For Some New Yorkers, a Grand Experiment in Participatory Budgeting ON a weeknight in mid-March, a room in the Park Slope Armory YMCA that is frequently used for children's birthday parties was packed with tables draped in pale yellow, 99-cent-store, vinyl coverings and topped with propped-up tri-fold poster boards. About 100 people bumped and jostled their way to the snack table lined with bowls of popcorn and pretzels. Eager presenters button-holed passers-by. It looked like a middle-school science fair. But the buzz in the room wasn't over homemade solar system models or photosynthesis; it was the sound of revolutionary civics in action. The event in Brooklyn was part of something called participatory budgeting, in which constituents in four City Council districts were given control over a small slice of their council members" discretionary budgets - $1 million in each district. In a process that began in October, they proposed projects, researched their viability and ran them by city agencies. This week, voters will finish choosing which of the proposals can move forward. Results are expected to be released this week. When Keith Christiansen volunteered to take part, he didn't expect to become the patron saint of Public School 124 bathrooms in Park Slope. Yet, whenever someone lingered near his display at the Armory, Mr. Christiansen pounced, beginning a fiery pitch about how one little vote might fix an architectural wrong that left children with little privacy in the school's restrooms. The backdrop to his argument: photographs of toilets in stalls barely wider than the toilets themselves, where a child and a door cannot co-exist. The solution, apparently, was to omit the doors. Under a proposal that Mr. Christiansen is championing, the girls" bathrooms would be adjusted to include stall doors, and missing tile in the boys" bathroom would be replaced, all at a cost of $150,000. "I can't believe that this has to be on the ballot," Mr. Christiansen said. This is only the second time that participatory budgeting, originally developed in Brazil, has been tried in the United States, and the first time in New York City, said Josh Lerner, executive director of the Participatory Budgeting Project, a nonprofit organization. Whether it will become entrenched here is unclear. But what is known is that over the past six months, 250 regular people jumped into the trenches and dirtied their hands with democracy. The point of the experiment in October was to counter people's cynical view of government by inviting them to participate in the very process they mistrust. To some extent, it worked. Of the more than a dozen participants interviewed for this article, all said the process had emboldened them to stay involved in their communities and to continue pushing their representatives to work on the projects they thought would benefit their neighborhoods. Still, skepticism runs deep. Some said they were concerned that they would ultimately be defeated by the powers that be. "So far, I love feeling like we have some say in what is done," said Maggie Tobin, a participant from Kensington, Brooklyn, in Council District 39. But as the ideas pass to the city agencies involved, she said, "I find myself already being distrustful." PARTICIPATORY budgeting was created in 1989, when the city government in Porto Alegre, Brazil, responded to a call by civic groups for more input into government decisions. Used as a way to introduce transparency and restore faith in the system, it involved residents who were on the fringes of the democratic process, like poor people. Over the years, the residents were able to build clinics and develop sewage systems in villages. In 2004, the government leadership shifted, and local experts say that fewer people are taking part and that more than 1,000 approved projects have been stalled. Nonetheless, the practice continues in Porto Alegre and has expanded to about 300 cities in Brazil and elsewhere. "Despite its limitations, there are strong elements that can contribute to the American society - particularly because there is a crisis and the debate about distribution of wealth is on the agenda," said Adalmir Antonio Marquetti, a professor of economics at Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil and an authority on participatory budgeting. Except for an alderman in Chicago who started the process in his district two years ago, politicians haven't exactly been champing at the bit to hand over control of their budgets. But there has been a gentle nudge by the Participatory Budgeting Project to introduce the concept to other cities. It hosted talks in New York City, where the Chicago alderman, Joe Moore, and other experts discussed the process. Luis Vieira contributed reporting from Porto Alegre, Brazil. Correction: March 30, 2012 An earlier version of this article misidentified the City Council District 39 as District 15. It also misstated Susannah Laskaris's role at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, where she currently teaches gardening.