since it has accelerated so dramatically into being supported by the WAG i worry a lot that it will go the way of many great environmental projects and become nothing more of a token gesture. nightmare scenes of entering towns and under ‘twinned with…’ there being a sign saying ‘… is a Transition Town’ but nothing actually changing in the mindset of the people.

i’m currently helping the very early stages of a potential transition initiative in swansea and it’s amazing how many organisations (including the council) want to be involved. part of me thinks this is great and part wonders how ‘grass-roots’ anything can be if it is being run by the same people whose advice already falls on far too many deaf ears. my hope with transition towns is that people would be more likely to follow advice if it was given by a neighbour or a friend in a commmunity run group than from people who have their organisation in brackets after their name whenever it’s written down..

maybe this is controversial!! i’d love to hear any comments about what i’ve said..

Cheers, geoff

What I found was something entirely different which I now see from reading the above more carefully I should have perhaps expected.

I did not feel that the event I attended today reflected my understanding of the Transition ethos. The way that the event was led, rather than facilitated, being particularly telling and which left me feeling that the organisers really hadn’t “got” the transition thing.

It seems that the transition “brand” has been understood by certain parties as a movement, rather than a process that communities go through in order for them to prepare themselves for peak oil respond to the problem of climate change. Instead it seems that some of the attendees, and especially the organisers, see it as a movement that is going to join together all the people concerned about climate change.

While I would not disagree that such a mass movement is needed, as a steering group member of a Transition initiative I did not feel that the agenda as proposed had anything to do with supporting local initiatives and in fact was entirely aimed at asking us, as the grass roots, to give the organisers of the meeting our mandate to be the spokespeople for the entire transition “movement” in Wales – being the interface with the Welsh Assembly Government, the National Press and funding bodies.

There was no clear mandate from the transition groups that any of these things were wanted or needed. Rather there were requests for networking facilities and a bilingual webspace for Welsh specific items. The organisers of the meeting seemed to be content for volunteers from the initiatives to provide these functions.

How do other people who were there feel about how things were and the outcome of the meeting?

More comments please.

Mandy