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Let’s start this month’s round up in Derbyshire, where Melbourne Area Transition have received planning permission to install 48 PV panels on the roof of their local 12th century church, and there they now sit, in their energy-generating splendour. Here’s a short film made by Chris Bird (author of the Transition book ‘Local Sustainable Homes’ who blogs here) where MAT’s Graham Truscott gives him a tour of the roof.
Welcome back to Transition Culture, and a Happy New Year to you. We’ll kick off with our round-up of Transition for December. We’ll start with a few stories of Transition groups working on energy efficiency and fuel poverty which, even though this has been the UK’s mildest winter for many many years, is still a big concern for many people, especially as energy prices continue to rise. TT High Wycombe have created a Warm Homes Team (see right) who have taken to the streets with their council loaned thermal imaging equipment to address winter fuel poverty.
While there has been much discussion in terms of Transition and diversity over the past few years, little has been said about the issue of age. It’s not something we’ve explored here at Transition Culture in the past. Sometimes it is suggested that Transition only appeals to older people, whereas Occupy, for example, tends to attract more younger people. But is that the case? Is it that straightforward? How might Transition best serve people at the different stages in their lives, and what might they, in turn, bring to it? What are the things that attract people of different ages and what do they hope to get out of their engagement? I ask these questions by way of stimulating discussion, and thought a useful framing might be William Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man (with apologies to female readers for Shakespeare’s gender focus), from ‘As You Like It’. It begins:
“All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players,
For the past year, Catrina Pickering has been Transition Network’s diversity person, developing trainings networks and insights around Transition and how initiatives might better embed diversity and inclusion in their work. Sadly, the funding for her post recently came to an end, but before she moved on, we asked her to distil her learnings and accumulated wisdom into a guide for Transition initiatives. So, hot off the press, here it is, your fantastic, free, 25 page guide to embedding diversity and inclusion in your Transition initiative or community project. Pass it around, and do let us know what you think.
Where does equality fit in Transition? Should Transition be responding to climate change, the rising cost of energy and inequality?
This is a question that the staff team at Transition Network have been mulling over for some time. Our discussions have journeyed from responses to inequality need to be somewhere in Transition towards responses to inequality need to be everywhere in Transition, and perhaps at the centre.
A Transition Finsbury Park project that works with Turkish mothers to provide access to bicycles.
We’ve come up with a possible new purpose statement to reflect this. It says:
“Transition Network supports community-led responses to climate change, inequality and shrinking supplies of cheap energy, building resilience and happiness.”
Of course this statement is fairly familiar except for the addition of the word “inequality”. If we are to change Transition Network’s purpose statement in this way, it will be because people involved in Transition want this to happen.
