With the People’s Budget Coalition and the National Democratic Institute (NDI), we launched the Young Budget Leaders Program (YBLP) with our common dream for the budget advocacy — to have a next generation of leaders in civil society trained and empowered to engage the public democratic processes for the budgets that their communities deserve.
One of the main objectives of YBLP was to create a blueprint of the budget process based on real sectoral experiences that advocacy movements can use for deeper democratic participation in the future.
Together with the nine YBLP fellows, we co-designed a guidebook called Budget Natin: A Guidebook for Engaging The Philippine Budget Cycle which documents the learnings from the budget advocacy training and from our organizers who shared their own personal experiences fighting for their sectors' own budget. At its core, the guidebook uses simplified language to explain how public budgeting works in both local and national government. We hope the learnings in this guidebook are useful to new budget advocates wanting to learn about the advocacy but are hesitant due to high-level jargons on publicly available documents.