you had $1.5 million to spend in your community, what would you do?"

While framed as a budgeting exercise, the question opened conversations about deeper issues of safety, access and well-being. PB helped forge new connections between the city, UNM and District 6 residents, creating a platform for community voices to be heard.

Healthy food access quickly emerged as a top priority. Residents voted to fund infrastructure for a growers market, and in July 2025, the city broke ground on the new site. To date, approximately $4 million has been mobilized toward implementing top priorities identified through the community-designed process, with students playing key roles.

As community conversations deepened, a broader systems challenge became clear: Food security was intertwined with transportation, cost, education and policy barriers.

Building on trust established through PB, Hernandez and then-undergraduate student Esther Hewitt formed a participatory action research (PAR) working group as part of UNM's National Science Foundation-funded Transformation Network.

"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."

- Andreas Hernandez
Director, Sustainability Studies Program

PAR, pioneered by Colombian sociologist Orlando Fals Borda, is a collaborative research method in which community members and researchers work as equal partners to study local issues and co-create solutions.

"What I value most about participatory action research is the way it is grounded in sustained collaboration with communities and institutions around real, lived concerns," Hernandez said. "By engaging relationships, histories and material conditions together, it often creates space for unexpected creativity and responsive solutions to emerge."

Working closely with Rogers, Hewitt - now a master's student in Latin American studies - and Hernandez convened stakeholders from city agencies, community organizations, neighborhood leaders, and UNM students and faculty to focus on 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," Hewitt said. "Seeing what's possible when the university, city and community share resources was incredibly powerful."

Through collective analysis, the group identified several key barriers to food access:

• Transportation: Food sources are often too far to safely reach by foot or public transit.
• Economics: Healthy food remains prohibitively expensive for many families.
• Education: Residents expressed a need for clearer nutritional information and culturally relevant resources.
• Policy barriers: Licensing requirements, language access and complex regulations limit small-scale food entrepreneurship.
• Social cohesion: Feelings of isolation and mistrust affect residents' comfort accessing available resources.

These insights led to targeted interventions. A District 6 Food Policy Council was established to coordinate food-related efforts, while UNM faculty contributed specialized expertise - including soil testing conducted by Honors College professor Tomasz Falkowski.

Sustainability students produced research and policy recommendations for the Food Policy Council and the mayor's office. The working group also launched a community WhatsApp network to improve communication, supported legislation expanding neighborhood food access through bodegas, and submitted capital outlay requests for cold storage and a commercial community kitchen.

A pilot project offering women's self-defense classes, designed to support feelings of safety among immigrants and newcomers, is scheduled to launch in spring 2026.

In response to concerns about extractive academic practices, UNM partners created a Research Justice Workshop to strengthen accountability and foster more equitable research relationships. A grant proposal has also been submitted to support IDHCC, a key community partner, in expanding its educational mission.

Throughout the project, participatory action research has served as a framework for rebuilding trust, redefining institutional roles and grounding solutions in community knowledge.

The collaboration underscores that none of the outcomes would have been possible without the combined efforts of UNM students and faculty, city officials and District 6 residents. Together, they are modeling what community-engaged scholarship can achieve.