The Community Empowerment and Engagement Team are getting in touch to invite Community Councils and local communities across Edinburgh to express interest in allocating the Community Grants Fund (CGF) in your area through a participatory budget process, similar in kind to LeithChooses.
Express your interest by completing this form no later than Friday 31st October. Please note that you will also be required to evidence that there is wider community support for this in your neighbourhood area.
The current CGF process
The CGF is currently split into thirteen funding pots, each covering a different geographical area of the city. Funding is administered and recommendations are made via voluntary funding panels in 12 of the 13 neighbourhood areas across the city. Leith is the exception, where recommendations are made via a public voting process called participatory budgeting via LeithChooses.
What is participatory budgeting?
Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic process in which citizens decide directly how to spend part of a public budget. You can read more about what PB is via the PB Scotland website. It’s worth noting that PB can take a variety of different forms and any new PB model adopted within the city would be bespoke to the needs of that community, and the council resources available.

The folowing table outlines the key differences between a current funding panel model and the LeithChooses PB process via the CGF:

CGF Funding Panels 

CGF LeithChooses Participatory Budgeting Process 
  • Panel members include elected members, community council representatives, and staff/volunteers from partner organisations, usually from the non-profit sector. Membership is open to anyone over the age of 18 from a group/organisation with a clear link to the local area. Panel members should have an awareness of local issues and what is important to local people.   
  • Panels meet 1-2 times a year, with the frequency varying depending on number and quality of applications.  
  • Council officers check eligibility criteria of applications, redact personal information and send to the panel for review.  
  • An assessment sheet was introduced for 2025-26 to score applicants against the funding criteria.  
  • Panel meetings are deliberative processes, where recommendations are made based on local knowledge and the extent to which projects reflect the CGF guidance.   
  • Leith Chooses is a yearly process with one application round. It works on the principle of ‘participatory budgeting’ (PB), which means that local people get to vote on how public money is spent in their area. Anyone who lives, works, studies or volunteers in Leith is eligible to vote during the in person voting day, or via the 2-week online voting window.  
  • The steering group, made up of a group of seven unpaid local volunteers, some of whom are also local Community Council members, facilitates the process but have no direct influence over the decisions and outcomes.  
  • Council officers undertake eligibility checks for applications, then project descriptions are shared for local people to vote for their favourite.   
  • Projects receive funding based on how many votes they received so all funding is spent in one go, with projects ranked in order of their number of votes and funding distributed accordingly.