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FEATURED BOOKS
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Budget Justice: On Building Grassroots Politics and Solidarities
In Budget Justice, Celina Su offers a bold vision that empowers communities to solve our cities’ most pressing problems.
Budget Justice speaks directly to the crises many communities are facing today: skyrocketing housing and food costs, under-resourced schools, lack of access to healthcare, climate-driven disasters, and state violence. Through vivid narratives, in-depth interviews, and grounded analysis, Su shows how participatory budgeting and grassroots budget campaigns can become democratic practices, where everyday people empower our communities to thrive.
Su shows that budgets are sites of political struggle—documents that encode racial and economic power and that can be contested and reshaped through organized, grassroots participation.
MODERATOR
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Dr. Carmen Rojas is the president and CEO of Marguerite Casey Foundation. Under her leadership, which started in 2020, MCF launched the prestigious Freedom Scholar award and has granted more than $323 million in funding to dozens of organizations doing the hard work of shifting power to those people who have long been excluded from having it. Prior to MCF, Dr. Rojas was the cofounder and CEO of the Workers Lab, an innovation lab that partners with workers to develop new ideas that help them succeed and flourish.
PANELISTS
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Markasa Tucker-Harris is the executive director of the African American Roundtable (AART). An award-winning organizer and master facilitator, she is trained in conflict mediation, de-escalation, and circle facilitation. She has a wealth of knowledge related to nonprofit organizational development, infrastructure, and sustainability. Markasa has a background in media relations and a bachelor of arts degree in mass communications from Grambling State University, where she graduated cum laude. She is the advisory cochair of the State Voices’ Wisconsin c3 Table, Wisconsin Civic Power Table, and serves as a board member of Black Futures Lab.
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Celina Su's academic, activist, pedagogical, and creative work focuses on everyday struggles for collective governance, centering economic democracy and racial justice in cities. She is the Marilyn J. Gittell Chair in Urban Studies and a professor of political science at the City University of New York, a former Senior Democracy Scholar at the Harvard Kennedy School's Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, and the recipient of a Berlin Prize in public policy. Celina engages in critical participatory action research, working to ensure that her scholarship reflects the priorities of and is useful to community groups and social movements. She served on NYC's participatory budgeting steering committee for the first decade after its inception in 2011, on the board of People Powered: Global Hub for Participatory Democracy since its launch in 2019, and most recently as an appointed member of Zohran Mamdani's mayoral Transition Team. Her publications include three books on social policy and civil society, a full-length collection of poetry, and pieces in the New York Times Magazine, New Republic, Harper’s, n+1, and elsewhere.
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Robert took the helm in September 2009 at the height of the Great Recession, when Citizen Action was in virtual bankruptcy, and has led a dynamic team of organizers in rebuilding it into one of the leading progressive forces in Wisconsin. Robert is a leading strategist in the Wisconsin progressive movement and is especially known for developing innovative approaches to strategic communication and issue campaigns design and implementation. Robert serves on the boards of In These Times magazine and the James Luther Adams Foundation. He has also appeared on major national and international media outlets such as Fox News, MSNBC, Al Jazeera, Democracy Now!, and many syndicated radio programs, including Thom Hartmann , and has been quoted in national newspapers and magazines such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The American Prospect, The Atlantic, and Mother Jones. Robert is the author of several major academic articles on American political rhetoric in Rhetoric & Public Affairs and other academic journals and collections. His book, Woodrow Wilson and the Lost World of the Oratorical Statesman (Texas A&M Press), topped a Wall Street Journal list of the five best books on presidential rhetoric. Robert also occasionally teaches graduate rhetoric seminars at University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He is the former Wisconsin State Council Director for SEIU, where he helped develop and win the passage of several policy innovations that enabled over 12,000 low-wage workers to form unions. He is also the former policy director for the Wisconsin Blueprint Project, where he cut his teeth on devising strategies to build out progressive infrastructure. He grew up in Oak Park, Illinois, and has lived in Wisconsin since 1989.
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