📖History

The story of Greaterthan starts in November 2016 with Francesca Pick and Jessy-Kate Schlinger, who were both passionate about how participatory budgeting could transform power structures in their communities Ouishare and the Embassy Network. In January 2017 they decided to meet in New Zealand at an Enspiral gathering to work on Cobudget, a piece of participatory budgeting software prototyped and developed by various numbers in the network.

After one month of working together, Greaterthan was born as an umbrella project to drive forward the work on practices and tools for collaborative budgeting. Greaterthan was then given stewardship of the Cobudget software by Enspiral. From that starting point, a team of practitioners and developers, including Kate Beecroft, joined the project, spanning the globe from New Zealand to Europe.

Team Sprint in May 2017 (Spain) with (left to right) Kate Beecroft, Michael Arnoldus, Jessy-Kate Schlinger and Francesca Pick.

In Summer 2018, the team was joined by two new founding partners, Susan Basterfield and Anthony Cabraal, to take Greaterthan into its next stage of evolution as a cooperative company. Since then, it has and continues to evolve and change, becoming the global collective it is today.

Team sprint in February 2019 (New Zealand) with (left to right) Francesca Pick, Kate Beecroft, Susan Basterfield and Anthony Cabraal

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the contributions of those members that moved on to other projects early on in our journey, Jessy-Kate Schlinger, Juliana Lopker and Michael Arnoldus.

We also want to acknowledge Cobudget and its heritage as having brought an important initial spark to this endeavor. To learn more about the history of Cobudget and Greaterthan, and how the Cobudget project has developed further, see Cobudget.com.