This was a participatory budgeting scheme held in the city of Lancaster in the UK. Its purpose was to allow local residents a voice in how to allocate grants to local charities and organisations.
Problems and Purpose
The “Your Pots” Participatory Budgeting scheme (hereafter PB) was initiated as part of the Closing Loops project, a community-led initiative in North Lancashire aiming to “stimulate a thriving, regenerative local economy” [1]. FoodFutures views this as necessary to combat current dominant economies “based upon the continual extraction of natural resources” [2], an issue they believe to be “the central cause of the complex challenges facing human and planetary wellbeing” [2].
The Your Pots PB scheme sought to provide a platform for “regenerative projects and enterprises” to have a chance of receiving a grant between £5,000 and £10,000, with a total of £50,000 awarded every year [3]. By adopting a PB model, they aimed to encourage organisations to “build connections and increase community engagement with their project” [3], thereby strengthening community connectivity. This was ultimately the purpose of the Your Pots scheme: to develop “that sense of social connectivity” that is formed through the PB process [4], while simultaneously funding those regenerative enterprises.
Background History and Context
Your Pots is part of a broader project called Closing Loops, founded by FoodFutures in 2022 [5]. FoodFutures is an organisation which supports “the development of a collaborative cross-sector food partnership that oversees the cultivation and delivery of a sustainable food strategy for Lancaster District” [5], acting as the primary food partnership of North Lancashire.
Closing Loops was made possible through the National Lottery Community Fund (hereafter, NLCF) [6]. This is a public body in the UK that distributes funding collected from the national lottery to community-led projects [7]. Closing Loops aims to bring people together, creating a culture that will help the people of North Lancashire “move from sustainable to regenerative” [6]. Regenerative here refers to an approach aiming to “restore and revive rather than simply maintain or sustain” [2] local communities and ecosystems. They understand this as a response to that systemic issue of an extractive economy, one which “assumes the earth has unlimited resources as inputs and an unlimited ‘sink’ for all the waste created” [2]. FoodFutures explicitly frames Closing Loops as a model intended to “scale out beyond our district” [6], highlighting its objective to address this systemic issue rather than a specific local one.
It was in 2023 that the Closing Loops project launched the Pots of Possibility fund, and with that, the Your Pots PB scheme. This was done specifically to “help grow a zero-waste, circular and regenerative economy in North Lancashire” [1]. Your Pots, looking at other PB schemes globally, is “bringing some of this learning to North Lancashire” [8]. Your Pots acts as the first long-term PB scheme attempted in North Lancashire.
Organizing, Supporting, and Funding Entities
Much of the following case study will be supplemented by an interview conducted with Jez Hall [4].
The Your Pots scheme is a part of the Pots of Possibility fund, which is a part of the wider Closing Loops initiative [9, p.2]. Closing Loops receives a total of £1.5 million in funding from the NLCF, and allocates £300,000 of this to the Pots of Possibility fund, with Your Pots receiving £200,000 [9, p.2]. The Your Pots scheme itself is delivered by six local organisations: LESS, Lancaster District CVS (hereafter, LDCVS), Eggcup, Global Link, Shared Future CIC and Scientists For Global Responsibility [9, p.2]. Of these, Shared Future CIC, LDCVS and LESS are the main coordinating entities [4].
Jo Stocking of LESS acts as the “Closing Loops REconomy coordinator”, with Stocking and LESS assisting FoodFutures with the Closing Loops initiative more widely [9, p.5]. Shared Future CIC primarily handles the design of the Your Pots PB scheme, with Jez Hall working “with LESS and Lancaster District CVS to develop Your Pots” [9, p.5], who was brought in due to his extensive experience in supporting similar PB initiatives over the years [9, p.5]. The implementation of the PB format was shaped by this collaboration, with Hall drawing on his experience in the field [4]. While Shared Future CIC assisted in the design, “ultimately LDCVS is the accountable body and is responsible for the process” [9, p.9], handling the final allocation of funds.
Unfortunately, the documentation reviewed does not specify the circumstances under which the other organisations became involved with the initiative, or details regarding the training and hiring of staff beyond Hall and Stocking.
Participant Recruitment and Selection
Your Pots was open to all local Lancashire residents. The application process for organisations is made up of two stages. In the first, local organisations make an expression of interest through an online platform. Here, any local “voluntary, community, faith and social enterprise organisations” can apply [9, p.6], provided their project supports “the Closing Loops aim of creating a thriving, regenerative economy” in North Lancashire [9, p.5]. The applications then go to a verification panel, which reviews them to ensure they are viable [9, p.8]. This panel comprises three independent people [4] who are representatives of community organisations, local authorities and other stakeholders [9, p.3]. The purpose of this review is not to shortlist them, but rather to verify that the project is in scope, at which point its organisers are invited to present [4].
The people who voted on presentations were local members of the public, with up to 100 people able to attend and vote on which projects got funding [10]. This was limited to local Lancashire residents, as this was a place-based project, and they were the affected party [4]. In 2025, an online vote was introduced [4]. This was done to extend participation to members who were unable to attend, and ultimately to “lower the barriers to participation” [4], allowing for more community input. Online voters also had to be Lancashire residents. The only criteria were that voters must provide personal information, must be from the local area, and vote only once [4]. There was no sampling process; the scheme used self-selection.
No financial incentives, meals or travel assistance were offered to voters. Despite this, attendance at the 2025 event was still close to 100 people [10], with the primary incentive being the opportunity to get involved in local decision-making.
Methods and Tools Used
Your Pots adopts a PB model, an established method that allows local citizens to be the ones who decide where project funding goes [9, p.4]. On a scale like this, it takes the form of “participatory grant making” [11], where members decide which projects receive certain grants. This was done as PB “enabled everyone to connect, collaborate and meet” [9, p. 4], bringing people together and fostering a shared sense of community.
Before each annual round, a co-design day is held. This is a community feedback system in which applicants and voters can evaluate the previous round and collectively shape the format of the next [9, p. 4]. They have found that this approach makes the whole process feel “more democratic, and more likely to get local organisations working together”, as they are involved in delivering the next Your Pots event [9, p. 4]. Suggestions are not limited to just the voting day; they also decide whether they wish for next year’s applications to be focused on a specific objective, which is then “reported in the application process” [4], providing a direct way for the community to decide what kinds of projects they wish to see considered.
A variety of tools is used to support this process. Information sessions are held in the build-up to the application period around August. LDCVS holds these for organisations that wish to apply, ensuring everyone is informed about how the event operates [4]. Video presentations are used to enable organisations to communicate their projects to the community, shared both online and at the event [9, p.3]. Finally, in 2025, they introduced an online voting system. This was done in response to a design session held after the previous event [10], to extend participation to community members who would have liked to attend but couldn’t [4].
This use of voting is common among PB schemes more generally. A trade-off of voting that Shared Future CIC addressed was the potential to incentivise people not to attend. In response, they implemented a weighting mechanism for online votes to prevent this and prioritise in-person attendance [10].
What Went On: Process, Interaction, and Participation
Before the voting day, the co-design day for the 2025 event took place. Hall emphasises how every year they make changes based on these co-design days [4]. Adding online voting is one example: it emerged from the previous design day and was implemented in the 2025 round [10].
The application window ran from September 1st to September 29th [9, p. 3]. During this period, many guidance sessions were held. There were three drop-in sessions held by LDCVS on the 2nd, 8th, and 9th of September [9, p.5], with three further bookable sessions organised by Jez Hall. These were designed to give organisations “suggestions for improving your project outline”, and ran on the 17th, 24th, and 25th of September [9, p.5]. Twelve local charities and organisations ultimately submitted eligible applications, ranging from food systems to environmental restoration, among others [10].
Each organisation recorded a two-minute presentation about their project, which was subsequently made available on the LDCVS website in the lead-up to the event [9, p. 3]. Online voting ran for one week before the voting day, from the 8th to the 13th of November [10]. To ensure fairness, “online voters had to vote 4 times”, the same as the in-person voters [10]. The difference was that every online vote counted for 1/3 of an in-person vote [4]. This “ensured the face-to-face meeting made a significant difference to the final outcome”, encouraging in-person participation from as many as could attend [10]. The online votes were checked before being approved. These ensured there was no duplicate voting or any ineligible entries [4]. In the end, they had reached roughly 800 online voters [4].
The 2025 Your Pots voting day was held at The Storey in Lancaster on November 15th, with nearly 100 people attending in person [10]. Upon arriving, they were shown the video presentations the applicants made [10]. Once all the videos had been played, a marketplace was held, where each organisation was assigned a stall to “pitch their project and persuade people to vote for them” [10]. The stalls gave voters the chance to go directly to the organisations and ask questions before deciding who to vote for [10].
Everyone had to vote four times. This was to “make people consider all the projects on offer, not just their favourite” [10]. Applicants were also given four votes, though they were not permitted to vote for their own project [10]. When people were ready to vote, they took their four vote tokens and placed them in ballot boxes [4]. At the end of the event, the votes were counted, and the winning projects were announced [10]. The final decision was dictated by the vote, with the results being read out to everyone in attendance [10]. They funded six organisations across a range of regenerative community projects [10]. For example, one of these addressed hygiene poverty in the region, and another facilitated expansion of a local farm to provide a new space for food production and community growth [10].
Influence, Outcomes, and Effects
The Your Pots scheme achieved its primary intended outcomes. This is evidenced by the high turnout (800 online voters and 100 in-person voters) and the planned expansion of the project to a larger venue in 2026, which highlight visible community growth. The online turnout even exceeded the organisers' expectations [4]. Beyond this, they successfully funded six local regenerative enterprises, all tackling different problems relevant to the community [10].
The initiative did not aim to directly impact local policy; the aim was to build a sense of “social connectivity in the process” [4], with the building of social capital and a sense of collective power prioritised [4], rather than policy impact. The process expanded the networks of the applicants to audiences they wouldn’t otherwise have been able to reach, especially through the online vote [4], indicating that this goal of building community and social capital was achieved [4].
While FoodFutures has stated an intention to extend this beyond North Lancashire [6], at the time of writing, there was no documented expansion from the organisers or any replication by participants.
Analysis and Lessons Learned
The following section will be a critical analysis of the 2025 Your Pots PB scheme. It will be evaluated against Graham Smith’s six democratic goods: inclusiveness, popular control, considered judgment, transparency, efficiency, and transferability [12, p. 12-13].
Inclusiveness
Firstly, it’s important to identify who “constitutes the demos” [12, p. 21], in other words, which citizens must be included. Due to the “hyper-local nature” [4] of the Your Pots scheme, the ‘demos’ was constituted of local North Lancashire residents, as they are the “affected interests” [12, p. 21] of this scheme. Through measures such as vetting online voters to ensure they are locals, they succeeded in targeting this group. It’s important to note that this might exclude people who don’t live in Lancashire but commute there for work, depend on its food infrastructure, or other such cases. While this isn’t a central point, it’s worth keeping in mind.
The design of Your Pots presents a low barrier to entry, as all that is required of them is to watch the presentations the organisations put on and then vote on which ones they feel are the best. As Hall says, the whole process is “very straightforward” [4]. Allowing everyone four vote tokens ensured an equality of voice, with every attending member contributing the same amount. This being said, the marketplace format can present a barrier to less confident members. There may be members who are afraid to approach and question the organisations directly, risking self-censoring and favouring more confident members. While they partially account for this by making everybody consider all twelve proposals, some may not get as much out of this interaction if they are afraid to ask questions.
A limitation of the event is that it has an open application process, following a self-selection model. The risk of using self-selection is that it might “simply replicate existing inequalities” [12, p. 21]. All participants go to the scheme of their own accord, without a documented effort to ensure equal representation in the design. Therefore, there’s no method to ensure that those 100 people attending the in-person meeting are representative of the wider population. A lack of a sampling method which aims to be representative results in an unknown demographic composition, which limits how confidently we can speak of the design's inclusiveness. Another issue with the selection process of the design is that the organisations which may attend are chosen by the 3-person verification panel, not the citizens [9, p. 8]. While rejection by this panel is rare [4], it still means the citizens do not select the option pool, a problem which returns in popular control.
The most significant limitation of the scheme is how the votes are weighted. The online voting introduced in 2025 reached around 800 people, suggesting a major boost to inclusiveness, letting them reach groups they otherwise wouldn’t have [4]. However, we must take into account that “the presence of citizens from politically marginalised groups does not necessarily equate to equality of voice” [12, p. 21]. This highlights a deep issue with the Your Pots design, since the online votes only counted for 1/3 of the in-person votes. While this was done intentionally, to encourage in-person discussion and the building of community [10], it still limits how included those marginalised members really are. This is a structural tension in the design, as ensuring inclusivity through online voting and prioritising in-person voting are at odds.
Overall, Your Pots succeeds greatly in defining its demos and targeting them effectively through checks to ensure they are residents. But within that demos, inclusiveness is realised unevenly, with an unknown overall demographic. The weighting of votes in favour of in-person voters diminishes the voice of those who aren’t able to attend, and so while they are present, they aren’t heard equally.
Popular Control
This criterion of popular control evaluates the extent to which the participants of these schemes exercise real influence over the decision-making process, agenda-setting, and the final output [12, p.22].
The decision-making process is divided into “problem definition, option analysis, option selection and implementation” [12, p.23]. Members of the Your Pots scheme had significant control in most of these stages. Through the co-design days, problem definition was partially shared between the members and the organisations, as they could ask for specific recommendations, which were relayed to the following year's applicants [4]. However, the wider architecture is not theirs. LDCVS states that the projects must both aim to realise FoodFutures’ goal of a regenerative economy and meet NLCF guidelines [9, p. 10]. Therefore, option analysis is constrained by these criteria, since LDCVS decides which applications are eligible to apply [9, p.8]. Even though rejection has been rare [4], it’s still a design feature that takes the power away from the citizens.
However, option selection was fully in the hands of the citizens, as they were the only ones with the power to choose, from the options presented, who would be funded. The implementation is indirectly controlled by citizens. While voters aren’t directly involved in implementation, the organisations (LDCVS, Shared Future CIC, and LESS) only carry out what people voted on [9, p.10]. Therefore, even though the citizens don’t have an active role in implementation, it is their decisions that get implemented.
A key criterion of agenda-setting is the citizens' ability to influence how the projects are considered and how the discussion happens [12, p.23]. In this, the residents enjoy a significant say, primarily through the co-design days. These allow them not only to have an impact on next year's applications, but also on the process itself. For example, both online voting and the video presentations were implemented as a result of previous design days [4]. This gives the citizens direct control over the conditions under which they participate. However, as mentioned, it is FoodFutures and NLCF that ultimately decide what the wider agenda is [9, p.10]. So, while the individuals can have a significant impact on proceedings, the wider agenda is beyond their authority.
Another aspect of popular control is the design's capacity to share power with other authorities [12, p.24]. Your Pots operates outside of government, which means the citizens don’t have to be involved with any other public bodies. As a result of this, the citizens can’t be overridden by officials, consolidating their power. However, this does mean that the design lacks an established model for co-governance. This can make the design hard to transfer to other places, since there’s no template for contexts which require power sharing.
Considered Judgment
Smith defines considered judgment as requiring both a technical understanding and a level of empathy, and what Arendt calls an “enlarged mentality” [12, p. 24]. As he says, “this requires a capacity to imaginatively place ourselves in the position of others” [12, p. 24], allowing for judgments that go beyond one’s own personal interests. Ultimately, Your Pots realises the technical aspect more clearly than the perspective-taking one.
There isn’t much technical knowledge required, as, fundamentally, all voters must do is listen to the presentations and decide on their four favourite projects [4]. They are provided with the video presentations in advance, so they have time to become acquainted with the projects. Additionally, the organisers of Your Pots provide extensive assistance through various information sessions designed to help applicants learn how to give effective presentations. Despite this support, the lack of external moderation can be a drawback for this design, as there’s no way to ensure the presentations are truly informative. Beyond the presentations, voters are allowed a Q&A session at the in-person event, which mitigates this risk and provides them with sufficient opportunities to inform themselves before deciding.
However, online voters are constrained. Their votes are “all based on watching the videos” [10], which presents a clear issue. If the videos are not particularly informative, or if the voter just doesn’t understand something, they cannot ask the organisation directly. While we don’t have explicit data on this issue, the fact that they can’t see the stalls and ask questions is likely to affect their considered judgment.
Requiring four votes forces voters to “consider all projects on offer, not just their favourite” [10]. This forces individuals to look at projects that may not concern them and consider them, marking a clear move towards that enlarged mentality. Additionally, given the wide range of topics considered, it is unlikely that someone will be personally impacted by all twelve proposals, meaning there is a high chance they will be considering ones that don’t impact them directly, once again fostering that enlarged mentality. However, the online platform can’t ensure this wide consideration. As Shared Future CIC says, the online voters “were strongly encouraged to watch all the videos first” [10], but there is no way to ensure they did, limiting this aspect of considered judgment for the online voters.
A central limitation concerning considered judgment is the lack of deliberation between voters. An opportunity to deliberate and discuss each proposal could substantially assist voters in seeing others’ positions. This would significantly aid the development of that enlarged mentality, thereby enhancing citizens' judgment.
Overall, considered judgment is encouraged in Your Pots through the structure of the voting day, but it’s not deeply cultivated. The four-vote system encourages an enlarged mentality, but it cannot be significantly developed due to the lack of deliberation among voters.
Transparency
This section is best broken down into two main questions. The first is internal transparency, which requires “participants have a clear understanding about the conditions under which they are participating” [12, p. 25]. This refers to how transparent the design is to participants themselves. In addition, we need to consider external transparency, which posits that “the process needs to be open to scrutiny not only to the participants, but also to the wider public” [12, p. 25]. We will judge Your Pots based on how clear the procedure is to citizens, and then how open the scheme is to public scrutiny.
Regarding internal transparency, Your Pots does well at informing participants about the procedures. How the voting and event work is explained to them at the design days, so people know what’s going to happen. Beyond this, by allowing members to have a noticeable impact through the co-design days, Your Pots builds a “culture of cooperation and transparency” [4], one where residents are well-informed about the proceedings and can even influence them. It’s important to note here that this benefit is only afforded to those who can attend these co-design days, which is unlikely to be the same number of people who actually attend the event.
However, when it comes to the roles of the organisations involved and the initiative's general structure, things are less clear. So many different organisations are involved that even if the information is available across their websites, this doesn’t mean that the average participant can find it easily. In particular, the specific roles of the organisations are not clearly explained. For example, they say the verification panel consists of “three independent people” [4], composed of representatives of community organisations, local authorities and stakeholders [9, p.3], without specifying who these people are or the process by which they were selected. This presents a clear barrier for participants regarding internal transparency.
When it comes to external transparency, Your Pots fares well. An important aspect of external transparency is “the transmission of information about the institution and its decisions to the wider public” [12, p. 26]. Regarding its decisions, Shared Future CIC clearly shows which organisations received funding directly on its website [10]. When it comes to information about the institution, “there is common publicity” [4]. One way Your Pots does this is through blog posts and newsletters on the FoodFutures website, which advertise the event in the lead-up to it [13]. While there isn’t an official way to track exactly when the money is received, LDCVS states that they gather final information in November and December and then issue the grants [14].
Efficiency
Smith focuses on three main aspects of efficiency: Civic costs, institutional costs, and the benefits of this model as opposed to alternatives [12, p. 26].
Firstly, we’ll discuss civic costs. For those citizens who can afford to go, the costs are minimal. There is no major time commitment, with the event lasting “about three hours” [9, p. 9], and the only costs are travel and a potential missed workday. However, there is no support for logistical costs. The scale at which the event operates makes this kind of assistance difficult, as Hall says, “We have limited resources to do this. This is not a government-led process.” [4]. These limited resources don’t allow the organisers to provide such cover. This means members who cannot afford these costs must vote online, which, as discussed in inclusiveness, results in them having less of a say.
Regarding institutional costs, Jez Hall estimated that to distribute the £50,000 every year, “it’s probably in the region of 20% of the money distributed additionally is on the process costs” [4]. These costs primarily cover “staff time and also the hire of the venue” [4]. This is a modest cost by participatory standards.
To determine whether these costs are worth the benefits, we must compare them with a possible alternative method. A key part of this model is that through this allocation of money, they can build “social capital… and a sense of community agency”, and for these purposes it is a “very effective tool” [4]. If there were an alternative which wasn’t PB-based, then it might be more effective at distributing money more quickly and more widely, but it would be done by “a number of people with expert power sitting around and making decisions” [4], not by the people. Therefore, when it comes to achieving the goals they set, it is generally an efficient model.
Overall, this is an efficient model for the institutions running it and for those who can afford to attend. The main limitation is the lack of logistical support for participants. While this is understandable given the scale of the initiative, it reinforces the inclusiveness limitations discussed.
Transferability
The criterion of transferability assesses how well a given democratic innovation can be replicated in new contexts and at different scales. Particularly, we will look at how it scales up from here, how it fits into other political systems, and how it can adapt to dealing with different issue types [12, p. 26-27].
Firstly, PB schemes already operate on many different levels. As Jez Hall says, in PB models we see “a commonality of principles that go right through to the large-scale Paris PBs” [4], namely that it’s always citizens making decisions, not elected representatives. Provided that this principle is retained, the PB model can be scaled effectively, as “it’s a values-based process, not a mechanistic process” [4]. This suggests the Your Pots model could be effectively scaled. This is explicitly one of FoodFutures’ key aims, to create a model for a regenerative economy that can then be expanded beyond Lancaster [6].
However, when evaluating the model’s ability to handle different issue types, some structural limitations become apparent. The design in its current form doesn’t involve much technical deliberation, and while this enhances the model's inclusiveness, it also means it can’t account for problems that require significant technical knowledge. In issues concerned with building a regenerative economy and growing a local community, it could transfer well, but if the issue were something like housing policy or infrastructure, there would have to be significant changes to the model. While PB has been shown to work in these cases, with a notable example being Porto Alegre in Brazil [15, p. 35-36], this had a completely different structure. So, while PB, as a general democratic innovation, has been proven to be widely transferable, the Your Pots model, specifically, would need significant revision to tackle different types of issues.
Another factor in transferability is how effectively this design can work in different political systems [12, p. 26-27]. Your Pots operates entirely outside of government, since public authorities aren’t involved in the decision-making, funding, or planning of the scheme. A scheme like this would therefore be easier to replicate, as the local government need not be involved. However, the clear caveat here is that the scheme relies on the NLCF. Therefore, even if other political systems are not inherently a constraint on this model’s replicability, this reliance on finding external funding is a significant hurdle.
Overall, Your Pots is not replicable as a model, in that conducting another event in the same manner would be difficult. However, many of its principles are transferable. The way voting is done, the presentations, and the marketplace stalls are aspects that can conceivably be integrated into many other systems without major revisions. The main limitation comes with its inability to address other issue types. While PB models are capable of this, the Your Pots model would have to be altered to a point where it starts to resemble something entirely different.
References
- FoodFutures. “Pots of Possibility grants help regenerate North Lancashire’s environment and build healthy, thriving communities across our district.”, FoodFutures. Accessed 12/05/2026, www.foodfutures.org.uk/pots-of-possibility/
- FoodFutures. "REconomy: Time to Reimagine and Redesign Our Local Economy.", FoodFutures/Closing Loops. Accessed 12/05/2026, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YId131aQckHHxrfNTiLdBqgtPP7wfuFF/view
- Lancaster District Community & Voluntary Solutions. "Latest Round of 'Pots of Possibility' Grant Funding Open for Applications to Create a Greener Economy in North Lancashire.", Lancaster District Community & Voluntary Solutions. Last Updated 06/09/2023, www.lancastercvs.org.uk/latest-round-of-pots-of-possibility-grant-funding-open-for-applications-to-create-a-greener-economy-in-north-lancashire/
- Hall, J. (2026). Your Pots Interview Transcript (Director, Shared Future CIC)
- Sustainable Food Places. “FoodFutures: North Lancashire’s Sustainable Food Partnership”, Sustainable Food Places. Accessed 12/05/2026, www.sustainablefoodplaces.org/members/lancaster/#
- FoodFutures. “Closing Loops is a collaborative projected created to stimulate a thriving local economy in North Lancashire”, FoodFutures. Accessed 12/05/2026, www.foodfutures.org.uk/closing-loops/
- National Lottery Community Fund. “The National Lottery Community Fund”, National Lottery Community Fund. Accessed 12/05/2026, www.tnlcommunityfund.org.uk
- FoodFutures. “How can local communities decide together where money should be spent?”, Food Futures. Last updated 31/08/2023, www.foodfutures.org.uk/participatory-budgeting/
- Lancaster District Community & Voluntary Solutions. “Pots of Possibility: Your Pots Information & Guidance – 2025.”, Lancaster District Community & Voluntary Solutions. Accessed 12/05/2026, www.lancastercvs.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Your-Pots-2025Guidance.pdf
- Shared Future. “Your Pots 2025 Participatory Budgeting: Now with added online voting”, Shared Future. Last updated 02/12/2025, www.sharedfuturecic.org.uk/your-pots-2025-pb-now-with-added-online-voting/
- Shared Future. “What Is Participatory Budgeting?”, Shared Future. Accessed 12/05/2026, www.sharedfuturecic.org.uk/what-is-participatory-budgeting/
- Smith, G. “Studying Democratic Innovations: An Analytical Framework”, Democratic Innovations: Designing Institutions for Citizen Participation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. 8-29
- FoodFutures. “Help us distribute £50,000 of Pots of Possibility grant funding”, FoodFutures. Last updated 13/10/2025, www.foodfutures.org.uk/help-us-distribute-50000-of-pots-of-possibility-grant-funding/
- Lancaster District Community & Voluntary Services. “Your Pots 2025”, Lancaster District Community & Voluntary Services. Accessed 13/05/2026, www.lancastercvs.org.uk/your-pots-2025/
- Smith, G. “Popular assemblies: from New England town meetings to participatory budgeting”, Democratic Innovations: Designing Institutions for Citizen Participation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. 30-71
