A little more than a year after King County and its five urban unincorporated areas embarked on an uncharted journey with the goal of empowering them, nonprofits in a recent participatory budgeting process are celebrating their winning projects that residents chose during this month’s community vote.

This was a unique process that involved voting by residents. Community members cast more than 2,600 ballots to decide which projects King County will fund, then they voted, online and on paper, over eight days in early August.

One local nonprofit was the New Start “Shark Garden,” which will receive $66,000 in 2023, and whose co-founder and VP Taryn Koerker told us:

“We started a social media campaign and sent out emails to everyone we knew to ask people to vote. Each of our regular volunteers asked at least five of their friends to vote.

“We are a volunteer run organization, so this grassroots effort to spread the word was key for us to inspire people to vote for our project.

“The projects we proposed include a lot of things that will benefit local students and our community. We will be able to design and install more interpretive signs, develop more gardening and food curriculum for local students and visiting volunteer groups, hire support staff for our summer program, buy tools, hire translators and computer programmers to help us create a multimedia garden tour app in multiple languages, pay guest speakers to teach more free gardening, art, and cooking classes, and create a college internship position to help with the food bank gardening.

“I will become our part time ‘Garden Director’ to coordinate all of the classes and events throughout the year. We’re really trying to raise awareness for the garden, so this is a great step towards being able to invite more people in to enjoy it through all of the classes and events that we can now fund.

“We’ve spent the last seven years building the garden and now it’s time for us to put it to good use! People can follow along on our social media too.”

You can find the Shark Garden on Facebook @theSharkGarden and Instagram @sharkgardenburien.

“We use those as an extension of our garden classroom, reaching over 45K people each month now,” Koerker said. “If people want to join our mailing list, they can send an email to [email protected] for updates on events, classes, and volunteer opportunities.”

Here are the winners and their grant awards for White Center/North Highline:

    • White Center Food Bank “New Location Renovation Fund” ($875,000)
    • White Center Community HUB “Construction Fund” ($750,000)
    • Khmer Community Temple Support ($750,000)
    • Spray Park/Outdoor Cooking Center; Cool Me Down – White Center ($725,000)
    • Gifts of Hope ($175,000)
    • Neplanta Cultural Art Programming ($150,000)
    • Acts on Stage – Programming ($75,000)
    • Green Education – New Start Shark Garden ($66,000)
    • Mental Health – Grief Support ($32,500)
    • White Center Heights Elementary School – Family Resource Center ($25,000)
    • Wolverine Select – Funding ($16,500)