On May 13th at 1pm BST, Transition Network and Resilience.org will be hosting a Webinar entitled Local Economic Blueprints: pioneering or pointless? and you are cordially invited to join us (details for how to watch it will be posted here at the end of the week). It will look in more depth at the recently published ‘Totnes & District Local Economic Blueprint‘. This innovative process, also being trialled in Hereford and in Brixton, looks at the potential of local economies, trying to quantify the potential economic benefits of taking a more localised approach to economic development. It shows that, in the case of Totnes, a shift of 10% of money spent on food could lead to £2.2 million of increased local economic activity, with the resultant growth in jobs, training and so on.
Thanks to Transition Town Freiburg in Germany for this. Horst Köhler, recently-resigned German president (and former president of the IMF) gave a speech to a big world mobility conference (i.e. lots of car companies in the audience), in which he waxed lyrical about Transition! And a few days later he stood down. Here is the video of his talk, followed by a translation of what he said.
We start this month’s Round Up with the first of two awards we’ll be giving out this month, the ‘Dedication to Transition Above and Beyond the Call of Duty Award’. It goes to David and Mark of Transition Keynsham, who will be taking part in the Exmouth Exodus bike ride to raise much needed funds for Transition Keynsham. The Exodus ride is an overnight bike ride from Clifton to Exmouth, a total of around 100 miles with a few hills along the way! If you would like to sponsor them, or send them encouraging words, please click here. Every little helps (as they say).
With some considerable amount of fanfare and dancing elephants, I would like to introduce you today to the all-new Transition Research Primer. It is the creation of the Transition Research Network (TRN), a self-organising peer group of academics and community activists which aims to:
Help advance understanding and practice in Transition
Support Transition groups to address their research needs
Help transform the crisis in our universities into an opportunity for positive change in research culture, making research relevant, fulfilling, and fun.
The Power of Just Doing Stuff is in the final editing stages, and as always in final editing stages, some things that have been there all along end up on whatever the book-writing equivalent of the cutting room floor is. They’re too good to waste though, so I’ll be posting a few of them here. We start with a piece about San Lazzaro Citta’ di Transizione in Italy.
In 2009 Massimo and Silvia Giorgini attended a Transition Training in Monteveglio, the first Transition initiative in Italy, and returned home inspired and determined to start Transition: San Lazzaro Citta’ di Transizione was born. Projects thus far include a Bartering Market, a community solar photovoltaics scheme on a local school, a community garden and a study programme.
How might our response to peak oil and climate change look more like a party than a protest march? This site explores the emerging transition model in its many manifestations
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